gourimoko
Fighting the good fight!
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These are different problems.. Online subscriptions were designed as a financial means to increase revenues by adding value to games and facilitating increasing replayability. This gave gamers reasons to spend more money with publishers after the point of sale, thereby increasing profits, and encouraging future development. This model became the counterpoint to piracy, as you couldn't benefit from the online modes with a pirated copy; especially if that copy were identifiable in some way, either through an account or a key. This made piracy less attractive and gave consumers a choice.
Microsoft's approach, again, has nothing to do with piracy. It simply squeezes out retailers. It moves the consoles away from physical media, which is fine honestly - but it changes the nature of software ownership to a completely subscription-based system which has never existed before. This isn't a solution, but a paradigm shift that Microsoft is attempting to force down consumers throats. I say it hasn't anything to do with piracy not because it won't prevent piracy, but because the console continually needing to be online hasn't anything to do with piracy.
The games themselves could perform those checks on launch, and using a signed key method (that lasted on the 360 rather successfully for 5-6 years before the GliGli hack). This would prevent unsigned content from running, and since all games are digitally signed the Xbox One (unlike the 360) it can differentiate between pirated and unpirated games.
Here's the thing for those of you who aren't aware how console piracy works. On modern game consoles, particularly the 360 and PS3 there are hardware DRM features built into both PowerPC CPUs that can allow the operating system to prevent code execution of unauthorized (unsigned) code. These features have been broken recently on both. First on the 360 in 2007 with the JTAG hack, but Microsoft had a very elegant solution that worked by including a write-once TPM-like boot module that once updated it prevented any form of downgrade. Sony lacked this feature, and in 2010 their root signature was cracked and they adopted a policy of rapid release security updates and signature changes that, to this day, prevents a great deal of piracy for users that play online.
Now, can you play pirated games on both consoles today? Yes. But both are very different. On the 360, for all practical purposes, you cannot play unsigned digital media of any sort on the console without the GliGli hack which is easily identifiable once the console goes online. The drive mods that are prevalent do allow burned games to be played, but since the Xbox One plays all the games from the hard drive and only uses the physical media as installation media, this is really pointless - there is an activation process and signatures can be installed by remote as they are for all DLC on both consoles.
Concisely, Microsoft's present day solution prevent 99.99% of all digital media piracy for online systems. There are very very few GliGli/JTAG boxes on Xbox Live today, probably less than 100 on any given day because doing so is expensive (rekeying the 360; i.e., unbanning, plus account recovery). The only reason to take those consoles online is to have fun for a day or two cheating at games like Call of Duty or Halo, that's it - because you will get banned within 1 to 2 days, guaranteed and a new key might cost $5-10 and a new Live account is at least $5-7/mo with new credentials to boot...
Again, Microsoft knows that it does not incur DLC piracy at any meaningful rate for it's Xbox Live users. Now for the offline community? That's different. But the Xbox One, being an x86 system, will get cracked like any other (especially since it uses a Windows operating system) and it will likely be faster than any other crack in history (couple weeks, to a few months tops). Those systems will play games offline, guaranteed. Rotating keys, which I suspect they'll try to implement ala the Satellite and Cable company methods won't stop piracy as the games themselves will be patched to always accept the old key. And since physical media still exists, the console will play burned games. Meaning that within several months, there will be modded Xbox One consoles that will not require the user to go online - ever - and will play pirated games. Microsoft knows this.
So calling this an anti-piracy mechanism doesn't make sense. It makes much more sense as a means of eliminating the retail market. I'd go so far as saying Microsoft will not have an optical drive in their next console. Then what does GameStop sell??
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