Scoble writes that he ‘cheats’ at Xbox:

I have about a dozen achievements. I only earned one so far. My son is the leader.

I imagine if this truly is classified as ‘cheating’ then there are a lot of cheaters out there. Heck, our family would be among them. I think it’s unrealistic to expect families to to have separate Xbox Live accounts for each family member. For a family of five to have their own accounts that would be:

$2,000 = $400 (xbox 360 premium) x 5
$250 / year = $50 x 5
————–
Ouch that’s $2,250 to outfit the entire family and doesn’t include the separate TV sets. If you figure conservatively $500 USD for a decent LCD or lowend HDTV that is capable of 1080i, you are talking another $2,500 (5 x $500USD) for a grand total of $4,750 with a recurring cost of $250/year.

Not a realistic scenario.

Scoble is just joking around in his post but this raises a serious question about families using a single Xbox Live account and how achievements should realistically be handled in multi-user accounts. It would be a useful feature for Microsoft to include the ability to assign achievments within an account to subaccounts/profiles (prior to playing the game, of course).

Or is this possible to setup alternate profiles within a single Xbox Live account for this purpose and I don’t know how to do this?

We have two Xbox Live accounts and yet are a family of five where two play regularly, one plays sometimes (me) and two hardly ever play (wife and oldest son). Despite owning two Xboxes and two Xbox 360s, we have two Xbox Live accounts. I doubt we’ll be purchasing any more Xbox Live accounts, however I will admit thinking about getting a third Xbox Live account. I wish there was more time available to play to justify having an account myself.

What are other families doing that have a single shared Xbox / Xbox 360 and Live account?

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