Steam Family Sharing: Finally!
Sep. 11, 2013Steam Family Sharing: Finally!
Today we learned aboutSteam’s “Family share” program. The beta testing is by registration and with limited spaces, so make sure to visit the page and register if you would like access.
The PC market’s application of “One purchase one user” has been used to defend the Xbox 1 original value proposition and to signal that eventually everything would go that way with consoles as well. It would seem Steam has some intelligence against these common notions and is acting to implement a system that allows you to share your offline/solo adventures with registered PCs. This is as mentioned still a Beta, so we shall have to wait and see how the proposition evolves.
Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another’s Steam 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.
For more information about Steam Family Sharing and the beta program, please visitstore.steampowered.com/sharing.
In the meantime, I shall be celebrating.
Fexelea
MMO raider by day and guide writer by night, Fex enjoys multiplatform gaming, good books and animes, and streaming with a cold beer.
Nice to see an approach to digital content that is more in line with hiw it would be if you owned physical copies. This is a flexible and fair setup for both players and content creators. Kudos to Steam for putting in the effort to find a middle ground.
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