No it is not. Xbox Live Family Sharing doesnt have anything to do with you giving someone else your gamertag (aka login and password) and allowing them to play the game as you/with you on another machine.  It means your gamertag has 10 friends that are given a special designation and they can all play thier your games as themselves.  You do not need to give them any of your credentials.

It has nothing to do with power, but availability. Sony is not providing free cloud services to all PS4 devs other than first party. Devs need to aquire their own servers for Ps4... Some devs may be lucky to make a case to sony and have them subsidize the cost. Bit it isn't standard.

When things aren't standard you get fragmentation of features. Also you may get issues where EA is shutting servers down for Fifa 2014 in 2016 because they don't want to pay the cost for those games anymore. 

We will have to see but I think thx1139 is correct in sayingt that the game sharing on Xbox One will not involve giving your gamer tag. Most likely it will involve marking a selct number of consoles as "family members" and all can share each others library with different gamer tags. This is how microsoft have presented it so far...

I think both companies will continue to tweak DRM and make changes as time goes by. We could end up with a reality where Sony has the better DRM and online features... Im no ruling this out, but it its extremely unlikely.

I was hinting with my initial that online and digital is Microsofts home turf and has been their home turf for a decade. They have been doing DRM and digital only for a long time and know a thing or two about it... Other than Google, no one out there can compete with all of the digital services Microsoft has to offer. Skype, Bing, IE, Skydrive, Hotmail, Office 365, Azure, Windows 8...are all digital products, services or platforms. And most of those are coming to Xbox One in one way or another. 

^^ Watch your quote trees people!

when Netflix changed their subscription model from mailing you your movies... to being a digital service, almost exclusively. There was a backlash. But if you look at them now it was the right decision.


All microsoft is doing is making digital distribution the obvious purchase method for its customers since any disc is useless after install. Four years from now a slim version will likely release without a disc drive. MS is just forcing its inevitability. This concept doesn't make sense now, but it will.

They aren't really comparable at all:

 Netflix changed their policies, which would cause most people's cost to more than double for the same service, after already raising their prices 9 months earlier.  Then they said they were going to make an entire new company - another PR Disaster.  Also, lost some major contracts in the middle of all this.  What happened is most people dropped part of their services, and lowered their bill and a huge dent in Netflix's profits.  It was several disasters to existing customers in a row and lower overall revenue for the company.

A great percentage of Xbox One whiners are fans of other consoles, or systems who would never buy an Xbox anyway.  If Netflix had a major competitor who was posting all over the place how terrible Netflix was (Say Hulu+), who never used the service, then that would be different. 

Microsoft stock is still hovering around their 1 year high.  They are up over 24% for the year.

Exactly my point. Was huge PR disaster and really hasnt had much of an effect.

Er it DID hav a huge impact though, instead of expanding their market share netflix contracted for an entire year before expanding again. They weren't even abandoning physical copies either, just spinning it off to a dfferent company and seperating the charge, and the backlash was so bad they literally had to cancel the spinoff plan 3 months later.

And seperating the cost even made sound economical sense, most digital user probably are happy with the reduce cost as they don't use the physical rental aspect anyways (vice versa for physical renters), there were real tangible benefit! But because of horrible communication, it turned into a PR and commercial disaster.

They have recovered from that massive blunder but to say that it hasn't effected them is laughable, in term of momentium they essentially lost an entire year, that's something no businessmen or entrepreneur would be happy to hear.

rental vs purchasing is apples and oranges.

What you need to do is compare DVD/Blu-ray sales vs online purchasing and downloading of movies and TV shows.

Actually the Movie biz is going in the opposite direction to MS. On Disc they provide you with the disc, which is tradeable AND a digital copy for putting onto your HDD for streaming onto all of your WIFI connected devices in the home. So with many Blu-ray movies I can keep the digital (SD) copy forever and sell the Blu-ray. Some movies even come with a DVD version too, which means I can sell 2 discs, separately and keep the digital version.

That's about as unlike MS's Xbone policies as you can get.