Valve announces Steam Family Sharing feature

Steam users will be able to borrow and lend their games to family members and close friends in the near future through Steam's newest Family Sharing feature. With this feature, a user will be able to share his games library to a maximum of 10 authorized users.

The Steam Family Sharing feature will allow 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.

Here's the official announcement of this feature:

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 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.

My thoughts

When I first read about this feature, all I that I can say was "Bravo Valve! Bravo!". I was thrilled that this feature was finally possible due to the fact that me and my brother enjoy playing games and we want a way to share our games to each other without much hassle.  I am currently expanding my games library and because of this I have a lot of game backlog ( I'm sure most steam users have this problem), some of the games that are in my library are not even played that much. Because of this some of the games in the library will finally fulfill their purpose of bringing enjoyment to someone (too much drama?)

Because this feature will soon be available, we may be able to see Microsoft bringing back their original plan of the Family Sharing feature for the Xbox One. ( I hope so.) I also think that this will decrease piracy to some degree because if you have a friend who has a legitimate copy of the game, why shall you risk your computer's integrity for a copy that may contain viruses that will ruin you unit. Come on guys, let's stick to legitimate copies of games!

To know more about this feature click here

This feature will be in beta by next week and if you want to be a part of it you can click here

What do you think about this feature? Post your comment below!

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