[UPDATE] Xbox One Has "Pre-Owned Fee" For Used Games, No BC - News

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Not mentioned at Microsoft's Xbox One presentation was the fate of used games. There had been much speculation whether Microsoft would cut used games out of the picture on their new console. Wired is reporting that they haven't, but there will be a fee.

Microsoft confirmed to Wired that all games will have a "pre-owned fee". The games themselves will be installed into the first Xbox One they are inserted into. The game will then be connected to the player's Xbox Live gamertag. When another player tries to put the disc into a different Xbox One, they will be required to pay the pre-owned fee in order to install the game onto their Xbox One. The fee amount has not been disclosed. Effectively, this means sharing games with your friends is now impossible to do without ponying up some extra cash.

Also briefly mentioned in the Wired article is that the Xbox One will not be backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games, though purchased licenses for other content (such as movies and music) will transfer to Xbox One.

Does this affect your opinion of the Xbox One? Will it sway you in your decision to buy the console? Let us know.

UPDATE: There are now conflicting quotes from various different Microsoft sources on the existence of a pre-owned fee as well as how the console will handle borrowed games. VentureBeat attributes this quote to a Microsoft spokesperson: “We are designing the Xbox One to enable customers to trade in and resell games. We’ll have more details to share later."

Microsoft's corportate Vice President, Phil Harrison, spoke to Eurogamer and mentioned the pre-owned fee system:

Okay, so, I can understand where some of the confusion may have come from, so let me try to help out there. First of all, you can buy a game on a disc from a retail store, come home and install it to your Xbox One. The disc contains all the bits and data on that game, which you can then give to your friend, and they can then install it on their Xbox One. No restriction on that, except that the second person obviously has to pay for it.

You can purchase a game in two ways: you can purchase it from a retail store or you can download it. So the act of putting the bits on the hard drive - the Xbox One doesn't really know or care what method the bits got into the machine, if it was from a disc or downloaded from Xbox Live. But obviously the users will then have to purchase that content.

What I think people are now confusing is the purchasing of content in the first instance with the ability to trade and resell the previously played games. We have a solution for that and we will be announcing exactly how that works in due course.

But the Xbox Support Twitter account was seen posting tweets that deny the existence of a pre-owned fee. Those tweets appear to have been removed, but here are screencaps of two tweets:

So, to recap: There's a fee, unless there isn't, but there probably is. However, Microsoft has a plan, it seems, but they haven't told us what that is yet. Confusion reigns today.

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