XBox 360 DRM Changes

At last, after I'm sure an immense weight of customer feedback and complaints (me included), Microsoft have announced they are releasing a tool in June that will allow you to consolidate all of your licenses for the software/media you've downloaded onto one Console.

This tool is absolutely required as anyone will tell you who's experienced the dreaded Red Ring of Death (RRoD).

All content when downloaded is currently locked to the combination of the console, the hard disk AND the Xbox Live GamerTag. This means once you receive back your 'new' Xbox after a repair, any content downloaded will NOT be playable unless you're connected to Xbox Live.

Even worse, for any other accounts also on that console (your children's for example) they will also not be able to play that content at all in most cases. In some cases, as in Arcade games, 'you' need to sign in first to unlock the content for whoever wants to play it.

This is totally inconvenient, a real pain and in almost all cases , incredibly restrictive on the content you've legally purchased. For example, my daughter has just gotten hooked on Oblivion. I literally lived this game a year or so back and clocked up an embarrassingly large number of hours on it. I also bought a number of add-on modules to it (including grabbing a few of the modules when they were offered free).

My daughter only gets to 'see' the most recent of modules that I downloaded (the Fighter's Stronghold when it was initially released). This is because this is the only module that was downloaded onto this console (I'm now on my FOURTH 360 believe it or not). All others that I rightfully purchased and downloaded were initially downloaded onto one of my previous consoles so she doesn't see them at all.

Hopefully, once this tool is available, I can, from reading the interview, re-register all of my downloaded content onto my most recent 360 (sure it won't be the last though...) and Maggie (my daughter) should, the next time she opens up Oblivion, be able to see all manner of new fun things to do...

About time is all I can say...

The interview in Next Generation detailing this is available here.