Digital game trade-ins will return to Xbox One at some point

Microsoft still hopes to re-introduce some of its more ambitious online plans for Xbox One at some point in the future.

Specifically, this includes both the ability to trade-in digital Xbox One games and the option of allowing assorted family and friends to access a user’s purchased games – both of which were dropped following Microsoft’s post-E3 strategic rethink.

I think if you go back and you look at some of the things we said, that was one of the places that we were actually trying to pioneer,” Xbox strategy boss Albert Penello told GameSpot.

We were trying to implement the ability to trade [and] loan digital games with your friends which is something that no one else was doing. I believe, in retrospect that people have calmed down and gone back and actually looked at what we said, people are starting to understand, ‘Wow, they did want actually to allow me to loan and trade’ which other digital ecosystems don’t want to do.

And so, yeah, I think we need to do that. That has to be part of the experience. Right now, we’re focused on launch and we switched the program back to discs, because that’s what customers wanted.

I get a lot of mails saying ‘god, please bring back the family sharing.’ We’d love to figure out how to bring that back. I still think it was a good idea. Maybe it was a little too soon for some people, but I still think there were a lot of good ideas in there.

And we’ll bring it back when the time is right.”