Microsoft Is Actively Investigating Digital Game Sharing On Xbox One

Microsoft is actively investigating the possibilities for Xbox One digital game sharing, Game Informer reports.

When the console was originally announced in May 2013, Microsoft announced plans to allow users to share digital games with friends and family members. The ensuing backlash surrounding the company’s DRM plans for the console resulting in many of the policies outlined in the announcement press conference being scrapped, including digital game sharing.

During the recent Xbox Spring Showcase, Game Informer asked Xbox’s head of programming Mike Ybarra about the absent feature.

Ybarra told the site that Microsoft is actively looking into how to do this in a way that clicks with the company’s Universal Windows Platform on both PC and Xbox One.

“Steam has a great family plan right now,” he commented. “We’re looking at both from a Windows standpoint – well, what’s our policy of the Windows Store? How many people can play concurrent? How do you share? We’re going to merge those two topologies soon so that a whole new model for how you share games across that will be in place. We’re actively working on that now to try to figure [it out], but we want to get to a much simpler model and potentially one that lets you do more… have a little bit more freedom in what you can and can’t do.”

There is a somewhat convoluted workaround to play another Xbox One owner’s digital games now. To do it, you need to select your friend’s Xbox One console as your home Xbox in the settings menu and set your Xbox One as your friend’s home console.

By setting another Xbox as your home system, any user signed into that console will be able to play the games belonging to the primary user. If both consoles are set up in this way, you’ll be able to play any digital games associated with both your own account and that of your friend.

Microsoft has recently outlined its vision for the future of Xbox, it will soon allow players on the console to compete online against those on PC and other consoles for the first time and the company has suggested that it will adopt an Apple-like approach to hardware releases, with regular iterative upgrades.