Microsoft's Xbox One is holding steady against PlayStation 4 and Wii U, despite the mountain of PR bologna the company has buried itself under. Thankfully, some of the exciting stuff originally announced with Xbox One may still make it to the marketplace.
Originally, Xbox One was to allow users to designate a list of other "family" gamers to share software with. That plan was scapped in the company's abandonment of always-online DRM. Now, Phil Spencer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios, says those features may return on some level.
Specifically, Spencer said that the company believes in a digital future and that they "understand what games you own and who you are and how you move around and who you might want to loan rights to your games or gift your games to."
"We totally believe in that future and any other marketplace you play in, these kind of mechanism are out there," Spencer continued referring to Valve who recently opened the Family Sharing option for it's 60+ million users.
I've used Steam's Family Sharing to share my library of software with my brother. Where I've bought games and added them to my Steam account to never play them, my brother has spent dozens of hours enjoying the software I've ignored.
"We are now fully heads down on thinking about and building out the future of our digital marketplace," Spencer said, "to enable what people would expect, and hopefully some things that will delight them beyond their expectations."
Hopefully, we'll learn more about these Xbox Live Marketplace advancements in June at E3. I'd also ask Microsoft to speak clearly and directly to these kinds of features, especially since fans and press were accused of not giving the company room to have a "rational conversation."
[GameSpot]
