Coming Soon: STEAM FAMILY SHARING

[y0himba]

http://store.steampowered.com/sharing
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/familysharing

Share your Steam library of games with close friends & family

Share your Steam library of games with close friends & family
Share your computer?
Now share your games too.

Steam Family Sharing allows close friends and family members to play one another's games while earning their own Steam achievements and saving their own game progress to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

My kids are going to lose their minds over this!  

[Deozaan]

Awesome news!

[Josh]

Hell yeah! Now I can get my wife to nerd out with me!

[mouser]

I guess the devil will be in the details.

[Jibz]

Sounds like a great idea. I have picked up quite a lot of games from humble bundles and steam sales, so being able to let my son play them on a separate account where he can earn up his own trophies and stuff instead would be great .

[Deozaan]

Hell yeah! Now I can get my wife to nerd out with me!

Um... Not with you as in at the same time as you:

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.

[wraith808]

What I'd really like is multi-computer single-user licenses, i.e. I don't have to go into offline mode on my other computer in order to have steam up and running.  I had a stupid situation the other day- I was transferring my computer to my son, so I was uninstalling software I'd installed into my user account to give him more space.  A lot of that software was through steam, and even though I was only uninstalling, I had to go online and update Steam and be connected to the account just to uninstall.

That seems really stupid.

[Deozaan]

It sounds to me like this Family Sharing will basically enable that feature. After all, if your library is shared and visible on another machine while you're logged in elsewhere, why couldn't you install the software without having to switch to/from offline mode? But I'm not really sure.

[wraith808]

It sounds to me like this Family Sharing will basically enable that feature. After all, if your library is shared and visible on another machine while you're logged in elsewhere, why couldn't you install the software without having to switch to/from offline mode? But I'm not really sure.

It doesn't seem exactly like that to me.  This seems to facilitate sharing between multiple accounts, i.e. multiple users.  If I want to have my games available and playable on my laptop and on my desktop (and my backup desktop), I shouldn't have to have three accounts.  The one account should be enough.  And that's not what this is AFAIC.

[Deozaan]

You're right, of course. I didn't mean it was exactly that. I just figured if they can enable access to your library on multiple accounts, then maybe they can now allow you to be logged in to the same account on multiple computers.

[wraith808]

You're right, of course. I didn't mean it was exactly that. I just figured if they can enable access to your library on multiple accounts, then maybe they can now allow you to be logged in to the same account on multiple computers.

I think that's been *possible* for a while.  But is it *likely*?

[lanux128]

finally i don't have to buy two of everything!

[mouser]

Sounds like it's going to be a pretty reasonable feature:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/11/steam-adding-option-to-share-and-borrow-games/#more-168419

It sounds a little too good to be true to me, so we shall see..