It’s funny to me that in this comment thread there were only ever two options “The old way” and “The new way” and everyone is fighting over the merits of those. People complaining that you want progress, why aren’t you upset that Microsoft has (seemingly) vindictively killed their new digital download features to re-enable the traditional way of playing games on discs? Real progress often has to happen in steps, and real progress on this front would have been to leave the disc-based experience alone and entice people who actually had the internet connection required and the interest in it to switch to digital downloads with all these new features only on digital downloads. Real progress would have been the best of both worlds based on the source of the software coming into the system, not forcing one group of the other to do something they didn’t want to.
Personally, my guess is someone inside the company actually showed them all the problems an all internet based system still has in 2013, and in true Microsoft fashion (I used to work there), they dropped back to the old way ’cos it was cheaper to make that change now. Expect to see all these features show up in a system update after they actually have time to spend doing them right.
