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Steam Family Sharing

store.steampowered.com

1–10 of 123 posts

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#3

Sounds great for a hypothetical Steam Box Seems similar to the way current consoles handle accounts.

Yeah, it's very similar to how XBox Live accounts and digital games work (though, interestingly, it is dramatically inferior to the model Microsoft had proposed for XBox One before everyone got angry and forced them to backpedal - that model had dramatically superior sharing features)

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#4
"Can a friend and I share a library and both play at the same time? No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time."

So, if one of my friend play on my game, I can play none of my games? Or am I reading this wrong?

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#5
This has been a rumored coming feature forever but I can't for the life of me figure out how this benefits steam, or even how they convinced publishers to take part in this.

Whats their motivation? Did they go over the publishers heads with this? I'm curious to see how this pans out.

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#6
... on closer inspection, it seems functionally equivalent to logging into steam on a friend's computer, except that you don't have to type in your password on their machine and you can kick them off easily.

Considering how much trouble Steam has with phishing and accounts getting hacked, it's obviously a good idea to minimize any use-case where users are allowing others to get at their passwords. This kind of feature will probably save Valve money in the long-run.

Still, doesn't match what I hoped. I was hoping to see a way to share a few games on a machine within the same house, so I could have my set-top machine and my desktop machine divvy up the console-style and pc-style games without constantly having to re-log-in.

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#7

"Can a friend and I share a library and both play at the same time? No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time." So, if one of my friend play on my game, I can play none of my games? Or am I reading this wrong?

Sounds like it. The whole library is on one machine at a time.

You could do this before by logging into Steam from a buddy's computer... but that's got risks associated with it.

This just lets you loan out your whole library without risking your steam account.

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#8
post #5

This has been a rumored coming feature forever but I can't for the life of me figure out how this benefits steam, or even how they convinced publishers to take part in this. Whats their motivation? Did they go over the publishers heads with this? I'm curious to see how this pans out.

Pre-Steam games weren't tied to an account, so this is just bringing that capability back.

Re: Steam Family Sharing

#10

"Can a friend and I share a library and both play at the same time? No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time." So, if one of my friend play on my game, I can play none of my games? Or am I reading this wrong?

Yes this seems to be true, it's in essence providing users a easy approved way to share their steam logins, which happens a lot already.
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