Is it possible to gift delisted Virtual Console games to someone?

[pragmatic insanester]

I'm kind of upset I lost the ability to pick up a couple of Irem games I had my eye on for the VC, as they were delisted within the last month or so. Bloody Wolf, R-Type, Silent Debuggers, Ninja Spirit, and a few others. Does anyone who has these games see the option of gifting them to another person?

[Leo_A]

The only gift option is to buy a game to gift to someone else. Since these games are delisted, that's now impossible.

For obvious reasons, existing owners can't transfer their purchases to you via a gift. Even in the unlikely event that you found someone willing to, Nintendo obviously wouldn't allow it. The last thing they want is for downloads to be passed among friends.

[pragmatic insanester]

Hmm. There are several delisted XBLA games you can license transfer to people who never even downloaded the demo, so I was hoping there existed a kind of limbo of the game data that could allow a person who already owns the game to purchase it to someone else as a gift .

[Leo_A]

You can't license transfer delisted XBLA games to someone else's account.

[Enmity]

You can't license transfer delisted XBLA games to someone else's account.

I'm pretty sure if you set their xbox's serial number to the licensed system they would have access to the game.

[Leo_A]

I'm pretty sure if you set their xbox's serial number to the licensed system they would have access to the game.

Set your Xbox's serial number to the licensed system? Not sure what you're saying (Since there's no way to change your 360's ID), but I assume you're talking about the license transfer utility?

Sure, you can do that. But you have to give your account information out to the other person and you also will lose offline access to your DLC if you let someone else tie it to their system. And if you want to share everything, the other person will have to be the one that makes the future purchases so the licenses are tied to their system instead of your own. Not the intended purpose of MS's license program.

From the sound of his post, he's suggesting that there's an officially sanctioned way for someone to gain new access to delisted content, I'm pretty sure that pragmatic insanester was referencing Microsoft's cancelled plan for delisting underperforming content to declutter the marketplace. Under that system, games that were delisted (but able to still be legally sold) would be available to new buyers to purchase if someone that owns that delisted content recommends it to them.

But in the end, MS wised up and never cleaned house of underperformers. All the content that has been delisted so far has been due to legal agreements coming to an end (Such as Sega's Outrun Online Arcade and the Ferrari license). There's no way for someone to now buy such content and there's no way to share or transfer your own rights to delisted content to someone else's account.

All you can do is abuse the license transfer process and act as if the other individual's console was your own by linking your own licenses that provide offline access to the other individual's console (Something that can be done for all DLC, not just delisted content).