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January 26th, 2012 
Jimmy Bilenko 
Ah, Microsoft, the phrase “one step forward, two steps back” seems to have been made with you in mind… Welcome gamers to this latest edition of the Rabid Gamer. Instead of boring you with an intro, let’s just head into the main bit of news we’ve just received… and it could be a deal breaker when it comes to the new “Xbox 720″.
First, the good news, just cos I love torturing you guys and making you wait 
The good news here is Xbox is, according to Gamerant, going to move into the present, and instead of DVDs, we’ll finally have Blu-ray discs. That’s right, no more swapping discs in the middle of a case in LA Noire, no more frantic searches around the house, and best of all, they are very hard to scratch, so the games will definitely last longer! Oh, and it’ll also ship with the Kinect 2 (yay?). Personally, I still find Kinect one boring with only a few interesting games to make it worth bothering plugging in.
There’s also another piece of good news. According to IGN, the Xbox 720 could be six times more powerful than the current Xbox. That’s good for two reasons: A) More power = better graphics. But, more importantly: B) This means they’re still concentrating on making GAMES instead of just force feeding us apps that don’t work (UFC I’m looking at you!)
Now, here comes the bad news… According to that same article, as well as Forbes.com, Xbox 720 will not allow you to play used games. Yup… I’ll let you digest that for a minute. You back with me? That’s right, it’s no joke. Right now it’s just a rumor, but with reputable websites like Forbes.com, it’s becoming more and more of a scary possibility.
According to Kotaku.com, even though they’re not sure how, Microsoft intends to make sure we can only play new games. They theorize that each copy of the game would be linked to an Xbox Live account. Now, that could be worked around if you don’t want to go online, but as we’ve seen before, they could just force us to be online if we want to play.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Two years ago Final Fight was released on Xbox Live and on PSN. Now, the Xbox version was fantastic, easy to play and had no problems… the PSN version however… If you weren’t online, even during single player, the game quit on you. That’s right, you had to be online or you couldn’t play. Capcom apologised for not warning players, but said that’s what the DRM was for, so that we wouldn’t share our games with others. As you can imagine, that went over REALLY well…
So, what do you think? Could this be just a scare? Or is Micro$oft dumb enough to go through with its plans of not letting people play used games? And what do you think of the Xbox 720 being a lot more powerful? Happy? Neutral? Air your thoughts and have a great day. Until next time, this has been your Rabid Gamer.
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I sort of like and dislike the idea of having to have new games in order to play. For one, having to buy the game will give everyone a fresh copy, unlike GameStop sells you used scratched up games. Another positive would be that awesome game developers will get more money. This in turn will give them more money to play around with and make better games.
But, I dislike the fact that if my brother or cousin buys the game I won’t be able to play it. I’d be forced to buy the game myself. Also, in this economy people don’t have money to be spending on Xbox live. Buying the game is one thing but to pay every month for a service just to play the game, now that is ridiculous.
What they should do is make it so when the game is first played the Xbox and the game combine so that only that console can play the game. This would make it so only that console can play the game and it wouldn’t require Xbox live to play it.
Just my 2 cents.
As someone who used to work for Gamestop, I can say that this might be a big problem. What would happen if Sony and Nintendo followed suit and made their next consoles that way. Not making money on used games would hurt Gamestop tremendously because they make the majority of their money from used sales and trade-ins. That’s why they push it so hard.
I would rather buying a game new in the first place because of the download codes and season passes in the box. That seems to be happening a lot nowadays, and I don’t want to miss out on anything. Actually, within the last few months, I haven’t spent much time buying pre-owned material because of that reason. This makes the Powerup Rewards membership useless for me because it only gives discounts on used games.
It would force players to buy their own copy of the game instead of borrowing it from a friend or relative, though. It doesn’t really affect me because I don’t borrow games from anyone and vice versa, but I can see how that might be a problem for player accustomed to those practices. I can also see how this would possibly generate more money for developers that would normally go to Gamestop. The developers actually deserve the money for creating astounding entertainment, so why not?
I do agree that developers do deserve more money than they get as I love Bethesda, Bungie, and all the other greats and it sucks that some of their money goes to gamestop and now bestbuy which buys and sells used games.
But, I am one of those people who likes to barrow games because I don’t have $500+ to spend on video games per year. I like when my cousin or brother buys a game because I get to play for free and vise versa when but I buy a game. What would be nice is if someone is done with their game and they give it to someone else then that person should pay a small fee to activate the game on their console. Not full game price since the game is used but something like $15 would seem fair to me. If I really wanted to play a game I’d pay the $15 to activate it.