Cliff Bleszinski Backs Xbox One's Used Games DRM

A couple of months ago, while a lot of people were up in arms over the Xbox One's potential "always on" requirement, Gears of War creator and former Epic Games developer Cliff Bleszinski said, quite simply, "#dealwithit". Unlike so many others, he simply didn't see the reason why an "always on" console was a bad thing, insinuating that it's the "world we live in".

Given this, it should come as no surprise that Cliffy B is also in favor of Xbox One's used game DRM - that is, where a disc-based game can be traded only once. On Twitter, and via Computer and Videogames, he defends the scheme by saying, "You cannot have game and marketing budgets this high while also having used and rental games existing. The numbers do NOT work people."

Gears of War Creator Cliff Bleszinski

That's an argument that's hard to disagree with, but the fact of the matter is, games like Gears of War, which have massive budgets, do still work out fine revenue-wise for the developer / publisher. What doesn't help, though, is that the number of people required to create such masterpiece games is constantly increasing. He goes on to state that, "The visual fidelity and feature sets we expect from games now come with sky high costs. Assasins Creed games are made by thousands of devs."

It'd be easy to counter this with "just lower the budgets", but Cliff would like to remind you of just "how silly you sound".

As for the once-per-24 hour Internet requirement, he of course has an opinion there, too. "If you can afford high speed internet and you can't get it where you live direct your rage at who is responsible for pipe blocking you"

As someone who moved at the beginning of May and went three weeks without home Internet due to an ISP screw-up, comments like that drive me bonkers. No sane person can expect to have Internet 24/7/365 without potential issue - things happen. People move, people bring their consoles to places where Internet access isn't that accessible, and so forth. Want to bring your Xbox One to the summer trailer for some gametime after smores? You better hope to have Internet there.

I can understand where Cliff is coming from with some points, but there's been nothing said so far that proves to me that used game sales are a bad thing. I think it boils down to one thing... if someone can't afford to buy a game at a new price, then they are simply not going to likely play it under this new scheme. Limiting how people can acquire their games doesn't suddenly give them more money to spend on them. If there's one thing that it does increase, however, it's piracy - though the Xbox One (and PlayStation 4) are likely going to be safe from that for a little while.