Steam Family Sharing is a feature that’s just been announced for Valve’s digital delivery service. It is slated to be made available in beta form next week, enabling gamers to share their library of Steam titles with their friends and family members. This new service will work across PC, Mac and Linux games of course, and as revealed by Valve’s Anna Sweet, it was created as a direct response to requests from the Steam community.
Those interested in participating in it can join the Steam Family Sharing group on Steam now and wait for further updates. This new service has been introduced by Valve with the aim of allowing you to share your digital games just like you do with your boxed titles, books, DVDs and other stuff with your close ones. They will be able to play games owned by you, but at the same time, earn their own Steam achievements and store their saves and application data to the cloud.
How will it work?
Let’s say you have a friend or a family member who wishes to play a game you have purchased through Steam. All you need to do to make this happen is sign in through your account and authorize their machine to provide it with access to your library of games. You can then sign out. When the user then signs in with their own account, they will have access to all your purchased games, and will be able to download them, earn achievements, store saves on their own cloud and more.
There’s a small hitch however. If you wish to play a game at the same time that your friend or family member too is accessing it, they will be given a few minutes to either purchase the title or quit playing. Steam Family Sharing will be available via up to 10 devices per account.
How do you enter the beta?
Head to this link here, and join the Steam Family Sharing group. Details will then be provided by Valve when the beta becomes available.