Steam sharing with up to 10 people

[king3pj]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/11/steam-family-sharing-announced-enters-beta

It is still in beta right now but soon Steam will allow you to share your game library with up to 10 friends. It says there are exceptions. Games that require uPlay, Origin, and other launchers won't work for example. Only one person has access to the library at a time too but the owner always has priority. So I could share my library and you can play all You want when I'm not playing. As soon as I try to launch a game it will kick you back out and you'll have to play your own games for a while.

I think this sounds very cool. I say we start a satelliteguys group and share our libraries with each other as soon as this leaves the beta. Even better would be getting into the beta but I'm not sure how that works yet. We could save each other quite a bit of money.


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[king3pj]

Here is the press release.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/11436/?snr=1_4_4__109

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 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.

The thing that isn't really clear is how you authorize a friends computer. This is what will decide how easy it is to share with friends over the internet. If I can just pick people from my friends list and click authorize that's great. If I have to give people my account info and let them log in once from their computer to authorize it's not so great.


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[yourbeliefs]

I say we wait until the beta is over.

Nice feature though. Definitely has some good potential. The other launcher thing kinda sucks, but is expected.

 

[king3pj]

I'm fine with waiting until they work the kinks out if people are more comfortable with that than entering a beta. I'm fine with sharing my library with my fellow satellite guys as long as they don't make it too difficult to authorize friend's computers. I nominate meStevo into the group too. We are friends on Steam and he has more games in his library than anyone I have ever seen.


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[meStevo]

I feel so used, I mean loved.

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[yourbeliefs]

Speaking of Steam, am I the only one having an issue with games saying they're not installed when they really are? I almost had a heart attack the other day when it said that Saints Row The Third wasn't installed, and now I just had the same issue with The Binding of Isaac. Thing is, when you tell it to "Install" it acts like it needs to download and such but then all it does is just look at the files that apparently are already there and then runs the game. It's more of a nuisance than anything, but I don't like the idea that Steam doesn't even know what damn games I have installed. And considering I have my games on my SSD, I really don't have many games for it to keep track of locally.

 

[king3pj]

I have never had that happen to me but I haven't played any games in a couple days. Maybe there was a buggy steam update that I didn't get yet.


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