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+--- Thread: Steam Family Sharing (/thread-15554.html)
Steam Family Sharing - Bolty - 09-11-2013
Announcement here
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 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.
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Now that's pretty cool. I do wonder though how they worked this out legally with the software companies that sell their games on Steam. Was Steam contractually able to implement this without the publisher's say due to their sales agreements previously signed, or did they have to go to every publisher and work this out with them? After all, I can't imagine that EA would want the games that are sold on Steam to be sharable in any way, shape, or form...so how did Valve get the ability to tell them to pound sand and put this in anyway?
RE: Steam Family Sharing - kandrathe - 09-12-2013
This is awesome. My boys will be thrilled.
RE: Steam Family Sharing - DeeBye - 09-13-2013
This is a great idea.
RE: Steam Family Sharing - Frag - 09-13-2013
This announcement actually brought peace to our household.
RE: Steam Family Sharing - kandrathe - 09-16-2013
I was researching this more; http://store.steampowered.com/sharing
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http://steamcommunity.com/groups/familysharing/discussions/0/846964363934261867/