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Xbox One will be region locked, have 3x cloud storage

Games from abroad won't work on a UK Xbox One, but we will have three times the console's storage in the cloud.

Joe Svetlik Reporter
Joe has been writing about consumer tech for nearly seven years now, but his liking for all things shiny goes back to the Gameboy he received aged eight (and that he still plays on at family gatherings, much to the annoyance of his parents). His pride and joy is an Infocus projector, whose 80-inch picture elevates movie nights to a whole new level.
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Joe Svetlik
2 min read

Just like the PS3 and Xbox 360 before it, the Xbox One will be region locked, Microsoft has announced. But the big M is beefing up its Xbox Live and cloud storage services, offering three times the Xbox One's CPU and storage capacity online.

The region locking is in line with other arms of the entertainment industry, according to Microsoft. "Similar to the movie and music industry, games must meet country-specific regulatory guidelines before they are cleared for sale," a Microsoft rep told Digital Trends.

"We will continue to work with our partners to follow these guidelines with Xbox One."

Region locking the Xbox One means games you buy abroad won't work on your UK console. You also won't be able to download titles from the US Xbox Live service, which will likely stock a bigger selection. US Netflix dwarfs the UK version, for example, which is annoying, but makes sense I suppose, seeing as it serves far more people.

More welcome is news that we'll have plenty of room online to store all our games, movies and music. For every Xbox One, "we're provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud," Jeff Henshaw, Microsoft group program manager of Xbox incubation and prototyping, told OXM.

"We're doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the game."

The Xbox One is rumoured to talk to you like Siri, and feature remote play, for letting a pal take over when you reach a tricky bit of a game.

It'll face stiff competition from the PS4, which should hit the UK before Christmas, and will also feature remote play.

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