After more than two years and an increasing number of customers complaining as their
Xbox 360 consoles have red ringed, Microsoft has finally solved its
DRM license transfer issue - sort of.
The just launched
Xbox 360 License Transfer Tool will let you consolidate any licenses you may have scattered across multiple consoles and transfer them to another. The catch is that you can only perform this Web-initiated transfer once a year. After you take the plunge, you're locked out from doing so again for 12 months. Also, as with the
120GB hard drive transfer cable, it's an all-or-nothing affair.
This is good for some situations, like if you buy a bunch of
Rock Band tracks at a buddy's house and want to reclaim them to your home console later. The problem is that you're then locked out of buying a new console for a year! So what should you do: Put off getting that HD-capable 360 for 12 months, or - what the heck - go ahead and buy it now and
then reclaim your licenses? A year is a long time, too long for most to wait. You're just going to have to upgrade now.
It's clear that the iTunes model of authorizing and deauthorizing systems at will was deemed too permissive; people might use it to play games at their friends' house and then reclaim them back home later. And if you never logged that friend's Xbox 360 back onto Xbox Live, ostensibly you might have multiple consoles with the same purchases all playable offline (albeit with the same gamertag). Still, it seems like it would only take one slip to catch abusers, and you're still punishing the purchasers.
Thankfully, if you have to send your console in for repairs and it is replaced, the license transfer is automatic now - though you may have to go back and redownload your purchases to ensure they all work offline again.
My case is a little more complicated. I personally have 803 game licenses and 90 video licenses spread across two consoles in our home, and my wife has some too (though I can't login to see hers right now). Both of our 360s are from the 2005 launch and have had many problems (red ring, freezes due to overheating,
video card death), but - apart from that first month replacement in 2005 - they have been repaired instead of replaced. And neither has HDMI. The small annoyance is that some of the licenses were limited-time freebies such as Oblivion mods I downloaded to my wife's console while mine was being repaired. I could simply sweep up all licenses and consolidate them on our respective consoles, but then I'm locked out of upgrading for a year. But I don't want to run out and just buy a new console (and certainly not two!) for a little piece of mind.
The good news is that the expanded 360 warranty coupled with the extended service plans we bought should give us options should our consoles fail. I'm not sure whether I'll upgrade to HDMI this year; it would be nice, but now I feel like if I do so, the people who came up with this inane solution win! So maybe I'll just take the plunge and consolidate all of our licenses.
But not right away. I've had enough 360 DRM headaches these past few years. If this thing has bugs and issues, I'm not going to be the one to find out the hard way - because if it can go wrong, it will go wrong for me. I'm going to wait at least a month to see how things shake out.
-=Gamewatcher
There was a time when all games licensed from movies and TV shows were awful, but that was before casual game developers got their hands on them. With their lower overhead and more reasonable production schedules, there is a much greater likelihood you'll find interesting and polished gameplay (albeit derivative of an existing genre). Case in point: Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen. A slick mashup of Diner Dash table waiting and Cake Mania "cooking"-type time management games, this one takes things further by letting you unlock real recipes to print after receiving a "critique" from the celebrity chef. For a limited time, you can get a saltier 