Following on from a fan petition to Microsoft regarding the reversal of several Xbox One policies, chief product officer Marc Whitten has revealed that the platform holder hasn't abandoned their plans to introduce the Family Sharing feature.
Family Sharing will allow gamers to share content between a select number of family and close friends, but it was thought that the proposed feature had been shelved after the platform holder pulled a u-turn on their DRM and always-on policies for Xbox One.
"If it's something that people are really excited about and want, we're going to make sure that we find the right way to bring it back," Whitten confirmed to IGN. "A ‘road map' sort of implies more like ‘on date X it's back' than I think exists, but we believe really strongly in how you build a great experience on Xbox One for me as an individual, but also for my family. Family Sharing is a great example of how you do that with content. I think you're going to see us, both with examples like that and with other things, keep pushing on how that's something great. An example is some of the stuff we're doing with what we announced around Gold, where other people in the house get the advantages of Gold when I'm a Gold member. You're going to see us continue to push in those areas."
The reason behind putting Family Sharing on hold was to allow the platform holder to put in place changes demanded by the community: "To add it to the program, we had to make room, just from a pure engineering perspective, to be able to get that work done," Whitten explained. "So taking Family Sharing out of the launch window was not about ‘we're going to take our toys and go home' or something like that. It was just sort of the logistics of ‘how do we get this very, very clear request that people really want, that choice, and how do we make sure we can do an excellent job of that, get to launch, and then be able to build a bunch of great features?' In the future I think you're going to see the ways that we change how you discover, how you consume, share, play. To me, this is the magic of digital. You know, if there's anything I think that Xbox 360 has proven, it's that we're super committed to this constant cycle of improving the experience and the software, and it's what we've been doing for 360 for the past seven years, and it's certainly where we're going to go with Xbox One."