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> - Share access to your games with everyone inside your home .. Anyone can play your games on your console--regardless of whether you are logged in or their relationship to you.

> On my console, anyone can play my games, whether I take the disc to a friend's house or not. This is hugely beneficial for me and my brothers who, until this point, have been sharing a single console.

That's hugely depressing. I have a DVD. I can lend it to anyone in my home to play. I have a book. I can lend it to anyone in my home to play. Why is it different for a game?

> Give your family access to your entire games library anytime ... Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One.

> The key word there for me is that people can play my games, once I've shared then, from any console. So I can be in another city to my friends, buy a game, and immediately say to them "This game is awesome, check it out in my shared library."

They use the word "family", so I wonder what they mean? I guess they mean "people in the same house", but I could be wrong.

> Ofcourse, there is the limitation on reselling games. But honestly, I have had an xbox 360 and ps3 for years, and I have never sold a game, and only bought one or two pre-owned games.

Well, that's great for you. Unfortunately, it sucks for other people.

Ann is not as wealthy as you. She loves buying new games, and knowing that she can sell games she doesn't like gives her power and confidence. She can risk $40 on a new game that she might not like.

Bob is not as wealthy as Ann. He buys most of his games second hand. None of that money goes to the game devs - just as when he buys a second hand car none of the money goes to the car manufacturer, or when he buys a second hand book none of the money goes to the publisher, or when he buys a second hand chair none of the money goes to the carpenter. Except, the money does go back, indirectly, through Ann. Being able to buy cheap games means that Bob can buy more accessories, or spend money on online play, or on Indie games.

$GAMESHOP sells new and second user games. They love Ann for buying new games. They love Bob for buying second hand games. They make a bit of money off each of them. Having more customers makes it easier for them to stay in business.

I dunno, maybe MS hates $GAMESHOP and only wants to sell games through an XBOXONE[1] web-tv-interface-app-store thing.

Perhaps I'm just too old for video games. I got depressed when Nintendo added region locking to 3DS.

>That's hugely depressing. I have a DVD. I can lend it to anyone in my home to play. I have a book. I can lend it to anyone in my home to play. Why is it different for a game?

The link I referenced before also mentions that on your Xbox, any user can play any game:

>Your friends and family, your guests and acquaintances get unlimited access to all of your games. Anyone can play your games on your console--regardless of whether you are logged in or their relationship to you.

So anyone in your household can "borrow" a game from you just by using your Xbox. I guess this also introduces the idea of someone having a "main console" that is particularly linked to them.

>They use the word "family", so I wonder what they mean? I guess they mean "people in the same house", but I could be wrong.

I also saw this, but restricting it to "people in the same house" doesn't make sense in light of the previous points.

Regarding the issues you raised about Ann and Bob, they are completely valid points. I guess the most honest response I can have to that is that they, for better or for worse, just don't seem to be Microsoft's target market for the Xbox One. Luckily for them, however, the PS4 looks like it will be able to suit their needs much better.

>The link I referenced before also mentions that on your Xbox, any user can play any game: >Your friends and family, your guests and acquaintances get unlimited access to all of your games. Anyone can play your games on your console--regardless of whether you are logged in or their relationship to you.

That would be really something if that wasn't possible :). But a big difference with the traditional media is that I can borrow a game from a friend and play it on MY console at my home.

Would be really cool situation dough. A family member in your household would like to play a game you bought and by ways of kinect it would disallow it because he/she wasn't the one who bought it :)

Another thing is that at the moment XBOX Live network is dog slow I once had to D/L a game for 24 hours and I have a 60MBit connection... Also most new games are more expensive on the Live network than in a shop. So for me that was a one time thing. I did like the episode experiment with Fable would love to buy games that way.

Microsoft's definition of family is extremely generous - in short it can include your friends, and doesn't appear limited by geography.

See the "It's a 'family' affair" side box: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/microsoft-defends-the-...

"You'll be able to link other Xbox Live accounts as having shared access to your library when you first set up a system and will also be able to add them later on (though specific details of how you manage these relationships is still not being discussed). The only limitation, it seems, is that only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time. All in all, this does sound like a pretty convenient feature that's more workable than simply passing discs around amongst friends who are actually in your area."

