The Xbox One was originally announced as having several controversial features such as always-online DRM and restrictive sharing policies. Eventually Microsoft changed these policies after a flood of complaints from gamers, but it does not mean that they are dead and buried.
Xbox director Albert Penello spoke to Gamespot during PAX Prime, and the executive was adamant in his belief that a "digital only and always connect" future is going to be coming soon.
"It's going to happen. I don't think there's anybody in the industry; no matter what you thought about our original policies around DRM; I don't think there's anybody that doesn't know that someday, it's going to happen. Right? It's already happened on tablets and smartphones. It's mostly there on PC," he said.
"If you look at what's happening with Steam. And just the congregation of gaming on Steam. It's already basically happened with music and it's on its way to happening with movies. So it doesn't take a big leap to say it's going to get there," Penello added. "For us, we probably said it was going to happen sooner than people were ready for it to happen. And I'm glad we've gone back to the disc model. People have to accept it. The Internet bandwidth caps have to support it globally. Internet infrastructure has to support it globally. So it's going to happen, it's just a matter of time."
When asked about trying to bring in digital sharing as a way to get gamers behind a digital only future, Penello stated that Microsoft is interested in trying to make game sharing or even buying and selling digital content among users is something the company is very interested in.
"We were trying to implement the ability to trade [and] loan digital games with your friends which is something that no one else was doing. I believe, in retrospect that people have calmed down and gone back and actually looked at what we said, people are starting to understand, 'Wow, they did want actually to allow me to loan and trade' which other digital ecosystems don't want to do. And so, yeah, I think we need to do that. That has to be part of the experience. Right now, we're focused on launch and we switched the program back to discs, because that's what customers wanted," he said,
It sounds as though Microsoft has not completely given up on their initial vision for the Xbox One, and though digital sharing may not happen on the Xbox One the next console after that may be the one to break into the service.