Home Console/Game Sharing expansion needed

I own two Xbox One systems to share between myself, my wife, and four children. So that we can all play the games we buy, I usually purchase them on my own account and have made my "home console" available to everyone in the living room. But the shortcomings
of the current game sharing system should become obvious pretty quick. With 6 of us sharing 2 consoles, and in reality it is 5 sharing 1 and 1 using the other, we really need to buy a 3rd console. But here is the problem: if I buy a 3rd console, it will be
completely useless to everyone except me. I can only share my games on one console even though all three consoles are my personal home consoles. Microsoft's policy on game sharing is blocking sales of new consoles. I have also had to hesitate to buy games
for my children, because they would encounter the same problems when trying to share games with each other, and I honestly do not want more fights over who gets what.

And let's not even try the argument of buying multiple copies of games. The phase we went through of licensing a purchased game to an individual user was an unpleasant one, and I believe the companies realized it, which is why everyone has some sort of game-share
for families at this point. If you force families to buy multiple copies of games, when they were previously able to buy only one and share it, you will face losing large numbers of sales. Gaming is something that familes pass on, and trying to treat gaming
families as collections of single-users is only going to be detrimental to the industry. My father got me into gaming back on the Intellivision. We shared the NES, SNES, N64, and first Xbox as family gaming systems. My wife and I bought our first 360 together
along with 2 more before we moved on to Xbox One. We have one Xbox One and one One X which we have to share with our own children. I would love to get another One X, but I will not bother if that means being forced to buy new copies of a hundred or so games.

Microsoft has our family status registered already. Each account is already connected in Microsoft Family, or whatever it is called. If the company can't put together a family sharing system or expand the console sharing it already has, it is limiting its
own sales and future growth.

:)

 

Home console game sharing

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Home console game sharing

Xbox One Home Console is designed to share games with your family members however, it may also be shared with good friends for you to enjoy the Licenses on your account. And Xbox Support Representative may also reset a home console for you should you ran
out of resets, assuming you purchased a new Xbox One. Though this is for a limited number of times only and depending on the situation.

What happens when I setup a Home console?

Basically there are two things:

•Share games and downloadable content purchased from the digital store with anyone else who signs in on your console. You can even share games downloaded as part of a subscription.

•Share your Xbox Gold subscription with anyone else who signs in on your console.

Reference:
http://support.xbox.com/en-CA/xbox-one/games/my-home-xbox

A good suggestion would be to turn on the Pass key security feature on your Xbox One to prevent unauthorized access on your account.

 

I agree that there is room for improvement in the current family sharing system. My Idea would be a true "Home" sharing setup, where all Xboxes on the same home network could share 1 gold account. They could even limit that to maybe 1 gold account can
share with up to 4 Xboxes on the same local network. That would solve most family account issues, and still be controlled enough to limit the abuse of the program.

The other way they could handle it would be similar to how Microsoft runs Office 365. With my 365 account I can have up to 5 running instances of Office at once, and I can designate family members to share my 365 account with. If Live Gold used that same
system, then you could add your family to the account the same way. 365 is $99 a year, where Live Gold is $60, so maybe up the "family shared" version of Live Gold to $99 a year, where a single use account is still $60?

I would also like a Microsoft "Super" account that would give me Office 365, Xbox Gamepass, and Live Gold under one Subscription...

 

I think extended is wrong.

The true and first meaning of the account/game sharing was to a house share like 2 brothers with 2 consoles and for the parents doesnt need to buy 2 xbox live golds or 2 games. And not to people share with all their friends.

Doesnt mix the family settings with account sharing on Xbox, is not the same thing and not the same end.

 

I also have this problem, so I've had to resort to discs, however, it still is dear for Xbox Live/ GP.

 

Discs solve the problem in moving from console to console. Digital copies let you play at the same time. What would be best would be something you could use on multiple consoles AND use at the same time. This would surely require some kind of registration,
which is why I think that a kind of family account would be preferred to limit sharing.

 

Hi, the actual intent of the Home Xbox setting is to allow game and Gold subscription sharing on a single Xbox One console not numerous systems.

The first time you sign in on an Xbox One and save your password, that console becomes your home Xbox. The My home Xbox setting allows you to do the following:

• Share games and downloadable content purchased from Microsoft Store with anyone else who signs in on
  your console. You can even share games downloaded as part of a subscription.
• Share your Xbox Live Gold subscription with anyone else who signs in on
  your console.

