Microsoft wants to give money back to developers so that they lower prices

Jun 14, 2013 06:58 GMT  ·  By

An alleged Microsoft engineer has posted quite a few interesting details about the company's plans concerning the Xbox One.

He is motivating the controversial digital rights management (DRM) systems imposed onto used games by the desire to reduce the price of a full game and turning the console marketplace into something similar to Valve's Steam.

Microsoft has drawn a lot of ire from fans with its complex system regarding used games and the process of trading them into stores, not to mention the mandatory 24-hour Internet checks needed by the next-gen console.

Now, it seems that an anonymous Microsoft engineer has posted quite a big explanation on the 4chan forum, via Pastebin.

The employee said that the ultimate goal of the Xbox One DRM system was to get more money to developers and publishers so that they'll be more open to reducing the price of a game or to running big sales like on the Steam digital distribution service for PC, Mac, or Linux.

"The whole point of the DRM switch from disc based to cloud based is to kill disc swapping, scratched discs, bringing discs to friend's house, trade-ins for [low] value with nothing going back to developers, and high game costs. If you want games cheaper then 59.99, you have to limit used games somehow. Steam's model requires a limited used game model," he said.

"The thing is, the DRM is really really similar to Steam. You can login anywhere and play your games, anyone in your house can play with the family Xbox. The only difference is Steam you have to sign in before playing, and Xbox does it automatically at night for you (once per 24 hours)."

The engineer also highlighted that Valve's Steam had a lot of problems at launch and drew the anger of gamers but, ultimately, it became one of the most successful services in the world.

"It's a long tail strategy, just like Steam. Steam had its growing pains at the beginning with all its DRM [expletive] as well. For digital downloads steam had no real competition at the time, they were competing against boxed sales. At the time people were pretty irate about steam, it was only once they had a digital marketplace with DRM that was locked down to prevent sharing that they could do super [discounts]."

Bear in mind that the authenticity of this report isn't confirmed, so take it with a grain of salt.