[Rumor] Anonymous Microsoft Employee Speaks Out, Family Sharing Was Just "A Simple Demo Mode"

What an interesting time for the video game industry. The Xbox One's DRM scheme is going back to basics, and while this is a victory for all who spoke out against DRM, losing the family sharing feature is a little sad. However, if this letter from an anonymous "heartbroken" Microsoft employee that is making its way around the web is true, family sharing may not have been as great as we all thought.

In a lengthy letter to no specific person in particular, this supposed employee laments the loss of the Xbox One's internet connectivity requirements, stating that despite the negative reactions "we felt the people we would have loss [sic] would have been made up by the people we would have gained." He doesn't point the blame at the consumer, however, pointing instead to Microsoft's haphazard messaging:

"I will admit that I was not happy with how some of my fellow colleagues handled explaining the systems and many times pulled my hair out as I felt I could have done a better job explaining and selling the ideas to the press and public at large."

On the matter of family sharing in particular, however, he speaks of how excited he is about the feature set but his details temper what enthusiasm I had for it. While the features that knew of were true- "Anyone who you deem to be family had access to these games regardless of where they are in the world"- the nitty-gritty of what we weren't told is far less exciting.

"When your family member accesses any of your games, they're placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour.  This allowed the person to play the game, get familiar with it then make a purchase if they wanted to.  When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game."

If this is true, we were all quite blatantly deceived about the nature and benefits of the Xbox One's family sharing feature and the loss doesn't sting as much anymore. A timed trial system is completely different than the "when you buy a game, you and your family can all play it anywhere" plan we were all told, and certainly explains what sounded like a very fiscally irresponsible move. The supposed employee writes after that they were even planning to put a limit on how many times people could play these bite-sized pieces of gameplay, making it even more restrictive.

Remember that this letter and its credibility are entirely unconfirmed, but these details do fill in a few missing pieces of the puzzle. It's worth a read, at the very least, and I came away from it feeling a little bit more understanding about what Microsoft was trying to do. if only they hadn't picked the absolute worst people to make this message clear to us.