This is great news. People should have no complaints about sharing games now.

Damn, that sounds pretty nifty. If this works how suggested, it could essentially cut down the amount of games you have to buy by half.

Maybe. But GAF seems to have decided that you can pick ten friends to share your games, but you can only pick one friend whose games YOU can play. That sounds a lot more like the PS3's situation. I think we're going to have to wait for Gamescom for a clarification, though... and for the other DRM shoe to drop.

I haven't contradicted any of the statements or facts. But the real world evidence for when a console manufacturer allowed up to 5 consoles to download a game from a single purchase is that the 3rd party publishers forced that console manufacturer to cut it back to 2.

The evidence from human psychology is that people like free stuff. If you get to play a game from start to finish without having to pay for it then you're going to be dead keen to play for free again with more games. What people aren't going to do is think, wow I played a game for free, next time I should buy a game.

Combine these two pieces of evidence and what do you get? Publishers realising that 10 family member sharing is too many.

I wonder If I can convince Microsoft that I am a soldier living in the EU. So I could get a useful Xbone not the online crippled something.

Ahh, interesting point of clarification, potentially. That actually sounds reasonably balanced as it prevents an exponential blowout of a single game being played by relative multitudes.

Perhaps everyone's been reading it that way, but I wasn't reading it that way at all. So if this limitation is true then it does mean what I thought was being claimed was too good to be true. But that's because I misunderstood what the family sharing thing actually was.

I'm still a little sceptical because it does still seem like more of a giveaway than MS or publishers would be prepared to give. But on MS's side if the sharing is behind the XBL Gold paywall then MS still gets paid, so maybe MS doesn't see it as a giveaway at all.

I'm still anti MS's overall DRM on principle, because I believe that a game disc should be freely tradeable, and restricting that freedom, but giving people things like the family group still stinks. But the family group thing at least represents a bit of air freshener masking the the bad smell of game trading restrictions.

Sony COULD. Have they yet? I love how people can downplay the biggest advantage of any system this generation by saying someone "could" implement it. By that logic, noone, ever, has any advantage whatsoever, because someone else could just also do it someday?

Here's the thing - people have taken the last 2 months and gotten very bitter over the DRM situation, so the fact that this sharing is pretty amazing isn't peircing through the cloud of malice they've already built up.

When Halo 5 comes out, it essentually functions as 2 copies right out of the gate for a friend and I. What's more, if down the road a friend wants to play it when we're not on all the time, it's essentially another copy. Now, with that in mind, how insane would it be if you could ALSO sell that copy? How many would publishers sell then? You can only, logically, EITHER own and share a game, or get a single copy and sell it back. Microsoft opted to go the own and share route, which for a lot of people, and families in particular, is awesome. You and your Son/Brother etc. both want the latest Madden? 1 copy - done. Just can't resell it later. This method front-loads the value of buying games, rather than rewarding people for waiting and buying it used.

Yeah. If that is how it works, then I can see MS being okay with it (it's almost definitely going to be behind a paywall) and third parties opting out or not as they see fit.

The guy who leaked basically everything about the Xbone does say that DRM is worse than any of us realize, and we'll find out the whole story at Gamescom. So unless the current firestorm forces them to change plans and/or explain everything before then, we'll probably have to do a lot of this sort of speculation about every feature until then.

Depending on how this works, yes. They have. My friend has been bumming games off of me for years now.

Granted, I can't share with ten friends. But I could share with another friend (or from this one, if the cheap fuck ever bought a game).