Microsoft has finally fixed a long-standing irritation with the Xbox 360: the inability to transfer licenses for purchased games from one console to another. The new license transfer tool lets you consolidate all your download purchases to a specific Xbox 360, even if some were downloaded onto a console that no longer works or was sold on.
I’m personally grateful as I ran into exactly this problem and had an argument with support about it.
There’s a wider point here. If I buy virtual property, like software, music or an ebook, it makes sense to record that ownership in the cloud so that there is no need to keep backups and it cannot really be stolen (other than by hacking the online account, I guess).
That would seem all to logical of an approach. I always assumed though that the corporations had the setup the way they did to force users to buy more than one ‘license’. Lucrative for them on a hot item, but a hassle on the user-end. Perhaps Microsoft got tired of paying for extra support people just to deal with the gripes of the prior system. =P