Steam Family Sharing has long been one of the handier features of Valve’s platform, although it’s always had a few limitations. Family Sharing lets you share your library with another Steam users, but only one person could access said library at once, regardless of what specific game you were playing. That could start to be a bit of a headache, particularly if you had a lot of people in your “family.”
Well, Valve is rolling out some changes to Family Sharing, which they’re rebranding simply “Steam Families.” The big positive change is that you and other family members can now be online using the library at the same time, as long as you’re playing different games. And if more than one person in the “family” has a game in their library, the corresponding number of people can play the game at once – so, if two people in the same family have a copy of, say, Portal 2, two people can play it simultaneously (this wasn’t previously possible).
“When you join a Steam Family, you will automatically gain access to all the shareable games that your family members own and they will also be able to access the shareable titles in your library. The next time you log in to Steam, this new ‘family library’ will appear in the left column as a subsection of your games list. You maintain ownership of your current titles and when you purchase a new game it will still show up in your collection.
Best of all, when you are playing a game from your family library, you will create your own saved games, earn your own Steam achievements, have access to workshop files and more. Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are currently online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.”
Sounds pretty good, although there may be some caveats. Needless to say, not everyone who uses Family Sharing are always actual family, instead sharing games with friends sometimes many miles away. Steam has always been pretty lax about this, but it seems they might be tightening things up…
“While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members. To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.”
It’s a bit vague, perhaps things won’t ultimately be that different, but there are already some folks reporting that they can’t add people to their families from different countries. You can check out the full Steam Families FAQ here and a list of games that support family sharing here.
Steam Families is available today in the Steam Beta Client, and should roll out to everyone before too long. What do you think? Is Family Sharing something you use? Will the updated Steam Families be something you’re more likely to take advantage of? As someone who uses the features pretty much exclusively with my actual family, I’m all for the changes.
