Next week Steam plans to roll out a beta of Steam Family Sharing, intended to allow family members and close friend access to your Steam game catalog. They would be able to download games from your catalog to their own computers and play them as long as you’re not currently using your account. If you launch a game, they’ll be given a warning and a few minutes to log out (and an offer to buy the title, naturally) before getting booted. Note that no one is actually accessing your account, you’re just giving their Steam account permission to access your library. So your idiot friends/relatives couldn’t get you locked out or banned for running TF2 hacks or something stupid*.
Also, “some Steam games may be unavailable for sharing. For example, titles that require an additional third-party key, account, or subscription in order to play cannot be shared between accounts.” – I would assume this would make most Ubisoft, Origin/Bioware and GFWL titles unavailable.
Still, with no downside to the lender (since you’ll never NOT be able to play the games you own) this could be a pretty fun and exciting thing. And a way to unleash your giant Steam sale backlogs upon the world.
*Edit: Actually, it says “Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked if your library is used by borrowers to conduct cheating or fraud.” so while you wouldn’t get banned you could lose your sharing privileges if you have idiot friends misusing your catalog.
Thank you Valve! No wonder people love this company! Not only do they make great products, but they realize that you don’t have to be dickheads like EA and always go for the profit motive and make games less accessible. I’m sure there were people in the company against this, but why shouldn’t people be allowed to share games they buy without paying for it? Now if they can only do something about Half Life 3…
So, to be clear, if a friend is borrowing my library to play Portal 2, and I log on to play Dungeon Defenders, it’ll still kick my friend off even though we’re playing different games? That sounds like it’d get annoying.
Still, nobody else offers any option at all like this, so there’s no room to complain. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
This will be a boon for those in vastly different time zones. Game owner can be sleeping while a friend on the other side of the planet is borrowing their games.
It’s also a good way to see if a game is worth paying for while getting more than just your standard limited demo. One gets access to the full games while the owner is offline.
One thing that should be noted is that region restrictions still apply, so if a game isn’t available on Steam in, say, Australia, getting your American pal to share with you won’t suddenly let you play the game. This means sharing with my friend in Japan isn’t quite as good as it could be, but still, since our schedules are basically opposite it’s pretty nice.
The thing is, a lot of people use Steam as their general messenger service, too. Quite a few of my Steam friends keep their accounts on all the time. And what if I’m running the Steam messenger app on my phone or ipad? Does that count as being logged in? I think this will be of limited use to a lot of users.
Is there any word on how it will work with offline mode? I’m assuming you’ll have to be connected to play a borrowed game, but if the lender goes offline, what’s to stop them from playing the same (single player) game simultaneously?
My question: did they have this idea before or after Microsoft came up with it? It’d be really cool if it were Microsoft’s idea, and their bumbling means that Valve got to it first.
Okay, now this is sweet. It pretty much removes my need for offline mode at all, then. My other computer can just be my “friend.” This is exactly what I was complaining about in the Humble Bundle thread, and a feature request I made a while back. Valve is truly awesome!
(You don’t actually have to be in offline mode for games to start if your Internet connection is pulled. I did that test a long time ago. The only thing you have to worry about is if your computer loses power or otherwise does a dirty reboot while Steam is still running–as that will corrupt your log in cache.)
If they’re smart, the lender’s switching to offline mode will act just like starting a game–giving the friend the “purchase or quit” screen.
Hopefully you can also just leave the screen up with the frozen game, and come back to it later. Or at least they give you time to save for games that don’t autosave.
Hopefully Steam has taken that into account and is fine with it.
As long as the sharing accounts need to be online, the worst case scenario is that the main account could be offline playing at the same time. But is that so bad? If the main account wants to give up online features in order to let one single other account play their games, it may not be a big deal.
If it does mess up offline mode though it might not be worth it.