Game-Sharing In Household vs. With Family

SciFi1234 · Jan 27, 2022

Hi,

I feel like nowhere is there information on this to clear things up for me or anyone else. Often times, when I look up game-sharing information, there is also not anything super recent, like it's not advertised as a feature anymore. What I have found seems to suggest that you should only game-share with people in your household. My question is, does "household" mean:

- the physical home where you live?

- close blood relatives?

or

- the people you consider your immediate family?

Here's an example for why this might be confusing. Let's say you always game-shared with your one sibling and had lots of fun, thanks to Microsoft/Xbox's great feature (which I can't tell if they still want people to know about it or not). Then, your sibling or you ended up moving away. Do you have to stop game-sharing? You are no longer in a physical household together, but you are still a household in the sense that you are immediate family?

Here's another example. What about kids with divorced parents. They may not spend all their time together, but then may also regroup at one parent's house from time to time. You better believe that dedicated gamers will lug their consoles around to different places if they are able to. Should they turn on and off game-sharing every time they split apart and regroup? They would go through each of their five "home" Xbox switches in no time, which seems poor.

As one more, though there are many examples, what if you have a partner (recent or long-term) that is not a blood relative, but they live with you or are over a lot. How does game-sharing work there? Can you game-share with people outside your blood family, like partners and friends? For some people, their immediate families or who they live with are not even related to them by blood.

I understand that (1) Microsoft doesn't want you handing out your Account information to random people and (2) simply because of how pricing is different across countries, you can't/shouldn't game-share across borders, but if (3) you did decide to game-share in your country with people close to you, what are the official limitations for how it works? Where is the official literature on this so people don't make mistakes?

Thanks for reading.

:)

Smwutches

No. There's no way to remove your account remotely. If you gameshare with someone else, you would sign into their console, set it as your Home, then remove your account from the console before you leave.

ngocphi

You can however change the password and force other devices to sign in which requires the new password

SciFi1234

Also, if for some reason ever you don't want to game-share with someone, you can also just go on your Microsoft Account and remove your Account from the other person's console, correct, without affecting anything on their end?

SciFi1234

Understood, yes. Common sense is a must and being careful beyond that is also good. Thank you. As a genuine question, do you think Microsoft doesn't advertise game-sharing as much for economic reasons? The information does seem pretty tucked away there in the home Xbox link provided above. It is sort of like a poorly kept secret that game-sharing exists, though.

Smwutches

By household they mean the people who live with you in your house. The idea is that the Home setting is used to set your own console as your Home so that if you have friends over or people in your house that want to play with you, they can access your games without you needing to be signed in. Your console should also be set as your Home console if you are in a situation in which you need to play offline.

You can share outside of your home (friends, family, etc.), but you should only do so if you can sign into the console to set the console as your Home and you can remove your account when done. If you are not able to sign in yourself, do not do it. Sharing account information violates the code of conduct and can put you and the others you're sharing with at risk for being banned.

This is the official documentation on the Home setting (game sharing) - https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console/my-home-xbox

Game-Sharing In Household vs. With Family