Next Gen Digital Rights

So anything I say here is utterly and completely personal opinion and has nothing whatsoever to do with the company I work for.  I am obviously biased because I do work for one of the console manufacturers and I will admit that that bias plays into my overall thinking, but nothing I say here is in any way official or reflects any kind of official Microsoft statement.

So what I have to say is that I'm really surprised that gamers are so willing to embrace the notion of disc-switching in a digital era.  This is something that gamers bitterly fought on PC for nearly a decade until Steam, with the least objectionable DRM in the industry, ended up ending disc switching on PC once and for all.  Do people not remember how annoying it was to dig through discs and put each disc in the PC when they wanted to play another game?

I'm not going to try to argue that Microsoft has the best DRM situation possible, I haven't really analyzed it, but I will say it's not that objectionable to me, personally.  I understand that I'm not every consumer and others have various problems with it, but overall, it meshes well with how I tend to play and buy games.  I hope Microsoft can get its lending story sorted out soon, but otherwise I don't have a huge problem with any of it.  I'm not saying that someone who does is in the wrong, everyone's situation is different. 

What I will say is that people acting like Sony doesn't have any DRM are fooling themselves.  Sony absolutely does a DRM check on your game, it just happens to check local media instead of the internet.  And for me, that's considerably worse than a manufacturer asking to have my console online.  I am many times more likely to play different games if I don't have to go hunting around for discs.  This is a major reason I switched to PC.  And being able to fast swap in and out of games looks absolutely amazing to me.  On the PS4 there will either be some kind of check to ensure you have the rights to the game you're playing via the Internet, or via local media, or else, in the least likely case, there will be incredibly rampant piracy that will destroy the platform (this is basically impossible). 

I know I have friends who work at Sony and I am not going to say the PS4 is terrible or even in any way bad, I'm actually pretty excited for it.  That said, I plan on never buying a single retail disc for PS4.  Since all games will be digitally available day and date and since games can play while they're downloading, I'll happily buy all my PS4 games digitally rather than have to constantly change discs.  If I'm being honest I'll have to say the same for X Box One.  I probably won't buy any retail discs for X Box One either (though I might get a few free from work here and there). 

In a few years I doubt people will even be buying video game media in stores at all, but for now, if I'm buying media, I love the idea of installing it on my console and forgetting about it, just like PC games have done for the past 5 years.