Wings Over Sealand

The process of simply buying the Xbox One took me either three days or eight weeks, depending on how you look at it, due to a combination of how retail works these days and the gibbering random madness that is GAME's pricing and corporate structure. But I'm not even going to get into that here.

What you should know is what happened next.

In the time between deciding to buy the Xbox and actually having it in my house, I'd accumulated a small pile of games, nearly all on disc and mostly at bargain prices:

Forza Horizons 3 (disc, £10 as part of a bundle)
Gears Of War 4 (digital, bundled with the console)
Doom (disc, special edition, £15)
Halo Master Chief Collection (disc, £10)
Sunset Overdrive (disc, £7)
Battleborn (disc, £3)
FIFA 16 (disc, £3 – FIFA 17 was £45 preowned)
FIFA 15 (disc, £1, because why not?)
Rare Replay (disc, £11)
Assassin's Creed Unity (digital, £1.49. No, that's not a typo.)
Instant Indie Hits (Curve Digital compilation, gift from a lovely friend)

That's 10 standard games and one package of pretty tiny indie stuff. By the time I'd finished installing them all (including compulsory updates), I'd filled up more than 60% of my "1TB" hard drive – which actually turned out to be just 780GB, a quite astonishing and borderline-fraudulent amount of storage to lose to an OS – and spent three full days doing nothing but install and update games, morning noon and night.

Gears Of War 4 alone took over 26 hours to download and install. I could literally have walked to the shops, bought an Xbox 360 and Gears Of War 1, 2 and 3, set the console up, finished all three games and still have had hours to kill before the fourth in the series was done installing.

If I keep buying games, within just a couple of weeks I'm going to run out of space and have to delete stuff if I want to play them. If I delete GOW4 (because it's hogging a whopping 75GB all by itself) and then fancy playing it again, that'll be another 26-hour install. (Putting it on disc/s in the box instead of a download code – knocking a good 25 hours off that time – would have cost Microsoft maybe £1.)

Whenever I tweet something about this, people always chuckle about how we used to complain when it took five minutes to load a ZX Spectrum game off tape. But that's obviously not a fair comparison – Speccy games were microscopically small, with eight-colour graphics and rudimentary beeping for sound, barely recognisable as the same category of entity as a modern AAA blockbuster.

A more relevant comparison would be with the most recent previous generation – the Xbox 360 and the PS3. There's been no spectacular generational leap in tech between the 360 and the Xbox One. Sure, games look a little bit better, but you'd barely notice the difference if you'd just landed from Mars, and it's not like they've become more complex – they're basically the exact same racing games and FPS games and sports games you were playing on the 360, but with more detail on the characters' eyelashes.

Is this Forza 4 (360) or Forza 5 (XB1)? I defy anyone to say without Googling*.

Yet on the 360 you could buy a game and be playing it within two minutes of getting into your house. Even if you were so unutterably stupid as to buy the digital version (almost certainly more expensive than a disc, but with zero portability or resale value), you'd be looking at a worst-case scenario of no more than a couple of hours with a humble basic copper-wired broadband connection.

Now you can easily be looking at a full day even for the disc version, twice that if you buy the digital version. (Battleborn is a 19.7GB initial install, but then you've got a 21.3GB compulsory update to download – no, you haven't read that wrong, the update is bigger than the entire game – because for some incomprehensibly cretinous reason the Store insists on downloading the out-of-date version and then making you update it, rather than just GIVING YOU THE PATCHED VERSION IN THE FIRST PLACE.)

But seriously, who's THAT much of an idiot? (Click the pic to enlarge.)

(And note, those prices are in a SALE. The non-deluxe version of Battleborn was £50, for a game I bought brand-new on disc a month earlier for £3. Goodness knows what the price is when it's NOT on sale. The Borderlands Handsome Collection was available brand-new on disc from eBay for £17.50 the same day it was £45 in the Xbox Store, and I could install the disc version in a twentieth of the time, be able to take it round to a friend's house, and be able to sell it when I was finished with it.)

That's an absolutely MASSIVE degradation in functionality in the space of a single generation. I used to be able to have a cataloge of 200 Xbox 360 games and play whichever one of them I liked at a moment's notice. Because, y'know, it's a console and that's the POINT of consoles. Fire the disc in and go.

But on Xbox One, perhaps a tenth of my collection would be available at any one time (and even that only after about a week of dicking around installing them). Want to play one of the other 90%? Make an appointment the previous day, pal.

You'll find occasional features about this state of affairs in the videogaming media, but they're rare and quickly buried in the endless avalanche of press-release "news". There's almost no upside to this gigantic loss of convenience – it's certainly a hell of a price to pay for marginally sharper graphics – and it's staggering that developers and publishers and manufacturers haven't been tarred and feathered and run out of town by pitchfork-wielding mobs for it.

Then again, gamers put up with a lot of amazing crap these days.

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*It's Forza 4.