Steam sharing beta. Exactly what it says on the tin

Phatose on 11/9/2013 at 20:11

(http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/)

Never thought I'd actually see this, but goddamn. Loan your game libraries to other people, let them play it. You keep access, but you can't both play the same game at once - if they're playing and you try to start the game, they get booted. But still....damn.

Ostriig on 11/9/2013 at 20:52

That's pretty cool, I like the idea as long as it can stay reasonably "local" to the owner of the games. So that it works like lending discs between people old-school, not massive price cuts in exchange for scheduling. At the end of the day, if I can get Kevin Bacon to say he's my cousin I'm pretty sure our timezones don't cross much, so bam, half price GTA V.

Phatose on 11/9/2013 at 21:00

Actually, I don't think that would work since Rockstar uses that godawful Rockstar social thing. Things that require secondary login won't work.

Fafhrd on 12/9/2013 at 00:11

Quote Posted by Phatose

You keep access, but you can't both play the same game at once - if they're playing and you try to start the game, they get booted.

It's a bit more restrictive than that. You can't play games from the same library at once. So if you're playing Portal 2 from a friend's library, and they fire up Legend of Grimrock, you get a notification to either buy the game and keep playing, or get booted until such time as that friend is no longer playing any games.

Phatose on 12/9/2013 at 01:26

Oh. Well, that kind of sucks then.

froghawk on 12/9/2013 at 02:13

I'm pretty sure this is just for families who have multiple members with steam accounts on the same computer. I don't think you can share with people working from a different machine.

PigLick on 12/9/2013 at 02:35

Not so sure about that, why the emphasis on being 'booted' from the game if the library's owner logs in? If it was only meant for use on one machine that feature wouldnt be needed.

Renault on 12/9/2013 at 02:50

The FAQ says you can authorize up to 10 "devices" to share your library of games.

Yakoob on 12/9/2013 at 03:30

Hmm I kinda think that's... fair? I mean it would be nice to be able to play two different games from the same user at the same time, but that's just inviting "casual piracy." I feel this is kind of an understandable compromise for customers and devs.

Angel Dust on 12/9/2013 at 03:41

Sounds pretty dumb to me. I'm on Steam most nights so that effectively means I could never lend any of my friends anything as they play at the same time. If you could create a subset of your library for sharing i.e games I am not playing right now, then I could see it working but as it stands now it's almost completely useless.