Xbox One owners will soon be able to gift games and other digital products to their friends now that the game gifting feature has been spotted within the Xbox One preview program.
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Within the Xbox One subreddit, one user spotted the new in-store option when browsing through games. Next to the typical “Buy” button within the Xbox One’s store, a new option is there that gives players the option to send the game to a friend.
Other users who responded to the Redditor’s initial post explained went a bit further into the options and found that you don’t even have to be friends with the person that you’re sending a game to. When selecting which who to send the gift to, there are options to either send the game to somebody on your friends list or enter in an email address that’s associated with an account. There were some Redditors who said that they weren’t able to see the gifting option just yet despite being a part of the insider program as well.
However, the game gifting feature doesn’t seem to take membership deals like Xbox Live Gold savings into account, at least not in the alpha version. Another user found a game that should be discounted at the moment thanks to their membership savings, but when trying to gift the game to someone else, it rang up at the full price. The feature may change before it goes live to account for players’ discounts, but it would make sense from a business standpoint if Microsoft decides to keep the games full price. If games were heavily discounted through certain deals and could be gifted at those lower prices, Xbox One owners would likely begin sharing accounts with Gold or other perks to gift themselves and others games at discounted rates.
Xbox bosses have talked about the ability to gift games several times in the past, more recently saying earlier in the year that the feature was definitely in the works and would be seen soon. Steam has had the feature for a while, but the Xbox One would be the first of the three major consoles to add the option. The Nintendo Wii had the gifting capabilities as well, but it didn’t make the transition to the Switch.
The game gifting feature will likely be fully available soon once it leaves the alpha preview stages, and hopefully other consoles will follow in Xbox’s steps.