That is nice. Just wondering how it works, hope you can lend a game to someone. Not that if your library is shared any one of you 'family members ' can play just any game form your library at any time, would totally suck since only one can play the game at the time.

If it works like their current 'family' accounts do, then everybody is basically sharing the same gold membership. So you all pay for xbox live gold on the same billing information.

Thank you for posting this. This was how I guessed that "family" would work when I made my original post.

Yes, I think you've nailed this on the head. The licensing is all dressed up, but ultimately MS is the one trying to take a slice of every pie. Having said that, I'm not sure what and how they currently profit from their consoles? It's my understanding that Nintendo and other manufacturers sell the hardware at a loss and make their money on licensing - perhaps that's done on a per game basis, rather than a per unit basis.

I know that Nintendo traditionally has been selling their consoles for a profit, though I'm not sure if this carries over to the WiiU.

I know Sony and MS have sold consoles at a loss before.

I think that idea probably works well...

...until you have to drag an entire BluRay disc over the Internet before Halo 14 will start.

I agree, but that that is a problem with the distribution method, not the licencing model. The most reasonable answer to this would be that the game disc can be used to install on any console, but only allow that disc to confer a licence once.

I do not know how it will actually work, but I am actually excited to see what happens.

edit: actually, thinking about it now - I think this is where the always online requirement comes from. If i was implementing this feature, I would allow the console to install the game content and have it associated with a unique ID for that disc. But I would have to check with the servers to see if that specific disc ID was already used elsewhere. If this is correct, then I think the always-onlne "feature" could be relaxed in the case where there are no unchecked games installed. This is just pure speculation, however.

It's gonna be a lot of fun when the master keys leak and someone writes a fake server that just authorises every game. Surely microsoft know that this is 100% going to happen?

I'm sure there will eventually be some form of jailbreak for the console that allows the execution of pirate games.

However the number of people who are willing to jailbreak will probably be small enough that they don't really care.

The beauty of online activation is that the console doesn't need to store the activation key, so you can't leak it by hacking the console as was done on the PS3.

You just sign game activations with a hardware encryption module in a high security datacenter. The console then only has to know the corresponding public key which is not enough to authorize a game for a console that has not been jailbroken.

That's just annoying though. It's like not being able to move your music freely around your devices. Granted that you probably will probably only have one Xbox one, but it's still a pain.

MS don't seem to have sorted the licensing model, to make it convenient with their OS, I have a copy of Windows 8, that I want to move from one machine to another at some point, and I'm sure it will be non-trivial. Not to mention that I'll loose Windows media centre most likely in the process. Even the install for Windows 8 for me was an incredibly convulted process at the time.

When DRM impinges upon usability, and convenience - it's just a complete pain in the backside.

Moving windows 8 around is trivial. Most of the time it just activates. Occasionally it makes you phone them which takes about 3-4 mins.

However when you have a VLK and you don't notice that the KMS server has fallen over, shit hits the fan on an epic scale...

Idiots guide to moving it from one machine to another?

Just install it from scratch on the new machine with the same key, copy your files over and delete the source installation. Don't ever move it or move disks - it will shit a brick.

Did I say that I had the professional upgrade! If I tried to do that, it would moan that there wasn't a copy of Windows on the other machine that I was trying to install it on. Even though when reading the license - I am entitled to move it. I guess there's always the hotline...

The other point that I raised was that I suspect I'd loose my media centre upgrade - well I assume I would, which frightens me a little, as it was the main reason for grabbing Win 8 in the first place. But I digress.

Snag the image for the full version and use your key on it - it'll work fine. I've done exactly what you have.

Instructions:

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/18309-windows-8-upgrade...

Many thanks.

That would be awesome since it would mean there would be tons of consumer pressure to increase upload/download speeds and hopefully get ISPs upgrading service.

In one of their presentations they mentioned "instant start", i.e. it downloads just enough to get you started then downloads the rest in the background.

