There's something crucial people forget when they go "bu-bu-but Steam!": Steam is on an open platform, and the Xbox is a closed platform. The PC is practically the wild west in regards to how you can release stuff, and by proxy crack stuff, so it's understandable to try to find a reasonable middle ground in protecting your software and being customer friendly, before that was CD Keys but that's a joke now so it's something like Steam that isn't too intrusive and convoluted of a mess. The Xbox should be innately piracy proof and thus just about ANYTHING is overkill. If they seriously run with dialing home once a day and requiring all physical copies come with a blu-ray key and every game just being an install disc as if it were PC... fuck that, if you want use to go full digital make buying digital over physical more appealing, not this bizarre Frankenstein scheme you're cooking up. Especially as it actually makes you look more anti-consumer by taking what freedoms we had as a consumer and tunneling them only through GameStop or yourself.
To be fair though, every iteration of the Xbox has been a PC shoved into a console box and stripped of most of its functionality. Its not as hard to crack an Original Xbox with little more than a flash drive loaded with a few files and some know how on what you're doing so that you don't brick the bloody thing by accident. And while I haven't payed too much attention to cracking 360s, I wouldn't be surprised it the internal structure is PC enough for simple instructions gathered from the internet to bypass the front end, nor would it surprise me to see the same case hold for the Xb1 as well.
The real kicker though is that this is not going to stop hackers and pirates at all, just like every other DRM conceived, they'll find a way around it. What this conference and system are saying though is that Mircosoft only wants to continue doing business with the "core gamer", or more accurately, the people who have stuck with Mircosoft and the Xbox fully up to this point and would still be willing to continue regardless because its "their system" and nobody else.
