Ranting Kenya

In my last post, I mentioned a new feature for the Xbox 360. Soon, Xbox 360s everywhere will have the ability to download a game from a game disc onto the hard drive. This is a fantastic feature that I will use a lot. I’m probably more excited about this than any game they could’ve announced. Obviously there are many advantages:

• When you pack your 360 and head for the cabin, or go camping, or a friends house, you can have all your games without all the extra baggage. Personally I have 13 games for 360 now, and taking that many discs around everywhere is quite a task.
• Moving your 360 around the house is now far more convenient.
• Taking your hard drive to your friends house and having all of your games would be awesome.
• Xbox Live Arcade probably first made me realize that I wanted this feature. Wireless controllers that turn on the console are great, but getting up to change the game disc breaks the whole “wireless” illusion/advantage. This fixes this now. Now I don’t have to get up from the couch.
• Hopefully cross game invites from friends will be much smoother now.
• Faster load times should benefit everything accross the board (since a hard drive is faster than an optical drive). I’m really hoping this will kill the texture popping issues that many games have (especially the Unreal Engine 3 based games).
• Quieter game operation. I don’t know what it is, but my 360 Elite has the loudest disc drive of any 360 I have encountered. Not having that thing spinning will help on those late night gaming sessions.

But I Still Have Some Questions

So, more details are now needed.

1. When will the dashboard update with this enhancement be available?
2. There must be some kind of DRM? What’s the deal with it?
3. What stops me from renting all the games from blockbuster and putting them on my console?
4. Will the game downloaded from the disc onto the hard drive share the already created game saves?
5. If I copy a game to my hard drive, then sell the disc to someone else, does my downloaded copy still work?
6. If I rent a game from Blockbuster, can I copy them to the hard drive aswell?
7. And what about purchasing used games from Electronics Boutique?

How Did We Not See This Coming?

Microsoft has done a lot of things in the last few years that is really pushing digital distribution, getting away from the office desk and into the living room and making the 360 the “do everything” box.

When the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war was raging on, maybe people speculated that MS wasn’t putting either drive in the actual Xbox because they were skipping that whole generation of content. Bill Gates even said it would be the last physical format. He didn’t say that Microsoft would be starting the next big thing so soon.

They have their Xbox Live Marketplace which allows people to download movies and game content from the internet to their consoles. Sure, games demos, live arcade games and movies are all find and good, but this is a much bigger deal to me as a gamer

Although these games will have to come in disc form first, having the games available on the hard drive will become an absolute necessity. Imagine now the next generation Xbox. I would bet, that every game will be available for download. It has been talked about before as the future, and this is a big step in that direction.

It now appears that the whole “Xbox Originals” program is really just a test bed for a far greater product. Xbox originals allows 360 owners to download select original xbox games to the console’s hard drive and play them from there

Throw in the digitally distributed XNA creators club games, the xbox live community, windows media center streaming and downloadable movies and you have a really compelling box in your living room. Then you add in their newly announced Netflix deal (please make it available to Canadians), and it’s a no brainer.

It also seems that this new 360 with the 60GB hard drive was basically announced so even the cheapest of the 360 gamers can enjoy this ability.

Updated

After writing this post, many sources are reporting that the game will have to be in the drive for the downloaded games to work. To that I say, FAIL. MS, I understand you don’t want crazy game copying. However, you’ve never been afraid to DRM the hell out of everything. In this case, you should’ve come up with some kind of DRM solution so I DON’T HAVE TO HAVE THE DISC IN THE DRIVE. You just about came up with the best feature ever. So close, but still so so far. Funny how that little tidbit wasn’t on Major Nelson’s post. Seriously, game performance better skyrocket, otherwise why would I bother doing this?