Its probably the same streaming tech office 2010 home and student uses. It basically makes it unusable. Every time you click something it lags for 30-40 seconds while it caches dlls. Horrible tech.

I doubt its the same tech as the code to do this in a game would be totally different than the code for a desktop application. There's a big difference between JIT downloading and prioritizing so that you can start the game. I swear some people will find any reason to get in a shot against MS.

I've used windows for over 20 years. I think I've earned my right to bitch about the bad bits :)

Sounds interesting, and a lot like Steam (which, like you, I've spent a fair bit of money on over the years now.)

Ah, but PC game retail prices are much lower than on consoles, which is why most people tolerate the insanely restrictive Steam licensing conditions. Frankly, if they took licensing condition form anyone, i wish they'd stolen it form one of the app stores (which is closer to what they've done than steam), where you can have 10 simultaneous installs and users per purchase.

Price-wise I believe you, but that makes no sense IIRC the economic arguments for consoles, since developing for a single specific platform is supposed to be cheaper than debugging on a hundred different processors.

Presumably those days are long gone, now that games aren't written in assembly anymore, which is what made Xbox/PS/PC releases plausible (which begs the question, why would anyone buy a console system anyway? Exclusive titles are the only reason I can think of.)

Who's to say console game prices won't go down in the era of all digital? If publishers make more money on their games there will be downward price pressure.

On the PC you have easier time pirating so buying a game is proactive choice - I like the game that is why I buy it. So it give the user the feeling that he is in control of the situation and is not feeling ripped off.

They tacled the problem of piracy (the equivalent of second hand sales in consoles) not by going berserk control freaks but by just making steam giving so much value that even with the restricted licensing it just makes for better experience than the alternatives.

Also Valve are generally pushing gaming for the better. Every addition to steam was something that the community needed or wanted - big screen, linux ... the Greenlight is the only weird thing but there they just have the problem with tuning the execution and not the idea.

the current Microsoft don't get gaming. The first XBOX was brilliant. Cheap PC hardware with MS quality sdk. X360 was acceptable and the team in the beginning had good ideas XBLA. And then came GFWL and the later part of the 360 lifecycle.

So it is a lot like Steam doesn't matter because everything else is unlike steam.

While there is an air of convenience to being able to pull your games from thin air, it's not really that difficult to carry around your games. Perhaps being able to store them on an SD card would be a pretty good comprimise. I like the idea of not having a load of plastic - but it's no great hardship plugging in a cable, or carrying a TV from one room to another. I keep my gamecube (yes gamecube,) packed away, if I want to use it - I just pull it out. If I want to listen to music in another room, I carry a music player through to it. But these days we are sold overly technical solutions to problems, like wireless music systems (with klunky interfaces), and such, which don't really give you much back. I was still watching an old school CRT tv back in December before it died on me, and once I was ingrossed in what I was watching, I didn't care what I was watching it on. Same goes for SSD's on computers, sure they increase boot and load times - but who cares about 2mins vs 40seconds? It doesn't really matter.

I'm not following the sharing idea - can you share a title at no expense? Can you lend a title? That sounds great. Don't get me wrong, I'm up for a little added convenience - but as other's have said - downloading a few Gigs to play a game - is currently more difficult (and probably wasteful,) than just copying the game onto another medium and walking somewhere with it.

I agree with you about carrying around discs being easy. I am based in New Zealand, and carrying around a disc is alot easier and cheaper than always downloading the game. I think downloading games is an incidental feature when the game licencing is centrally controlled with cloud-based distribution.

I think Microsoft's biggest failure is the marketing around the Xbox One and their failure to explain how the game sharing works. Just from my personal understanding of the link I posted, it seems to me that you can let up to ten people play any game that is owned by your account. So, once you buy a game, any of those ten people can play it without purchasing it themselves.

Only one person of the 10 with whom you share can play at a time. This will not restrict you from playing though. It's not clear whether you can play a co-op game together on a single copy. To me this seems better than actually lending a disk to someone since you can still play your game while you lend it out.

