While speaking to Penny Arcade at E3 2013, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer eased our concerns over the Xbox One ever so slightly by confirming that you will be able to share your games library even with people who don’t live in your house.
The original idea was that you can share your games with up to 10 members of your family, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Spencer clarified that the 10 people you choose to share with don’t need to be in your family.
Check out his quote below:
“It’s not ten different people all playing the game concurrently, but when you think about a real usage scenario, and we thought about it around a family, and I know certain people will create a family group of people that aren’t all part of the same family. And I do think that’s an advantage, and people will use that. I saw it on NeoGAF instantly, the Xbox Family creation threads, where people said ‘Hey be a part of my family’.”
For those who haven’t seen it yet, the original feature of game sharing was listed as follows:
Give your family access to your entire games library anytime, anywhere: Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One. Just like today, a family member can play your copy of Forza Motorsport at a friend’s house. Only now, they will see not just Forza, but all of your shared games. You can always play your games, and any one of your family members can be playing from your shared library at a given time.
Now all that being said, only one person can access the game files at any given time. Of course, that’s a bit of a bummer but overall, I think this new sharing feature is still a big positive for Microsoft’s new console and does definitely ease some of our worries over the Xbox One’s strict DRM policies. Besides, from a publisher point of view, the one at a time thing makes perfect sense.
What do you think of all this? Does the Xbox One‘s shared game policy make the DRM pill easier to swallow?