Steam to announce "Family Sharing" feature - But will it blend?

[FinZeroX]

Join BETA by participating Steam Family Sharing group.

 

 

 

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.â€

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 visit http://store.steampowered.com/sharing.

 

So pretty much if I lend some of you my library, it'll come available to you in it's completeness. Every game and content.

I can keep on playing whenever I want. If I'm offline, you can  freely play my games like they would be yours. When I come online, you will receive a popup telling to either purchase the game or quit playing. Therefore the feature wont limit the original owners right to the games in any way.

 

I find this feature very tempting. This is something that is very generous from Steam's side and is never seen amongst game providers. So big thumbs up to Steam. Now ones library can be split by different time zones, i.e. when the European owner is asleep during the night, a friends from USA can play his games. There's also less need for pirating as you can just "borrow" the game from a friends and play the multiplayer as well. And if you decide to buy the game, your saves and profile stuff will be there.

 

Agains, respect. This is a step to the right direction.

[Grim Reaper]

Steam is desperate to remain viable now that Microsoft has announced the same thing previously with their XBox one sharing idea....   the writing is on the wall that Steam is going to have to remain nimble with the coming changes to how games are played/shared/purchased

 

I don't think they are simply making this move out of the goodness of their little ol' hearts 

 

YMMV

[Heretic121]

I wonder if you would be sharing a GUID as well?

[FinZeroX]

I believe everyone will have their own GUID and data.

 

And what comes to the reasons for Steam making this available, it's not a problem for me. In my eyes Microsoft is not competing with Steam; consoles wrestle in a whole different category. And Microsoft has lost the fight in PC gaming.

[Vanaraud]

Thats a good news coming true, there were rumors about it already. And it won´t cut the market anyways because I´m not willing to hassle with my games library unless I´m 101% sure it won´t be messed with. So I´d share it only with my brother, which I already could do in the era of CD\DVDs.