Xbox One Games Will be Playable “Long-term”

There’s a lot of confusion about the Xbox One, partly because of people repeating erroneous information over and over, but mostly because Microsoft let people get that erroneous information in the first place. It’s the start of a new generation, the Xbox One does things that no other console has ever done – you make sure that people understand what’s going on with it from the very beginning.

Microsoft didn’t do that though, and they let people start to panic. One of those “panics” involved the idea that Microsoft could simply shut off the servers for the Xbox One and that the console would then just brick for everybody. The 24-hour check-in would be impossible and the games you bought, games locked in the cloud, would just disappear for ever.

Major Nelson, in an interview with /r/games, was quick to put people’s minds to rest:

I’ll just say this: We haven’t even started this generation, so it’s kind of early to talk about the end of the generation. That’s certainly something we would not do. That’s not the way the system is designed. It’s designed for flexibility. But let’s get the system out there first.

He also confirmed that banned users will only lose access to multiplayer, not their full games, and that the 24-hour check in supports new features like the shared game library.