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A couple of weeks back, Ian Livingstone stated that "with the new Xbox, you supposedly have to have an internet connection, and the discs are watermarked, whereby once played on one console it won't play on another. So I think the generation after that will be digital-only." That's a hell of a lot of supposition, born out of half-sourced rumours and general speculation over the past few weeks by both game developers and the games media. It's born out of fear, but the problem is it's not an irrational one. Microsoft has hardly been the most considerate of platform owners, consistently throwing up an increasing amount of obfuscating and overbearing ads on the Xbox dashboard, not to mention already charging you a handsome sum just to play your console online. Why wouldn't it necessitate an internet connection just so you can play on your new console? It certainly benefits them. In theory, it prevents second hand sales, and makes the life of a pirate very difficult indeed.
Except we don't have to rely on theory. This week we've seen Sim City stumble as its servers crumble under huge demand, a problem EA's still in the process of addressing. Ubisoft has been through this all before - in 2010, it tried something along similar lines with its PC games, with less than satisfactory results. In September of 2012, they scrapped the program entirely, moving back to merely requiring an online activation of the game.
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