I live close to a major metropolitan area, and: "Comcast is down again, let's go play Xbox" is something that happens to me fairly often. (Once or twice a month?) Is it a make or break feature? No. But I do legitimately expect to get games without internet, and Steam has occasionally failed badly in that regard as well. I was annoyed about the connection thing because of the big brother aspect of it all. Why not a one-time activation for a game? Yes, it would allow you to slightly break the system in the extreme case but that's an edge case of "never connect the console again".

That plus we trade games in my circle of friends all the time. The "ten designated sharees" thing was an interesting idea but still had that creepy big brother aspect to it -- not to mention it's not flexible enough. There's a rumor that Steam will allow you to lend games now, and I am curious to see how that goes.

It's 2013 now, when was the last time you had to put a disc or any other storage medium into your PC?

I bought a physical copy of a game I wanted because it was cheaper than the Steam version, and it has good old fashioned "is the disc present" DRM on it :P

If Microsoft were smart they would have left physical disc licensing as it is
and announced all the good news related to strong DRM-style licensing for download only games

"We will allow you to share downloaded games with up to 10 friends" would have been an PR coup!

This is mostly blown out of proportion as well. Pretty much all modern military basis have internet access available. Yes, even bases in Afganistan. Sure, they aren't going to be streaming videos too often or downloading 20GB games, but a daily checking would not have been a major barrier to use for deployed troops. I still maintain that the best way to handle it would have been to be able to bypass the 24 hour offline check when the disc was in the drive.

Military bases, sure, but what about naval vessels like nuclear submarines?

C'mon now. Should any gaming company really factor in submarine crew when designing their systems? We're talking around 71 US submarines, each with a crew of 120 to 160. That's just over 11 thousand people at the top end, only a fraction of who are going to be "gamers".

Or really anybody on a ship, or many bases where personal internet access is either absurdly bad/expensive, which is many overseas locations. The military is heavily skewed towards young adult males, who are often far away from home and vigorously discouraged from drinking/partying/etc, with limited access to the opposite sex... so gaming actually figures pretty heavily. There's really just not much else to do in the free time they have. Deployed troops can get internet, but at forward-ish locations it's often in the form of a group of computers they can get for a certain period of time, not an ethernet port next to their bunk. Presumably official military publications would have some idea of you know, how stuff works in the military.

Seriously, just because you/we have reliable broadband doesn't mean everybody does... It sounds like you guys would have to have "First World Problems" explained to you since you wouldn't understand the irony.

i'll pop this here: http://gamerant.com/xbox-one-game-sharing-timed-demo/ not sure how reliable the source is, friend linked it on facebook.

I also don't understand the fixation with submarines. I thought the problem with always on connection was primarily that phone-home type behavior is goddamn creepy. Plus just to repeat, I live in a metropolitan area with a 30mbit/s connection, but I still play consoles without a connection reasonably often because Comcast sucks at everything.

I also move our consoles sometimes to houses where getting an internet connection is tricky (eg grandparents live there and "the internet" is one computer directly into a cable modem). One time I played without power. But those are probably unreasonable cases.