I have no idea why Microsoft are saying outright you can't lend games, since you can share them. I think their messaging has been absolutely awful.

So how does that work, your mate turns his PC on, and it kicks you out as you are fighting a boss? I assume not, but it does make you wonder.

This basically means that Microsoft will know exactly what you are playing, which machine you are playing it on, and when you are playing it. That combined with the connects camera is quite frightening.

It may be obvious but to clarify only one of your family members can be playing from your shared library at a given time.

Exactly, the OP is completely glossing over the fact that it is not possible to 'share your game with a friend in another city', because that implies that he a) has to sign in using your XBL account, and b) you can not be playing the same game at the same time. This also holds for the whole 'family' sharing 'feature', which I don't really get anyway. If the XBox One is supposed to be the center of the living room media experience, I don't think many households will buy multiple, and even less so, play them at the same time.

One thing that MS apparently does allow you to do is lend the game disc to a 'friend' (someone who has been on your XBL friend list for more than 30 days) and play the game as long as the disc is in the console, and it can phone home every hour for some kind of DRM check I don't understand...

I don't blame the OP for getting confused by the ToS on the Microsoft site, which obviously have been carefully crafted to make them sound more reasonable. The whole licensing model of the XBox One is one big, crazy and hard-to-follow mess. What I understand from it, is that it doesn't allow you to do anything the PS4 doesn't allow, except going over to someone's house and play a game without having to bring the disc with you (yay, big deal!).

> except going over to someone's house and play a game without having to bring the disc with you (yay, big deal!).

I doubt it'll allow that, simply because it's not practical. You'll still need all the data at the disk, and MS probably won't add a very expensive network service to make it easier for you to not buy a game.

That portion of the ToS probably means that the XBox won't refuse to play your game once you put the disk in a console and log with your account, even if the console isn't yours... Maybe restricted only to a friend's machines, but the part about any XBox One implies that they won't check it. Anyway, you can't just make that kind of assumption from MS licensing terms, the word "any" there could mean anything and we'll only know the exact meaning once somebody tries it.

That's incorrect. Only one of your family members can play each of the games in your shared library at a given time.

So you can't have two people playing Halo 5, but you can have one person playing Halo 5 and one playing Forza 5.

Good spotting, it looks like I didn't read it thoroughly enough and misinterpreted it as a result. This does take away a bit of the power from this kind of licensing, but even so, playing co-op online with a single friend who hasnt bought the game is better than only being able to play with friends who have bought the game.

I just wanted to point out that, from the Ars Technica article above, "only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time". That, to me, really sounds like its either you OR someone on your shared list, not you AND someone on your shared list.

> - Access your entire games library from any Xbox One ... > > while you are logged in at your friend’s house, you can play your games.

This applies for all PSN games also.

> - Share access to your games with everyone inside your home .. Anyone can play your games on your console--regardless of whether you are logged in or their relationship to you.

Interesting. But I'm not sure the value. How many homes have > 1 unit.

> Give your family access to your entire games library anytime ... Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One.

How does one define family? How do they prove it

> Interesting. But I'm not sure the value. How many homes have > 1 unit.

I don't see how that has any relevance to what you quoted. What you quoted says that there's a console license for the game (as well as an account-license for the whole play at a friend's house) and that anyone can play the game on the console it's licensed to, regardless of if you're signed in or not.

>How does one define family? How do they prove it

That is something I am also wondering. The worst case would be that they ask for proof of a familial relationship of any form. That is something even I am not prepared to give Microsoft.

They have explicitly said that it can be anyone. It can be a friend across the country. It can be your cousin. It could be a sibling. You could even add your enemies and limit the sharing folder to only include awful games.

When companies make restrictions like that they almost always mean people in general with an upward limit on how many people to prevent abuse (a very generous 10 in this case)

> This means that I can coop with my friends (almost) anywhere in the world even if they havent bought the game! I think this will be a huge feature.

Everything else you've said is correct, but this is not true. Unfortunate, but understandable.

"The only limitation, it seems, is that only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time."[1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/microsoft-defends-the-...

Thank you for correcting me