Microsoft's decision to allow up to ten family members to share their Xbox One libraries has been swept away by the recent furore surrounding used-games and daily license validations. However, from the outside it looks like a good system that'll allow trusted friends and family to share content, and possibly save a lot of money in the process.
Microsoft's Phil Spencer has been elaborating on the subject, explaining to Penny-Arcade how the system will work in more detail:
"I think the policy makes sense. It's not ten different people all playing the game concurrently, but when you think about a real usage scenario, and we thought about it around a family, and I know certain people will create a family group of people that aren't all part of the same family, and I do think that's an advantage, and people will use that. I saw it on NeoGAF instantly, the Xbox Family creation threads, where people said 'Hey be a part of my family.'"
"No birth certificates will need to be sent in! I do think that's an advantage of the ecosystem that we have."
The position was further clarified by Yusuf Mehdi while talking to ArsTechnica, who in turn reported: "The only limitation, it seems, is that only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time."
That doesn't seem like a particularly crippling limitation. To play online co-op and multiplayer together, gamers will have to have their own copy of a game, much as it is today. But for single player content, or if you're not playing multiplayer at the same time as one of your friends/family, it could well prove to be a great way to play more games at the same time as paying less money. It could even turn out to be a saving grace for a platform holder currently on the defensive following their announced restrictions on second-hand games.