Steam Family Sharing Goes Live; Share Games With Your Cheap Friends

Share computers? Now you can share your Steam games

Image Via: Valve

Went a little crazy during the last Steam sale? No shame bro, now your friends can benefit from your game hoarding ways with zero judgment about how many hours you've put into Gone Home.

Previously in beta, developer and Steam manager Valve has opened up its Steam Family Sharing to all users. Now its not quite Wife Swap but you can loan out a few games to share with loved ones and snooping roommates.

“Steam Family Library Sharing allows family members and their guests 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 shared computers and users.”

The way it works is that you – most graciously so – can authorize up to five other mooches to judgmentally sift through the fruits of Steam Sale binges and play your games from up to 10 different authorized devices. Don't worry, if someone is playing a game that you want it in on, it'll boot them out while saving their progress.

One catch: It's very difficult to set up when not using the same machine, meaning Valve takes the “family” part of sharing very literally meaning you can't share with your friend across the country, and that makes multiplayer out of the question as well; make them struggle through they're own Steam sales. Saying that, multiple devices can be used so we'll have to experiment to see just what the flexibility of the sharing is.

Have questions? Check out Steam's QA on the subject here.

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[Via RockPaperShotgun]

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