Poll: "Heartbroken" Microsoft Employee Explains How Family Sharing Would Have Worked

[rob_simple]

I'm confused, how is this sharing service:

A) Different from the demo service PSN (and maybe Xbox Live, I don't know) already offers for most games?
B) More beneficial to my friends (and no, I don't consider someone on the other side of the world who I'll never meet a deal friend, nevermind 'family') than me giving them the disc and letting them play the whole game?

All I would say about this is that if I'd played Dead Island for 15-45 minutes I would have assumed that it got better and the leveling system wasn't hilariously broken. Instead, my friend lent me it over a weekend and I discovered it was an over-hyped bag of dog's cocks.

Once again, the only people I would have seen this benefiting is the publishers and incompetent developers.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I don't care, Microsoft has been screwing around the consumer for ages. I don't want to encourage them. I'm still annoyed at the adverts in xbox live, If I wanted adverts I'd read my spam box!

 

[Saltyk]

I don't know how I feel about this. Part of me hopes it's true, because it's just one more reason to be angry about Microsoft's horrible communication and lies. Part of me hopes it's not true, because how can anyone brag about this system like it would change the whole landscape of gaming?

No, seriously, if this is true, it's not even a Demo. It's worse than a demo! It's a Demo that I can only get from my friends/family. Hell, even a lot of Demo's I've downloaded were whole levels with no time limit. What happens if my 15 minutes was up just before I reached a save point? Oh, guess I just had to buy the full game.

Seriously, this is pretty horrible. But, I'm not even surprised. This is the company that brought us DRM on the console, daily check ins, and so many PR failures that you could probably write a novel out of them.

 

[JetFury]

The worst part is Sony has been doing game sharing and game trials for years now and Microsoft is being innovative? I just got saints row3 sharing plus with a friend, and last month played 1hrs of dead space 1 through a trial. I really wish game journalists were journalists and had integrity instead of "that's a cool feature" in blog form.

Oh well, at least we have Jim and Joe still. Im still waiting on Sesslers response to all that happened last week.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

I'm a little dubious whenever I hear any of these Microsoft employees in twelve foot high inverted commas coming out of the woodwork.

 

[deadish]

Set up your "share library" heh? Or you know, you can just hand the disc to them.

The game industry really needs to get over resale of used games.

Yes, it's "unfair". Ideally it should not happen. But it's law. It's a basic consumer right. The movie, music and book publishing industries have deal with it just fine.

 

[infohippie]

"Used games are an open wound?" No you shitstain, they are a convenience that people will go for, because the person who bought the original game has already paid you.

"But we lose money on used games and don't make as much money back!" Here's an idea: STOP SPENDING SO MUCH ON FUCKING DEVELOPMENT THAT YOU GO INTO THE RED JUST BY FUCKING RELEASING A TITLE.

Or alternatively, write a game that actually has replay value, so gamers won't play through it once then immediately go trade it in.

Yeah, all that was really "lost" here was another marketing avenue for Microsoft and their publisher partners. No loss at all, in my opinion.

 

[zumbledum]

wow the family sharing thing was even worse than we had guessed , this girl at M$ should thank her lucky stars she never got the chance to explain this feature as getting pelted with rotten fruit tends to offend more than some harsh words from critics!

 

[RicoADF]

The worst part is Sony has been doing game sharing and game trials for years now and Microsoft is being innovative? I just got saints row3 sharing plus with a friend, and last month played 1hrs of dead space 1 through a trial. I really wish game journalists were journalists and had integrity instead of "that's a cool feature" in blog form.

Oh well, at least we have Jim and Joe still. Im still waiting on Sesslers response to all that happened last week.

Yeah the more I read about it the more its clear it's just a demo option, if that's the case then nothing was lost. Demos aren't worth being locked online.

 

[Anthony Corrigan]

I agree with what everyone else has said here but the bit that caught MY eye was this

"But the consumer knows what is best, I can place the blame on no one but us here at Microsoft. We didn?t do a good enough job explaining all the benefits that came with this new model."

