Or you could simply enable it for digital NOW, while working on physical for later release.
This is just so typical.

Challenges are probably not technical, but license agreements with publishers and monetization. There is no reason they can't enable it for digital games today. Blaming physical discs for the delay is bullshit.

I'm curious to find out what they finally settle on. Last year it ranged from 10 friends can play 10 different games at the same time from your library independent of what you are playing, to a time limited trial mode.

Pretty much this. EVERYthing in the VG industry is calculated by monetization, and they hate people being able to buy used games. HATE it. But, they trust that model (the devil you know), because it's predictable, and digital only in the realm of 20-40GB games only reaches so many people. The vast majority of hugely popular PC games are fairly small in size by comparison. Part of the reaons that consoles are so popular to begin with is the relatively easy setup and go process (admittedly this has taken a hit with gen7/gen8 stuff from Sony/MS with day 1 updates/mandatory patches that can be annoying, I actually know people that never connect their consoles online because they just want to be able to play SP games in peace without being forced to download a massive update when they stick their new game in the system).

Digital only works great for some people. However, it is FAR from a great solution for many, and the reasons are myriad. If you follow ISP and net neutrality news, along with digital IP legal maneuvering, you'll know the US internet situation is mired in the 7th circle of hell right now. If you have a no-cap 20mbit+ connection, you're in great shape, but for more and more americans, that's just not the case. You have tons of crap internet connections out there with packet-shaping, throttling, data caps, inconcistent speeds, outages, and by far the biggest challenge facing us is two pronged :

The big ISPs are now dedicated towards their absolute dismantling of net neutrality. What that means is that content that they have a higher $ compensation for will get preference, and content that doesn't, gets nerfed in speed or disallowed altogether on their network. The second part of this is all the idiots out there that gleefully pay massive phone bills for 2GB of LTE monthly, etc, have them all salivating over implementation of similar models for home ISP access. No more infinite access per month at your max speed, not even infinite speed up to your 300gb cap or whatever somewhat-generous cap might be. No, the new model desired is something like : $50/mo for 30mbit, tier gives you 5GB of data. Every additional GB costs you $5. Oh, and while Netflix may pay the fees to give it top or 2nd tier speeds, smaller sites (like let's say VGChartz and a few of your other favorite sites) will get nerfed to dial-up speeds or not even allowed.

You don't have to believe me, do the research yourself. And of course it also comes down to the conversation between Microsoft and the publishers.

MS : "Hey we want to do family sharing for digital titles"

Publisher : "So do we get an extra cut of every shared game?"

MS : "No"

Publisher "Screw you!"

All the publishers will see is even more lost revenue. I can guarantee that the only reasons publishers might have initially accepted the previous family share plan was if there were huge caveats to the situation. #1 being of course that physical discs were basically useless in terms of used games, they'd have to go through a re-monetization routine through the official channels to be transferred to a new user. and #2 being that shared games weren't shared in an unlimited way.

It's insanity to believe otherwise, because from the publisher's point of view many games are purchased because you saw one of your friends playing the game and you go buy it yourself. With family sharing, you would just get clusters of friends sharing their titles, all diluting/reducing these sales.

"Should I go out and buy Sunset Overdrive"

"Nah, I already pre-odered it, you can play it, I'm still playing Destiny for now"

"Cool"

Etc.

Trust me, if anything called 'Family Sharing' comes to pass, it will come with exceedingly silly restrictions that aren't anything NEAR like "10 people can share all their games with the only limitation being only 1 person can play a title at the same time". Frankly, that would be a stupid thing for the publisher to agree on anyway.

And the final note is that the pricing will NEVER be competitive with phsyical used copies unless some extremely brilliant people start getting promoted to high positions. There really needs to be something of a more liquid model of game pricing. Maybe every game should have 45 days of premier pricing or whatever, but after that, digital prices need to adapt to true market pricing. It's WAY too common to see 6 month or even years-old games selling for $39, $49, or $59 digitally, when you can go buy a new disc copy in store for $19 or whatever.

Sorry, I didn't like th use of the term 'evolved'. Just because I prefer a physical disc which can be traded in if the product is not to my liking should not mean I am not evolving with the industry.

This said, I understand your point and in essence my next comment extends on Arkaign's long post above.

I highly doubt publishers, developers and even MS themselves want people able to buy a game once then have 10 people be able to play that game by sharing it. It's very detrimental to the industry. 1 Person buys and recommends it to their friends all who could be on their 'family list', 10 play (in turns but they still play) or 1 person buys it and recommends it to their friends = 4 people buy based on this recommendation. The game company will want the latter.

If you take into account the idea that you suggest (indirectly), if I can allow more than one people to play the game I buy then you could have 3 people 'game share' for the price of 1 copy essentially, spliting the cost between 2 of us is indeed cheaper but the developer again makes less money. 1 sales instead of 3.

Whatever is produced will have many restrictions to stop people doing such a thing. These restrictions might mean the idea won't be practical and thos justification of paying over the price digitally for a game will be lost.

I was not meant as an insult to anyone, and I apologize if it came through as such. What I meant was that the industry is evolving all the time, if it is in a good or bad way is another matter. I believe the evolution towards digital only is good for the industry as a whole, and escpecially us consumers. Just look at how much further the smartphone/tablet market has come in terms of pricing compared to the traditional console market. I don´t think all of the things in digital is good, like for example those "free" games that tries to do micro transactions to even get somewhere, but overall it has been good for consumers.

The thing with Family Sharing, according to how it sounded from the start, was that you and me would still need to have a copy of the game if we wish to play it online together. Also, you could not play my game if I was playing it, so a natural restriction would occur. Of course there are problems with it, but I don´t think alot of people would have thought PS+ with free games would have been possible a few years ago, yet here we are :).

EDIT: Also, look at what XBLA did for prices of games. Being able to buy such high profile games on XBLA for so little money (much less than I bought games for in the end of the 80´s) is amazing and a true testament to how good digital only can be for us gamers.

I thought that was confirmed as just a fake rumour. Most of the "insider dev" rumours from June 2013 - August 2013 ended up being fake.