I can imagine people at Microsoft's game division will go out and yell "Hey, we're the one who introduce this first with X-Bone!"

Oh well their DRM was far worse though. Also I think this family feature will be pretty difficult to maintain and a nightmare to folks at Steam's costumer service.

They're having a beta so they're likely to notice any kind of abuse and it's possible they will have some kind of requirement like at least 10 games purchased or something of that nature.

I wonder how far this is going to spread though. It's certainly nice, even though it's only for EA games bought on Origin and doesn't work for DLC. Still, it shows confidence in their lineups, to some extent I guess. Although EA has been going DLC more and more.

I honestly don't think Steam would have too much of an issue giving a one day refund on their own games either (Valve ones). They tend to be good quality/wanted. I think they might be weary of making the same kind of statement though since no doubt it would create a massive outcry/demand for this feature to be on every single game on Steam, which is really not under Valve's control, but no doubt they'd be held accountable by many. Origin doesn't really have much of an issue in this regard since the bulk of their offerings are their own games.

When you starts playing (using your owner account), the other person is signaled to quit the game of yours they are playing or buy it for themselves to keep playing. Therefore your library will not be locked at any time, since your own account acts as an override.

That's true.
But won't this Family Sharing thing also suffer the same issues? I can't imagine single-player games signing up to this unless there's a time limit (but in that case, why not just time trials?). Plus there's going to be backlash from 3rd parties if it goes under their nose.

Ehh ... I think MS's problem was that they also wanted to tie physical games to this system which people felt limited their physical bought games rather than freed them (which it did). If they had come out and said that you can treat your physical games exactly how you would've before if you wanted to, BUT we're going to allow you more freedom with your digitally-downloaded games than any other major DD platform and our competitors, here's how, people would've reacted more positively. Also people just didn't trust them to fulfill what they promised for the consumer and the arrogance in their messaging didn't help that.

The rescinding privileges should be far easier. You don't have to change your password when you change girlfriend ;)

It'll certainly be interesting to see, and yes, I wonder how publishers/developers see this. I'd kind of hope they'd put a similar restriction on it as Microsoft was planning, that anyone you'd share with would have to be in your friendslist for at least a month. That makes sense if it's family I imagine, or good friends at least. I really really hope there's some form of restrictions, else I can already see beggars adding me to ask to get to play a game :)

Yeah, from the leaked info I heard part of the family (in X-1) only allowed to play games for several hours before the machine asked them to get their own copy.

It's like having a strict dad no one ever asked for.

You could be signed in at different computers at the same time. Granted, you still can't play at the same time, but you don't have to sign out to play at a different computer.

Aye that's true too - I'd forgotten about that.

I would not call renting out your account abuse, but a good idea=)

Steam would.

It would be a bit hard to prove though on there end. An easy way for them to avoid this would be to limit the amount of family switching.