Note You cannot designate more than one Xbox as your home Xbox. You can share purchased games and Gold with other users only on your home Xbox.

My Home Xbox Setting on Xbox One | Share Your Xbox One

It does appear that Microsoft turn something of a blind eye to people allowing others to make their Xbox the Home Xbox of someone elses account beyond the limit of the same household, however I have seen instances where accounts have been suspended for marketplace
theft which could be tied to abuse of the Home Xbox setting.

Perhaps a better option would be to tie the Xbox serial number to a members household address and allow more then one device ( with a limit of course ) that are all registered at that home address to share content to some degree.

Maybe some sort of extended payment fee ? You pay lets say £200 a year or a fee per Xbox to allow you to register more than one system as your Home Xbox.

There could be some way around the limitations in a single household but not a very easy one I believe and of course it wouldn't suit everyone I suspect.

Companies make very little profit on the hardware sales and often even make a loss, the money is in the software. Finding a balance that suits both the user and the game devs etc could be tricky, would you like to think something you created was being shared
between numerous people and you're not getting the benefit from that after spending years of dev time and expense to you?

 

Hi, I state the obvious. I repeat known guidelines when they are not relevant to the discussion, which is about how the system should be changed or improved, not questioning what the system currently is.

People do not buy multiple copies even if that is what companies want them to do. Game purchases have changed since things became digital. When it was all hard copy, you actually owned a copy of the game. Now, companies claim that you are only licensing,
renting, that game when you purchase it. They can say this all they want, and it can even be true. But it isn't good for the industry, because it angers consumers and limits sales. You find very quickly that if parents need to buy a copy for each child, not
to mention themselves, they find something else to spend their money on. Therefore, developers lose no money by actually allowing families to share the games they bought--they would never have sold any other copies to that family.

You couldn't use a physical address for a family, because addresses change and are not any sort of real proof. Using serial numbers would only work if it were in conjunction with some sort of family registration. The previous suggestion of sharing over a
single home network would possibly work, though it wouldn't prevent people sharing with non-family that lived within a wireless network. Please do not go around randomly suggesting that they charge for sharing, especially at such a high cost. Once again, people
are simply not going to pay for the consoles and games if the pricing becomes too high, and adding hundreds of dollars onto the cost would make it unfeasible. Why would you volunteer an added fee before the company even suggested it?

As to the sharing, "would you like to think something you created was being shared between numerous people and you're not getting the benefit from that after spending years of dev time and expense to you". This is a stupid thing to say. A family unit should
not be counted as many various individuals. Even a husband and wife are financially a single entity. You are suggesting that a single financial entity should pay repeatedly for the same product when it has never before been the case. The gaming industry specifically
targets families, because it knows where its money comes from. Developers will gain nothing by expecting families to buy multiple copies of their games and lose nothing by recognizing reality as it has always been. One day those children will grow up and move
out on their own and have to supply themselves and their own families with games. They are more likely to do so if they have actually been able to play games as children in their own families.

 

In my opinion were any company to allow what you suggest they would fold pretty quickly.

Of course the game companies want to sell as many copies as possible, where is the profit in selling three systems and one copy of a game?

 

the major issue with extending the program in a way that would allow sharing onto more consoles is that this means a games company would sell 1 copy of a game and then end up allowing this to be played by multiple people across multiple consoles losing
them a lot of sales, It would not take long for a smaller company to start losing money.

 

It'll be great if with the next Xbox console come with an extension of the family sharing...like Steam that have 10 people, but obviously all peolpe have to can play the same game at the same time.

Maybe not 10 but at least 5...the new Xbox will fly in sales if they'll do this.

 

I can see it's frustrating however they dont have to provide any sort of game share. We have 4 consoles so have the same issues. But I'm grateful we can share 2. The feature has been widely abused already with people game sharing with friends and even
strangers in some cases. Allowing more consoles would open that up for abuse even more. When we lived in a disc only world we all had to have a copy of the game. So things have moved forward a lot already.

 

Agree with you. Sometimes there are issues with sharing xbox games etc... Unfortunately it will take some time to make everything work. Actually it was ment to share games in your family, and basically people are using it around the world.

 

The problem is that if it wasn't limited, you and everyone you know could all buy a console and then one person buys a game and shares it with everyone.