After basically keeping us all in the dark on the finer details of how the new Xbox One will work since its announcement, Microsoft has finally shed some light on the issue. Today the company released details on the console’s online requirement, games licensing and privacy concerns — here are the official answers to the biggest questions people have about the Xbox One:

• With Xbox One you can game offline for up to 24 hours on your primary console, or one hour if you are logged on to a separate console accessing your library. Offline gaming is not possible after these prescribed times until you re-establish a connection, but you can still watch live TV and enjoy Blu-ray and DVD movies.

• Today, some gamers choose to sell their old disc-based games back for cash and credit. We designed Xbox One so game publishers can enable you to trade in your games at participating retailers.  Microsoft does not charge a platform fee to retailers, publishers, or consumers for enabling transfer of these games.

• Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once.

As for the privacy concerns regarding the Kinect, Microsoft says that you can pause the device when playing or watching content on the Xbox One. When your console is off, it will only be listening for the “Xbox On” command, but you can turn that off as well. Finally, the company says that when “you’re simply having a conversation in your living room, your conversation is not being recorded or uploaded.”

It’s great that Microsoft has cleared things up a little more, but despite that, there are still a couple of things that aren’t 100 percent clear. If games can only be given once, does that mean the person I give it to cannot give it to someone else? And if they can, does that mean they can give it back to me, which is basically gaming the system at that point?

Kotaku tried to clear that up with Microsoft and they were given this response: “The blog posts on Xbox Wire detail everything we can share today. We look forward to sharing more details in the months ahead.” Interesting.

One more thing, while they did state that when you’re simply having conversations in your living room, your data isn’t being recorded or uploaded, does that mean that other types of data in other activities are being recorded and uploaded? If Microsoft isn’t planning on doing anything of that sort, they could have set the record straight by giving a definitive “we are not recording or uploading any of your data,” but they didn’t.

We’re definitely closer to knowing what exactly we’re in for with the Xbox One, but it looks like we’re gonna have to wait a little longer until we have all the answers.

[via Xbox Wire, Kotaku]