This was way more confusing than it had to be.
TL;DR: You can lend your digital games to friends & family for 14 days, but both consoles need to connect locally to enable this…(?)
You can’t play digital games you’ve lent out during this time. I guess the point is making it similar to giving your friend a physical game cartridge.
Even though this is an annoying DRM layer, I do like the innovation attempted here.
Back in the day, you’d hand your disc to your friend and then they’d hand it back to you some time later. Digital has given us a lot more freedom in how we game, but the ability to share had been removed. This at least seems to be offering a solution, at least for those who either don’t want to or are unable to just Arr! the games.
All they need is to remove the asinine local connection piece, and make the timeframe longer.
I do like the innovation attempted here
How is this innovation, though?
It’s a specific type of DRM/sharing scheme, but it’s not really innovative.
you should be able to use games within your family completely unlimited anyway.
I would understand the local connection requirement if that was for sharing with people outside your family. that would make it similar to sharing a game with a friend you know in person. without that the floodgates would be open to sharing games with literally anyone online.
It depends on how it works, 14 days and then the friend has to buy it or renewed every 14 days. If it is the latter and if it eventually goes online (which I think it will with the online subscription) it is a way, not the best way but a way, to stop scammers from building up massive stolen libraries because, unlike piracy, these games would actually be getting stolen from whoever lent it out since they can’t play them. If it is 14 days and then the friend has to buy the game, it’s a stupid limit.
I think it’s going to be mostly school kids sharing games with their friends, like their parents before them but digitally.
So it’s the overly complicated version of a system that’s on more sane platforms like Steam? Ok.
Only recently has steam gotten better at this. I’ve got my account, my kids account, and a 3rd account that owns games we may want to play, so that it doesn’t tie up either of our main accounts or if we want to have a guest use it. (all are shared to each other). Until last year, it was not super easy sharing them all, lots of logins, authorizations, etc.
Exactly ! Steam families are now dead simple, whereas this new oh-so-Nintendo method seems as janky as it gets.
It does have one standout feature that Steam families do not though: ability to play shared games even when offline.
You can lend games on steam ???
Family sharing I presume. I’m not entirely familiar with the scope of the service myself as I’ve only just set up family sharing with my child. But when I did, they had a huge catalog of games in their own steam account as a result.
Yup! Not all, but most. Some with high levels of cheaters block family sharing, like RUST
Let me sell my digital licenses before we talk about them like they‘re comparable to physical media.
I think that is a good thing. There are many reasons to dislike Nintendo, but they had no pressure to do this due to the lack of competition on their platform from other stores and manufacturers. 14 days is more than enough to finish most games or at least give them a try before buying.
I don’t get why they needed a 14 day limit. Sounds half baked to me. Steam, although with its own limitations, still does a better job at game sharing.
DRM poop.
Hooray, new DRM?