Again they can't admit that they fucked up, that they can't see that the mistakes are fundamental. The problem ISN'T marketing, the problem is A CRAP PRODUCT, a product that no one wants to buy.

What is it with the arrogance of this company, you would think that the flop that is windows 8 would have imparted some humility into them, and then they fuck up again, they don't do there research and announce a product that customers DON'T WANT and instead of coming out with an apology we get things like "If you want backwards compatibility your backwards" "If you don't have a stable connection buy a 360" and the famous "Don't like always online JUST DEAL WITH IT" and now we get this guy coming out saying effectively 'oh its not a bad product, we should be screwing over our customers and they should love us for it, the problem is we didn't market it properly'

Really wish they didn't backflip because they can salvage there sales without learning a thing, if they tried to sell it they would have taken a HUGE hit and the shareholders might have actually held them to account

 

[Anthony Corrigan]

Oh and BTW, I don't need my family to send me game demos, I downloaded a dozen off the PSN only a few days ago, if I want a demo I can get one easily and then decide to buy or not buy

 

[RJ 17]

"First is family sharing, this feature is near and dear to me and I truly felt it would have helped the industry grow and make both gamers and developers happy. The premise is simple and elegant, when you buy your games for Xbox One, you can set any of them to be part of your shared library. Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world. There was never any catch to that, they didn't have to share the same billing address or physical address it could be anyone. When your family member accesses any of your games, they're placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour. This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to. When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game. We were toying around with a limit on the number of times members could access the shared game (as to discourage gamers from simply beating the game by doing multiple playthroughs). but we had not settled on an appropriate way of handling it. One thing we knew is that we wanted the experience to be seamless for both the person sharing and the family member benefiting. There weren't many models of this system already in the wild other than Sony's horrendous game sharing implementation, but it was clear their approach (if one could call it that) was not the way to go. Developers complained about the lost sales and gamers complained about overbearing DRM that punished those who didn't share that implemented by publishers to quell gamers from taking advantage of a poorly thought out system. We wanted our family sharing plan to be something that was talked about and genuinely enjoyed by the masses as a way of inciting gamers to try new games."

Essentially the family sharing was a glorified demo service, except those who played the shared game got to keep their save file. So Escapists, what are your thoughts be you for the changes MS made or against?

That pretty much sums it up for me: "Orrrrrr they could just download a demo like they do now. You're not sharing a game, you're providing free advertising."

Beyond that, the problem wasn't the sharing of games (though that was definitely a part of it), it was the fact that gamers already know all the negatives of DRM. No matter how anyone tries to spin it, they're not going to be able to convince gamers that DRM is a good thing that helps them. They can dog-ear it and paperclip as many nifty bells and whistles like this Family Sharing system as they want...you'll never get rid negatives that gamers stand staunchly opposed to.

So my vote goes to "it's crap", the idea is bad and they should feel bad.

 

[mokes310]

Wanna know how I share games with my family? I give them the god damn disc. Granted, I don't have anyone else in my family that games, so let's just call my friends my family, for this example.

 

[NiPah]

I only ever lurk here, this forced me to ask:

Do people require literally zero proof of legitimacy of ANYTHING? You referenced an anonymous article that references another anonymous article without links OR names.

You don't actually believe that article is legit...right?

Nope, not legit, not even funny, the author just sort of picks random pieces to annoy/troll anyone who read it.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Snip

Big budgets CAN be helped, and pretty easily too. All they have to do is develop game maker programs that allow games to be made more easily, quickly, and thus less cost and then use them. Boom! Price of making games goes down. They also could simply drop this obsession with making photorealistic graphics that jacks up the cost too. Also, since it takes about as much money to market a game as it does to develop it, making extensive use of free and really cheap advertising would keep the costs down.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Snip

Then use the ones that don't have massive or even no licensing fees, or just make one themselves if they have to. Sure, to do so would cost lots of money NOW, but it would save them money in the future. Besides, there are plenty of great games who's overall quality is not really much worse than AAA games out there coming out all the time that cost a tiny fraction to make, so it's not like lowering the costs is impossible or anything.