http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/microsoft-defends-the-xbox-ones-licensing-used-game-policies/
What Microsoft's not saying...
Unlicensed use does cut into game sales -- it's how much that's open to debate, because any sort of verifiable exact numbers are rare. There's also a bit of *The Useful Myth* involved -- an exec called on the carpet to account for less sales than imagined, cites illegal use in defending their paycheck -- organizations that owe their existance to fighting against unlicensed use make a good sales pitch to get a paycheck. Some of the people running game or software companies may buy into this more than others -- they are only human, subject to believing in the same stuff, true & untrue as everyone else [not every strange belief involves stuff like wearing hats of tinfoil]. But regardless, most all companies exist to make money -- period -- with many [most?] embracing a philosophy that customers are a necessary evil, a chronic disease you try to manage but can never cure. In that light, the more you can control, the less you have to give in to the illness, the better -- whether or not the CEO believes illegal use is a big problem, what can it hurt to use the heaviest DRM they think they can get away with?
Business is also very much a risk/reward proposition -- the greater the risk, the greater the potential payday. It's just like gambling at a casino -- the more money you have riding on a color or number, the greater the potential win at the roulette table. Most people are risk adverse, & that includes people at all levels of any company. It makes subscriptions attractive. Whether you're signing on to a subscription for the local paper, a magazine, or software as a service, you [in theory] pay less because subscriptions remove a lot of the risk -- a company doesn't have to worry if each issue of a magazine is worth buying, or with software, whether the newest version is a total dog no one will want to buy.
Best practice in business is to diversify. Most stores sell more than one product -- most companies offer more than one product -- because if one product fails, or starts to fail, there's something else to provide income. Microsoft has been trying for decades to diversify, to become more than a PC software company, & they've injected that goal into their current products -- win8 comes as close as possible to forcing you to be a customer of their app store, & win8 RT comes with a subscription to their Office as a service that they hope you'll renew. If the Xbox One is always on, always connected, there's more a chance that you'll consider some of the other subscription services Microsoft offers & hopes to offer. You'll intergrate it into whatever setup you have, perhaps next to the cable box or whatever, rather than carrying it from place to place & plugging it in, which also increases the odds you'll use it for more than gaming -- if this wasn't part of their strategy they wouldn't be pushing the feature so much, that you can access your games from another Xbox One at your friend's home. Microsoft's push to be in every cable box failed, so they'ld love to replace the cable box instead.
Everything Microsoft is telling you is marketing, & as such, mostly spin [i.e. BS] -- not a bad thing, it's to be expected, but hype is hype & not to be confused with reality. One example -- "Mehdi made a comparison to the world of home movie viewing, where inconvenient trips to Blockbuster Video have been replaced with Netflix streaming on practically any device instantly." I admitedly cherry-picked that statement because it's so easily debunked, so makes a good example. Most people never went to Blockbuster or similar -- Netflix owes its existance to renting DVDs by mail, where they opened up a new market made up of customers who never [or almost never] went to a DVD rental store. Streaming video is lower quality, very much subject to network bandwidth availability, & as use increases there's a good chance you'll have to pay more for the bandwidth most streaming video companies don't pay for now. And while many people watch streaming video, very, Very Few watch Only streaming video. If that one statement is pure spin, how much of everything else Mehdi said is not?
