Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Volte Face! Microsoft caves and Frees the Xbox One from All Impediments

Well I guess MSFT will not be giving up the console war before a shot is fired after all.

In a stunning reversal, the company announced that the system would no longer require an Internet connection to play offline games (beyond an initial period when users first set up their system), dropped all restrictions on trading and loaning games to friends and did away with region-locking restrictions. 

Now they only have to convince me that paying $100 more is actually worth it or not. I might do it simply to have any multiplayer game hosted in the cloud instead of by one of the players. That will kill cheating, lag-switching, exploits, modded controllers, and all that mess. If MSFT is smart they will bundle it with some games already loaded on the hard drive. Maybe some old Xbox360 stuff or something like that. If they do that then the $100 value will be realized.

Oh and it is safe to go long GameStop again. The new console war will put piles of money in their pockets.  One analyst thinks it will be a bad deal as more games are delivered digitally but the speed isn't there yet. I bought Blood Bowl a while back and it took like 3 hours to download. I could have went back and forth the GameStop twice in that time.

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