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Xbox One Home Gold sharing for Xbox One detailed

on August 9, 2013
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Xbox One may have dropped its ambitious family game sharing plans, but the new Xbox Live is still meant to make sharing titles and services across accounts and consoles easier. Chief product officer Marc Whitten outlined the new convenience features of Home Gold on a post on the Xbox Wire blog.

First off, you won't have to juggle accounts to make sure you can play online or access all your games. One Xbox Live Gold subscriber can extend many of his or her benefits to every user of that console: multiplayer gaming, entertainment apps, Skype, and more, whether the subscriber's signed in or not.

Some of the benefits can even extend to other consoles: as long as an Xbox Live Gold member stays logged in on any account, all the other users can access online multiplayer and entertainment apps. If you buy a digital game while you're at another Xbox, it will also be available on your home console, and all games purchased by that Xbox's accounts are accessible to all its other accounts.

If you want to see some of the games you could share with your family/roommates/cult, check out every Xbox One game we know.

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family sharing Marc Whitten Xbox Live

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10 comments

  • FoxdenRacing - August 12, 2013 7:52 a.m.

    So it's exactly the same as it is now, but has been expanded to cover more than just DLC. Gotcha.

  • FoxdenRacing - August 12, 2013 9:49 a.m.

    The way they do things now I've found to be a nice compromise, which contributed to why I was so incensed when they changed it up on us...what they had worked, worked well, and generally wasn't inconvenient. As it sits now, digital content is tied to both your system's serial number and your tag itself. If it's on your console, it's fair game, no matter what...even if you're not signed in locally, let alone online. If it's on anyone else's system, you have to be logged in to Live [even if you're not the one playing], as a way to prevent piracy by handing out your username/password to a bunch of friends, then letting them use it offline (since Live will throw a fit if you try to connect from two places at once)...the same thing that got Sony in trouble with publishers and saw the console limit shrink considerably. That said? I much prefer the way Sony's doing it for PS4. It'd be better if multiplayer wasn't pay-to-play, but I get it; the infrastructure for a network like PSN or Live doesn't come cheap, likely in the millions of dollars a month between the hardware and bandwidth costs. The one genuine benefit to what they're doing is the same thing Sony's doing. One paid account per machine, rather than each one of your kids needing their own. [Got 3 kids on 360? Hope you're ok with $180/year for Live...]. Though with MS, I wouldn't be surprised if this was less a matter of goodwill towards customers, and more a way to clamp down on people getting around bans by creating a new tag.

  • FoxdenRacing - August 12, 2013 11:47 a.m.

    OH, I get you. I wasn't thinking about it from that angle. Then again I'm a poor boy born and raised, the idea of having more than one console for the convenience of being able to play in this room instead of that room [without tearing down and moving it], or for the ability to not have to share is completely foreign to me. Their mindset seems to be that most of their customers are bachelors with a ravenous appetite for all things entertainment; people that would have a stock of personal electronics and don't have to share anything. It's the only way their second-screen stuff makes any sense, too. Every one of 'the wives' in my group of friends takes the tablet for Netflix or app-gaming while the TV's being used for the Xbox. Now MS wants to tell them that they can't have that, either? S'not gonna go over very well.

  • GOD - August 10, 2013 12:03 a.m.

    This sounds just like what's already done on PS3, although on PS3 it has been limited to only two consoles now because of all the game sharing. I'm sure it will be limited on Xbox as well though. If an account on a PS3 has a game downloaded, all accounts on that system can play that game, and if you have that account on another system as well you can download the game onto that system too. This article really just raises the real issue that Microsoft still expects you to pay for a Gold subscription to access your entertainment apps. That's simply stupid. They're making you pay to access something else you're already paying for. Although then again Xbox 360 games also still had online passes despite people already having to pay for online multiplayer in the first place, so I guess it's par for the course.

  • chriszewski - August 10, 2013 2:47 p.m.

    All of what you stated is already done on 360 as well. The article really just states that you don't need separate Gold accounts for each profile on the X1.

  • awesomesauce - August 9, 2013 7:21 p.m.

    i don't find microsoft doing this. I gotta feeling it's a misunderstanding like when they hinted all those free gold games

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