Valve’s Steam service may be about to do one of the things that made the Xbox One‘s original vision look appealing. In a press release issued today, Valve announced Steam Family Sharing, which will work as follows:
Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another’s Steam 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… 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.
This sounds similar to the Xbox One‘s original “family sharing” feature, which would’ve allowed up to ten people to log in and play your games, but just how similar is still in the air at the moment… because of Valve‘s wording. They specifically say you have to use a “shared computer,” which makes it hard to tell whether they mean you can only share if you physically log into the authorized machine (as in you actually have to be in the same room as it), or if you can access a person’s Steam library online. We’ll know soon, as the beta is set to launch next week.
In the meantime, get all the details here.
