While there is an air of convenience to being able to pull your games from thin air, it's not really that difficult to carry around your games. Perhaps being able to store them on an SD card would be a pretty good comprimise. I like the idea of not having a load of plastic - but it's no great hardship plugging in a cable, or carrying a TV from one room to another. I keep my gamecube (yes gamecube,) packed away, if I want to use it - I just pull it out. If I want to listen to music in another room, I carry a music player through to it. But these days we are sold overly technical solutions to problems, like wireless music systems (with klunky interfaces), and such, which don't really give you much back. I was still watching an old school CRT tv back in December before it died on me, and once I was ingrossed in what I was watching, I didn't care what I was watching it on. Same goes for SSD's on computers, sure they increase boot and load times - but who cares about 2mins vs 40seconds? It doesn't really matter.
I'm not following the sharing idea - can you share a title at no expense? Can you lend a title? That sounds great. Don't get me wrong, I'm up for a little added convenience - but as other's have said - downloading a few Gigs to play a game - is currently more difficult (and probably wasteful,) than just copying the game onto another medium and walking somewhere with it.
I agree with you about carrying around discs being easy. I am based in New Zealand, and carrying around a disc is alot easier and cheaper than always downloading the game. I think downloading games is an incidental feature when the game licencing is centrally controlled with cloud-based distribution.
I think Microsoft's biggest failure is the marketing around the Xbox One and their failure to explain how the game sharing works. Just from my personal understanding of the link I posted, it seems to me that you can let up to ten people play any game that is owned by your account. So, once you buy a game, any of those ten people can play it without purchasing it themselves.
Only one person of the 10 with whom you share can play at a time. This will not restrict you from playing though. It's not clear whether you can play a co-op game together on a single copy. To me this seems better than actually lending a disk to someone since you can still play your game while you lend it out.
I have no idea why Microsoft are saying outright you can't lend games, since you can share them. I think their messaging has been absolutely awful.
So how does that work, your mate turns his PC on, and it kicks you out as you are fighting a boss? I assume not, but it does make you wonder.
This basically means that Microsoft will know exactly what you are playing, which machine you are playing it on, and when you are playing it. That combined with the connects camera is quite frightening.
I'm not following the sharing idea - can you share a title at no expense? Can you lend a title? That sounds great. Don't get me wrong, I'm up for a little added convenience - but as other's have said - downloading a few Gigs to play a game - is currently more difficult (and probably wasteful,) than just copying the game onto another medium and walking somewhere with it.