Two Xbox One's In One House: How to Online Game as a Family

14/09/15 15:21 Filed in: Technology

I thought I would write about something I don't generally write about much and that is gaming. My boys are really into playing online games with their friends through their Xbox One Console. They wanted to figure out if they could get another Xbox One and be able to play the same game together on separate consoles since most of the games these days don't do split screens or, if hey do it takes away from some of the action.
So we started our journey to figure out if this could be done. It should be pretty simple I thought. I went online to see if I could find the answer and I got a lot of confusion and nothing really clarified it for me. So in my own experimenting with this subject I thought I would put an article out there to hopefully help others in our situation not have to go through the frustration we did to find an answer. Before I get into the specifics, however, let me clarify the problem I'm trying to solve.

Xbox Live Family Sharing

Microsoft did attempt to solve some of the issues with wanting to set up your own family LAN party with it's new family sharing feature built into Xbox Live. This feature allows you to share your Xbox live account with anyone who has an account on an Xbox One that you are logged into. Not only can you share Xbox Live access, you also share all of your online games. Now this sharing feature is attached to the Xbox you consider your Home Xbox. In addition to this, your content that you purchased digitally follows you to any console you log into whether it be your home Xbox or not. In this case you could have two Xbox One's in the same household have your family member log into the Xbox One that is designated as your home Xbox and you could then log into the second Xbox and both play the same digitally purchased game on both consoles. Once you log out of that second Xbox, however, your content is no longer available to any of the players on that Xbox. So it only works on the Home Xbox One or it follows the Xbox Live owner. For many families this might work were you have family members who have their own Xbox One's that they use all the time. So you would have two Xbox One's but only need one copy of the game digitally. A pretty good deal if you only have two people.

Multiple Players Switching Between Two Xbox One's

In the case of our family there are 4 of us who play the two Xbox One's we have in two common areas of the house. Depending on what is happening that day, we never know who will be playing on what box and no one wants to be tied to one room or the other. In that case, there is no easy solution and it is more costly. We found that each box needs to have an Xbox Live account so that everyone can change between boxes whenever they want. This then becomes no different than what you could do before with adding two Xbox's to the home with the exception that you don't need one for every player in the house. If you want to play digital content, you still have to have the family member login to the home Xbox of the one who purchased the content and you go to the other Xbox to play which is still inconvenient. We just decided to buy two disk versions of the game to play seamlessly and at least we can sell them back in the future once we get tired of playing them.

So there really is no easy way to have two Xbox One consoles in your home and play back and forth with one game seamlessly. With all of the hoops we had to jump through it would have almost been easier to say get two complete set ups and go from there. It sure would have saved a lot of time and effort to get done what we set out to do in the first place. Hopefully this will help some of you out there trying to do the same thing.

Tags: Gaming, Xbox