The comparisons to Steam don’t quite work because the bulk of Microsoft’s Xbox One DRM policies were affecting disc-based games as well as digital.
Steam is a purely digital platform – you buy games digitally, they’re tied to your account. You can buy Steam-enabled games in stores but they are very much “buy the disc, use it to install the game, the game gets tied to your Steam account, forget about the disc”.
Compare this to other media – music, movies, books all have physical and digital representations on the market. Digital distribution is always based around accounts and non-transferable licenses – you buy it and it gets tied to you forever. But physical media is never bound by those same rules – your friend can borrow your book, your CD, your DVD, whatever. Microsoft was trying to apply the rules digital media follows to disc-based games, and that is never the way it should work.
If Microsoft was planning on having an option to transfer digitally-purchased content between people, this was actually a step in the right direction – consumers should be able to sell or trade their digital content in the same way their physical content. If Microsoft scrapped this strategy as well as their always-online policies, then that’s a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and it’s a shame.
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