I think all of the policies they announced are logical extensions of the fact that this is a digital-only console. The "retail" titles, such as they are, are like Steamworks games. It's not a retail+digital console, it's a digital-only console. I mean, imagine if a competitor to Steam popped up that had all of these policies. It'd be fairly standard--in some respect forward-thinking (being able to transfer a game you own to a friend, even once, is better than what Steam has right now; being able to trade in at select retailers is better than what Steam has now for both the retailer and the customer), in other respects a little behind the curve (offline mode being a 24 hour limit) I don't personally have a problem with digital only, I've got 600 games on Steam. And I'm generally a pretty future-proof kind of guy, none of my computers have optical drives anymore. I use Dropbox for everything. I love tablets I'm not someone who typically needs to be encouraged to adopt new tech or who worries about trading off the stability of current options for the cutting edge of new options.
But here are the problems:
1) No one views these policies as an advantage in any digital-only platform. They're a necessary evil. And they're one that's overcome with sweeteners. One sweetener is pricing. In Steam that's manifested in a few ways--frequent and steep sales on the whole catalogue, and the ability for developers to produce unlimited keys for free (and thus for third party resellers to sacrifice margin for volume and offer discounts). Will Xbox One games be $35 to pre-order? Will they drop to $5 within 6 months? I doubt it.
2) Digital-only PC platforms emerged in response to the decline of retail. Retail has not declined for consoles. It's still there. The Xbox One's direct competitors will have retail space. And the direct competitors will not necessarily have these policies. Maybe Microsoft ends up correctly predicting the future and riding the wave in advance, but it seems like Microsoft's competitors are healthy enough that this is too much too soon.
3) There exists no digital-only platform that requires an ongoing membership fee (or that encourages an ongoing membership fee). Ongoing membership fees tend to be for unlimited, all-access type services like Netflix--or even in the more limited form, Playstation Plus, or discount programs like Amazon Prime or Costco membership. It's true that Gold exists today, but today there's a platform that doesn't necessarily need the kind of sweeteners that the One will need.
So, I guess my conclusion is that given that we now know that Xbox One is a digital-only, not digital-first system, the policies are fairly unremarkable and the next question becomes how Microsoft will blunt these inherent limitations of digital-only systems and show advantages.
Indeed.
Do you know what's funny. For all the talk of a Steambox etc, this is actually pretty much MS attempting to make one but of course with their store/platform instead.
The problem is, with a Steambox, so long as it wasn't/isn't horribly locked down would be welcomed, as it would still have the advantages of PC. This is taking the bits of PC gaming we don't really like (DRM, license restrictions and online requirements) and probably not using the bits that sweeten the deal for us.
Steam gets away with a lot of crap because of the sales, and the fact that the platform is open enough to allow for competition, which keeps it on it's toes. Xbox One will have neither of these (Do you see a full catalogue sale every 6 months on Xbox One like on Steam, let alone weekly deals, daily deals and the twice weekly midweek/weekend deals? Didn't think so) so will have a much harder sell to those who use PC as a gaming platform.
For all of that, I'm not repulsed by Xbox One as a gaming platform, aside from the hilarious requirement for Kinect to be always connected (Seriously, MS can fuck off with that one and I hope the EU courts rule that an option for it to be switched off full is there) but the platform really doesn't excite me. Between a potentially high entry price, Xbox Live Gold fees, higher prices than PC, a lower power device than the competition and no advantages over PC with most of the downsides it's very hard for me to say I will be buying this anywhere near launch.
To address point 3 is where things actually get scary and where MS may think they have people over a barrel. Xbox Live now is a paid service for Xbox online components. As "the cloud" is basically an integral part of Xbox One, how will that work? The only way I can see is by locking out pretty much everything cloud related behind the XBL paywall, making the Xbox One basically a subscription only console.
Not only that, but the whole account based "trading" system is ripe to abuse that way too. Want to trade in games to these "selected retailers"? XBL Gold only need apply, after all, the systems will be revoking licenses from your account, so what's to stop MS from restricting it to those who pay the monthly fee? Nothing.
I hope I'm wrong here, but the obsession with account based DRM for Xbox One seems to me a precursor to announcing how Xbox Live will be "better" than before. Better for MS, sure, but meaning that most of the freedoms we have had with previous consoles can be locked away behind the paywall. I'm more scared about that, than anything else about the console really because it depends not on architecture now, but MS policy makers, and even if they don't go all in now, there's always "feature creep", where slowly the rights they give us now can easily be eroded over the life of the platform.