According to this anonymous insider over on pastebin (spotted by Reddit), the Xbox One’s family sharing – a feature that we’ve since lost – was only going to allow players in the shared group to play 15 to 60 minute “demos” of games where they’d have complete access to the game for that time period.

When your family member accesses any of your games, they’re placed into a special demo mode. This demo mode in most cases would be the full game with a 15-45 minute timer and in some cases an hour.

This seems feasible. Never did it dawn on us that publishers might not be to happy with this fact, but apparently this was to be a way to share demos and keep revenue flowing on games even after their time has passed.

When the time limit was up they would automatically be prompted to the Marketplace so that they may order it if liked the game. … We wanted our family sharing plan to be something that was talked about and genuinely enjoyed by the masses as a way of inciting gamers to try new games. … It gave incentive to share your games among your peers, it gave games exposure, it allowed old games to still generate revenue for publishers.

If this is the truth (keeping in mind that this is coming from an anonymous writer on pastebin), then we may have gained a lot more then we lost last night when Don Mattrick pulled the plug on the Xbox One’s DRM, taking with it this family sharing, but there is still hope. The writer tells us that while they’re no longer going forward with Game Sharing, it’s not completely off the table and is still very likely to appear at some point in time.

We may also soon be seeing Microsoft unveil another peice of the Xbox One, it’s very own social network contained completely within the Xbox One where gamers can “…post their highest scores, show off their best Game DVR moments, what they’ve watched via Xbox TV and leave messages for others to read and respond to….” this feature alone, if it turns out to be true, would be a godsend for Xbox One users if it ever materializes, which sounds very likely considering Sony is doing the same thing, and we all know companies have to rival eachother in every way possible.

You can read the entire Pastebin post here, and I’ve reposted it on our site here just in case something happens to it over on Pastebin.

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[Update: I’d like to clarify that I have not confirmed this source, no other information is known other than the pastebin.]