Family Sharing and other Xbox One features still on the way

Both Sony and Microsoft teased us with a lot of features before the PS4 and the Xbox One were released. While the companies did deliver on some of their promises, there are a few features that are still nowhere to be seen. Earlier this month Sony’s head of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida said that the “suspend mode” and “friend-assist” will still be arriving at some point for the PS4. Now Microsoft’s Phil Spencer steps up and tells us that Family Sharing is “still on the roadmap.” The head of the Xbox Live division spoke about this in a recent podcast where he also explained why some of the promised Xbox One features are missing.

“We looked at the digital features that we talked about last year, and yeah, as a gamer there are a lot of those features that really resonated. They were smart features for people who have a lot of games and maybe play on a couple consoles and have a bunch of people in the house and want to share with friends. As I look at our monthly update roadmaps and other things, those kind of features are in our roadmap.” He also mentions that DRM has made the company’s work more challenging, but the features will still be implemented to the Xbox One nevertheless.

“There’s a little bit of a challenge that you have DRM on the disk and how does that game play… We got hung up last year on kinda the enabling features, around when it has to connect to the internet and all of that, when in the end the feature that we really cared about, that people are like “I’ve got this collection of content that I can do family sharing, I can share with my friends…” There are a bunch of things we have ideas about. I haven’t given up on those ideas. There is some complexity now that you’ve got disks around that, you have DRM that you have to figure out, but it’s definitely part of our map with the overall product.”

While it’s nice to hear that Family Sharing is still coming, it would have been even nicer to know when. Similar to Yoshida, Spencer also claims that the features are on the way but fails to reveal a possible release window. Hopefully he’s not just making these statements to get Xbox One owners off his back. Stay tuned for more news and updates.