Microsoft To Tighten Territory Controls in Next Dashboard Update
By Ron on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 9:14 AM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Games Industry, Microsoft, Microsoft
For some time now, it’s been fairly normal for people in regions where XBox Live content they wanted wasn’t available to create foreign accounts. This allowed them to access the content in the region they had an account established in. Finally, Microsoft is moving to stop this from happening.
In the coming “Spring Update” for the 360’s dashboard, due out May 7th, players will only be able to download XBox Live content in their own region. Any accounts they have in other regions will be inaccessible.
Some other features in the “Spring Update” include:
- Support for LIVE Messenger
- A change to the “Achievement unlocked” pop-up, which shows you the name of the achievement and the amount of gamerpoints it represents as soon as you unlock it, saving you a trip to the Achievements screen.
- The ability to fast-forward, rewind, pause and resume videos you’re watching as they download from Xbox Live Marketplace.
- Being able to see the title of the game as part of the tray icon on the dashboard, rather than just a prompt to play the game. Highlighting the tray lists achievements and gamerscore for the title if it’s a 360 game, while Xbox 1 games simply list the name and show a picture.
- Playback support for H.264 (up to 10MBps peak, baseline, main and high profiles with 2-channel AAC LC) and MPEG-4 Part 2 (5MBps peak, simple profile with 2-channel AAC LC) videos.
- Enhanced family settings for text and video chat.
- An update to Xbox Live Arcade that allows you to see which games your friends are playing and join in, as well as compare leaderboard scores and achievements from the friends list.
- An option on the “Auto Downloads” page to download all the free versions of Live Arcade games.
- Switchable aspect ratios for video playback (Auto to Letterbox, Zoom, Stretch, Native).
- Various notifications to stop you downloading or transferring content when not enough disk space is available, as well as other tweaks that remember settings and folder hierarchies.
To take a look at the whole change list, you can go here.
