Steam Family Sharing

[Sledgstone 8,672]

Steam Announces Family Sharing!

Coming Soon: Players who share computers can also share their Steam games

September 11, 2013 – Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another's games while each earning their own Steam achievements and storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.”

Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though simultaneous usage of an account’s library is not allowed, the lender may always access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.

I was not expecting this. Well done Steam!

Sources:

http://steamcommunit...g#announcements

http://store.steampowered.com/sharing

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[DeathscytheX 9,732]

Xbox be mad.

[Sledgstone 8,672]

Lol. I'm pretty certain the Xbox One DRM was going to have a feature like this.. I remember reading something about Steam working on this many months ago, but it was only a rumor at the time. Steam has really improved itself over the past year. The better controller support and big picture mode make it like a console and game sharing just rubs it in the faces of all the consoles that emphasized the fact that they can hand a physical game to someone to borrow.

 

Now friends can borrow all your steam games and you don't have to worry about them scratching a disk or not giving it back to you.. just log in and it kicks them out. Pretty effective concept considering the large amount of Steam users that are set to always be logged in.