[aturnis]

Originally Posted by Pants

Oh, I think that's just a given. When you install a game to your HDD, the physical disc serves as your authentication. It tells the console you actually own that game and can play it.

The whole point of the 24 hour check-in was to authenticate your game library. It was going to enable you to play any game you own without ever having to put the disc in. Better yet, you could go to any other place, turn any Xbox on, log into your XBL account and play any game you own right then and there.

This is exactly how Steam works. You can buy a game on a disc that's also available on Steam. Install it once and you will always have it on your Steam account. You can go to any computer, install the tiny Steam client, download the game from their servers and start playing.

Without the 24 hour authentication, people would just be able to buy a game, install in on their HDD, disconnect the console from the internet, sell the game to anyone willing to buy a "once used" copy and then play through the whole game for as long as it takes while being offline because the Xbox would not have any way of knowing someone else is using the same copy to play the game because it has no way to check ( <---- best run-on sentence of all time). So... now you won't be able to do this because even though the game is going to be on the HDD, you will need the disc in the console. You also won't be able to lend or gift digital copies.

They could just authenticate upon startup or only the particular game when you attempt to play it.