One of the more positive aspects of the Xbox One, as it was originally announced, was the brief mention of a “family sharing plan” that would allegedly allow users to share their digital game libraries between 10 different accounts. The plan went out the window with the company’s infamous Xbox One Eighty, however, we are now hearing that it could potentially come back at some point down the road.
Microsoft’s Major Nelson (Larry Hryb) revealed the possible resurrection of the Xbox One’s digital sharing feature in response to a Reddit user this past week, saying:
“Great feature [buying a game and gifting it to a friend digitally] we’d like to add in someday, but it won’t be there at launch.”
Obviously, Hryb’s statement is about as far from a sure thing as you can get, so soon-to-be Xbox One owners would be wise to not consider this a done deal at this point.
The other thing to keep in mind about the Xbox One “family sharing plan” is that it was only officially talked about in the vaguest of terms, and after its cancellation rumors suggested that the plan was really nothing more than a glorified demo system. While those reports were never confirmed, they did seem to offer a reasonable explanation as to why third-party publishers were seemingly okay with the idea of gifting so many free copies of their games.
At any rate, the Xbox One family sharing plan is still dead at this point, and fans would be wise to hold off on getting too excited until we see if it will come back and exactly what Microsoft has in mind.