Xbox One: Question about sharing games.

[DrOswald]

So I have an important question about the Xbox One that I cannot find an answer for and I was wondering if people can help me.

The Xbox One allows you to share your games with up to ten people. Cool. However, I have noticed that when it was announced the image shown titled the feature "Xbox Live Gold Sharing." Does this mean that a gold membership is required to share games with family and friends? And if so, does only the person sharing the game require a membership or is it both parties?

This is important to me because this is the only feature I think is really interesting on the Xbox One but I do not play console online multiplayer enough to justify a subscription service.

If anyone could answer this question I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[oplinger]

You can share your game with up to 10 people in your household, from my understanding. Like the 360 allows for linked accounts, and other accounts. The XBone is allowing you to share all the features of having Xbox live gold with all the accounts on that Xbox, and share your games (they are bound to accounts) with those accounts.

The idea I heard they had with sharing with friends, was much more complex. I don't think you need a gold sub for it, but what it does is it removes the game from your library, and gives it to your friend. So your friend effectively uses your key for the game to access the data, while you can't play it anymore. It works like this for trading in games too. So effectively trading and sharing with other non-household accounts removes your access, while those on the same Xbox can share in your games. Up to 10.

(I'm not 100% myself either, but from what I have gathered, this is how it works.)

 

[blizzaradragon]

From what I've read from Microsoft, you can have 10 people that have open access to your games when they're online. These are put in your 10 "family" slots, but MS has confirmed that who counts as family is entirely up to the account holder. Along with this, if your console has multiple accounts then those other accounts can access the games that are installed to that console by other account members. So let's say you have you and a sibling at home, both of you could play your games at home on the one console from each other's libraries. You could then add a cousin and a friend that are on the other end of the country as two family members, and they could play your copy of Forza or Halo from their Xbox. However, only one person in the "family" can play a shared game at a time, so these two could not both play your Halo copy at the same time. It is also unsure if you count towards this quota either, but if not then you could essentially buy a single copy of Halo and have you and a buddy be able to play together. Then finally there's the gifting, where you can give your license of a game to another person on your friend's list if they have been on your friends list for at least 30 days. Each game can only be given once as well.

As for if any of this requires Gold, I'm not sure but given that everything else is locked behind Gold I wouldn't be surprised. Honestly MS still has a lot of explaining to do about this, and if my speculation above is true it could easily be something that could start turning some of this negativity towards the console around.

 

[GodzillaGuy92]

I'm pretty excited about the sharing feature. It's funny to me that sony thought they were being cute with their "how to share" video, when the XBone will actually be better for sharing. Also funny that so many people ate it up and still don't understand.

The Xbox One allows you to share a game with a maximum of ten people, requiring each of them to download the entire game to their console in the process.

The Playstation 4 allows you to share a game with as many people as you want, free of installation-related inconveniences.

Some people "don't understand," all right, but it's not the ones agreeing with Sony.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

I can see the merits of both.

One is purely conciliatory due to them otherwise crippling your freedom of ownership. The other requires actual RL human interaction.

Both are fraught with peril, so pick whichever one scares you least.

 

[Overquoted]

I'm pretty excited about the sharing feature. It's funny to me that sony thought they were being cute with their "how to share" video, when the XBone will actually be better for sharing. Also funny that so many people ate it up and still don't understand.

I think it's pretty cute that this is being touted as a new feature to consoles. This already exists on the PS3. You can link your account to two different PS3s. When you download a game from that account, it is then available to play on the console by any other account on the console.

Example: I log onto my brother's PS3, download a digital copy of BF3 on both, go home and then we play it at the same time from our respective accounts. [To be fair, it wasn't meant to be used this way. But there wasn't a restriction in place against it either.]

But sure, XBone created a brand new, awesome family sharing thing that has totally never existed on a Sony console before. And maybe the PS4 won't have the same feature the PS3 had. Who knows.

 

[Severian]

The sharing is cool. PS3 has been doing it for years. I could just hand my game to a friend or family member too. Xbox One is killing rentals which is baffling to me.