When Microsoft had back-tracked on the DRM policies for the Xbox One (among many others), there was some fear among the fanbase that if the company could bypass these features with a Day One patch, what would stop it from reintroducing these things later?
According to Microsoft’s Albert Penello on NeoGAF however, that seems unlikely. “I don’t see that ever happening with content you’re buying today either on disc and digitally. All of that DRM stuff was in place because there was no physical security on the disc itself, so all the licensing was done digitally.
“When you build that type of model, then you need to make sure people can’t install games on a bunch of machines, then unplug them. That would have made us an awesome Pirating machine, and that can’t happen for obvious reasons. When we went back to disc security, those DRM policies weren’t necessary. So no reason to turn it on later.
“If there’s ambiguity, it’s because it’s possible that, in the future, IF WE ADDED BACK some of those family sharing ideas we had in the beginning, we’d have [to] reintroduce similar types of policies. So IF you wanted to have a game and have that family sharing, always-in-the-cloud, and digital loaning – then we might add those requirements back.
“You can imagine a world where we have both types of models at the same time. Again, big IF, but the bottom line is I wouldn’t worry about us making those policies ‘retroactive’ which seems to be the issue I hear people worry about.”
The Xbox One launches this November across 13 territories worldwide, with 8 other territories such as Norway, Switzerland and Russia seeing its release in 2014.