10 "Family" Share Feature

[EvilFiek]

It's funny to see some people still believe the pastebin. To those sceptics, I just have one question: if "Family Share" was only a glorified demo service, why would they have taken it away? What's the point behind disabling a "promotional tool"? Publishers don't mind demos and you don't need DRM for a demo to work, either. If the family share had been what the pastebin alluded to, even in the worst case scenario it might have generated some sales, so why kill the concept?
Well, unless, of course, that pastebin is just some FUD spread by a kid with too much time on his hand, "doing it for the lolz" who's probably still rubbing his hands with glee whenever he sees someone on the internet who believes it.

Try to think about it, add 2 and 2 and if you still end up with 5, well, I don't think you can be helped.

 

[theeboredone]

It's funny to see some people still believe the pastebin. To those sceptics, I just have one question: if "Family Share" was only a glorified demo service, why would they have taken it away? What's the point behind disabling a "promotional tool"? Publishers don't mind demos and you don't need DRM for a demo to work, either. If the family share had been what the pastebin alluded to, even in the worst case scenario it might have generated some sales, so why kill the concept?
Well, unless, of course, that pastebin is just some FUD spread by a kid with too much time on his hand, "doing it for the lolz" who's probably still rubbing his hands with glee whenever he sees someone on the internet who believes it.

Try to think about it, add 2 and 2 and if you still end up with 5, well, I don't think you can be helped.

You put 2 and 2 together. It's already been established by developers/publisher through research that people who play demos are less inclined to buy the games. There was a big debate about it some months back on that.

Second, why does Family Share need to be removed? Just because you're removing the 24 check, what does this have to do with the fact if you buy your game digitally? If you buy it digitally, you should be allowed to share it with 10 buddies, one at a time. Once again, it doesn't make sense why developers would promote this if you are allowed to play the entire game. It's literally borrowing a game from a friend, minus actually handing the physical disc. Furthermore, it can be abused even more, because you can have a buddy in another state. If I'm in college, and I have a childhood friend in another university, it's a bit harder to give him the "physical" game compared to a digital version.

I just don't understand MS. It's like they want one extreme or another. "My way or the highway" mentality. Why can't they make concessions for both audiences? I believe you can still go to a friend's house and download your game, but that's about it.

 

[EvilFiek]

That news piece is another fine example of adding 2 and 2 and getting 5 because the data points it provides don't really allow for a conclusive result. From the data he has presented, we don't have any sort of context on it. What time frame was it in? If it's fairly recent, games like Halo 4 or Black Ops 2 will have been included, best-sellers on the platform that didn't have a demo, simply because they don't need it. Those kind of games are bought unseen. Would a demo have an impact on sales? Or even better, do you really think that if one of those games would've had a demo, we would've seen a more than 50% drop in sales as suggested by the nice diagram in the video? No, of course not, primarily because the data points he uses aren't really useful for comparison.
I am not sure how familiar you personally are with academia research, but if you are, I am confident you know that what little data has been presented can't be used to present a correlation. There are no double blind studies, for example, where you'd have two equal games, one with demo and one without, and then seeing which fares better. In all honesty, such research would probably be very difficult to pull-off but that's why we can't really draw any conclusions from it.

As for your other point as to why it's not allowed any more. According to Arthur Gies from Polygon.com, Microsoft had agreements with publishers in place to allow family sharing. You would've lost the ability to rent games from video rental outlets or go through traditional physical lending and would've gotten this digital variant instead.Also,Microsoft would've given them means to gain their fair share from parasites like Gamestop. Now those things aren't happening: rentals and used games market continue to exist as is, with publishers not getting in on the profits. So what reason would publishers have to continue allowing digital sharing in any form? They are supposed to do us a solid one for nothing in return? Especially because people can still sell their NEW game for 25$ at Gamestop so that the sales clerk convinces the next buyer to go for the used copy in mint condition for 55$ as opposed to the new game for 60$ and therefore robbing the publishers of their fair share? I don't think so.
Why it's not allowed any more? Because the used games market continues to exist. What's the inclination for publishers to allow the family share to continue? It was what Microsoft got in return for

 

[NaNoo123]

There's a few reasons why sharing may have had to be dropped (only for now hopefully), but people would rather believe that MS is being spiteful, even though this whole thing has been damaging to them and they need to try to get as many back on board as possible.

Thinking about it, it would be nice if you could back up games after download.
That way you could still install it on other machines without having to download again, and even install it and buy it digitally if it was given to a friend, saving them the download.

 

[Coreldan]

Not sure if this has been posted yet: News: Xbox One's family game sharing will return "if people are really excited" for it - Xbox 360 - The Official Magazine

 

[vertigoOne]

Phil Spencer‏@XboxP3 2h
@BuldozerX Split will likely be digital vs. physical. Physical will feel like today. For digital we'll push features we discussed at E3.

Woohoo!

https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/360400259437961222

 

[Coreldan]

Hooray! That's how it's should be. It gives incentive to get both!

 

[MerlotC]

Cool, was planning on going digital anyway.