Introducing Steam Families - Steam News

Can we go through a real world example of how a Steam Family might share games?

Of course! Let’s say that you are in a family with 4 members and that you own a copy of Portal 2 and a copy of Half-Life. At any time, any one member can play Portal 2 and another can play Half-Life. If two of you would like to play Portal 2 at the same time, someone else in the family will need to purchase a copy of the game. After that purchase, there are two owned copies of Portal 2 across the family and any two members can play at the same time.

In this example, if your family chose to not buy a second copy, you can play any other game in your library while waiting for your family member to finish playing your copy of Portal 2.

this seems like a pretty damn big deal.

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I already do bootleg-ass family sharing with a couple friends so this might be cool to properly set up

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yeah now i might actually set up a legitimate family sharing thing with my sister. never felt worth it before

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The worst part always was if you were playing any game, library sharing was disabled, so even just that change is nice

Played all of Gaiden and Infinite Wealth because when my friend logged in on my computer while visiting I turned on family sharing without telling him…

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LMFAOOOO that’s fire. i’d be the library holder in this situation but it’s fine 'cause she has a mac so she won’t be able to play 85% of said library anyways oop

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I was just thinking in the shower yesterday how i miss sharing video games with friends from school.

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Oh shit this sounds really neat! :0

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I used to share my account with my sister in the past and this was always a kick in the nuts. Wonder how long this new version is going to run before they throw some restrictions though, we are in the age of cutting down on account sharing.

I think it’s pretty safe until gabe dies / steam goes public. Out of all the tech companies that have been around for the past decade or so, Steam has gotten worse at a much slower rate than everyone else.

Steam still sucks in alot of ways and they’re also motivated purely by profit, but their changes at least make sense to keep a sustainable business going.

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I agree. Valve’s libertarian brainrot cuts both ways. They generally don’t close “loopholes” in their policies, even if it would technically be better for them to do so.

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