I'm not a Steam user - how does it work? If I share a game with you, can I play it at the same time? What if I share it with two people, and they both want to play at the same time?

I think the features could have lived on pretty easily without a daily check-in. If I were building it...

- If you buy a disc based game, there's no need to ever "dial home". There are offline authenticity checks, and they're reasonably difficult to circumvent. If people mod their consoles and copy discs, fine - I'll catch them if they come online.

- If you buy an on-demand title, there's no need to ever "dial home", just like above. Again, it's reasonably difficult to side-load a digital title, and easy to detect.

* I would still check your console when you connect to XBL - I want to protect everybody's experience, so I won't permit modders. Modded software or hardware = ban.

^^This is all current-gen stuff^^

- If you want to share a title with friends, it has to be a digital download. I wouldn't want to make my customer put in his physical copy to keep verifying that he still owns it, so I won't offer that feature (though maybe I could, and just limit it to two-week intervals of sharing; starting a new interval requires the disc be present). Only one person can play the title at a time, and the owner has priority. Friends who want to borrow it are handled FIFO.

- If you start playing a game that you're sharing, a notice is sent to XBL to prevent your friends from starting a session (maybe the title would show up as in-use when your friend goes to the "borrowed" section of his game library). I might even consider an "I want next" feature with a notification when the game is available.

- If your friend wants to play your game, XBL is updated to indicate the title is in use, so nobody but the owner can start playing. If he does, the borrower's session would either have a TTL and end at the next interval, or just persist until he quits. I don't see much harm in the latter.

Something like this would be reasonably simple to implement, would facilitate lending, would protect the owner's property, and would not require spurious check-ins (only those connected with actions performed online anyway).