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[Bgamer90]

The whole 'family plan' reeks of something hastily devised over the last 48 hours to combat the negative PR tidal wave flooding MS right now, and attempt to knock Sony down a peg in the process ever since they won the public/media over Monday night.

Uh... this was announced last week; at the same time that MS confirmed the Xbox One's restrictions.

A few more details have been given since then.

 

[DarkCloud]

The whole 'family plan' reeks of something hastily devised over the last 48 hours to combat the negative PR tidal wave flooding MS right now, and attempt to knock Sony down a peg in the process ever since they won the public/media over Monday night.

It sounds great in theory, but also half-baked.

Except it was announced on Thursday well before Monday's conferences. People just ignored it.

 

[border]

Xbox Live has 40 million members. They aren't all Gold members, but even if they were all Gold members and even if they paid full price for their subscription, that is $60 x 40 million people. $240 million dollars in yearly revenue. Even if every penny of that is fed back to publishers that's not a lot of money considering that game budgets have spiraled to $80-$100 million. I'm not certain why people think publishers would be satisfied with this meager revenue stream as compensation for every single copy of their game being shared with up to ten people.

If every subscriber shares just 2 games with 1 other person, that is (in a publisher's eyes) 80 million units lost in sales. At $60 per game, that amounts to $480 million in lost revenue. More than twice what they would receive if they took 100% of XBL Gold revenue. And that's a pretty generous estimate considering that most people will share way more than that.

 

[Klocker]

I have a feeling this is the case. So my friends and I would only need to buy one copy in total of short single player games? Nah.

people do that now all the time with retail discs though so they look at it like those people can do that if the want and they can still start shifting to digital and letting devs get a cut of used.


and that's the ting, not every user will bother with this...it will still be a minority and I'd wager low teens %-wise of people that "abuse" it