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Xbox One will definitely be in used games market, details still blurry

Xbox One will definitely be in used games market, details still blurry

Microsoft isn't prepared to share how used games on Xbox One will be handled – which had adverse effects on retailer GameStop's stock price yesterday – but the company is definitely going to be in the market.

"We understand the secondary market is incredibly important today in the current generation. It will be incredibly important in the next generation," Phil Spencer, Microsoft Corporate VP of Microsoft Studios, said in an interview with us. "I love the fact that my identity, my saves and my content can go with me to any console I move to. The ability to have me and my content save in the cloud who I am, and I can move around, that obviously requires some capability to know what content you own, associated with you and how you move."

He also danced around the always-online issue, something that already caused one public firing at Microsoft.

"We also understand that sometime people's internet goes down and I shouldn't stop watching a movie or stop playing a single-player game when that happens. We'll support a tolerance where we can," he noted, but we were seeking specifics on how long the console could be offline. "You asked about the boundaries, how long will that work? I'll just tell you we don't know yet. We'll tell you when we have the answer and we can tell everybody. But we understand that secondary market is important to the ecosystem, no doubt."

Asked about the game trading that Microsoft previously mentioned, Spencer said, "Yeah, these are some of the specifics... honestly, I'm not really dodging, I just don't want to tell you something we haven't fully baked yet.

"We basically set this reveal up so we could show the hardware, announce the name, talk about worldwide launch this year, show EA and Activision on our stage during our announce – which I think was a pretty compelling point to have both – with their biggest franchises in FIFA and Call of Duty," he concluded the topic. "Then we're gonna use E3 to game, game, game."