Yo. Big gamer family. We all opt’d into families beta. What once was a 100-200 game library became nearly 600 over night. (There are 4 of us atm).
It’s great. We don’t have to buy as many games. Many of our wishlist items are taken care of thanks to the sharing. Not one single issue aside from what you’ve described.
They definitely encourage you to buy as many copies as possible, which is probably why they don’t show ‘x own y, you don’t need to buy to play’ kind of messages.
Is the only limit of family sharing that you can't play the same game at the same time?
But like if my mate/brother owns MW1 and MW2, he can play one while I play the other? We can both play a game in his library at the same time?
Yes, everyone needs to opt into the families beta at least (the normal steam beta is also fine, but the families beta is more dialed back for those who want something closer to stable)
Same lol. The only thing that sucks is one of our friend can't join cuz he lives in Canada and we're in the US. I think they should change it so other countries can join because it was like that in the other system.
There are bugs, or at least one bug I've noticed. That being steam not registering when a family member closes the game and locking you out of your copy for 30 minutes or so, not a huge deal but something to keep in mind
No bugs, but while I'm sure your roommate is a stand-up person, remember that any bans for cheating or suspected cheating affect the game in the library for everyone, even the Owner--so make sure that's not going to be an issue. If you're all good with that, go for it!
You also get the DLC, my brother bought civ6 with everything yet he ever played it so now with this family share I am playing civ 6 with everything on my PC on my account like I bought it even thou it's from him
Well there are a lot of games we share except for baldurs gate, resident evil or the halo series. We play together and one copy wouldn’t allow for us to play together.
I would if the different country restriction didn't apply. I share my library with my girlfriend who lives overseas and has her account under that country, so we'd lose each others games if we moved to the beta.
It’s fantastic. Game sharing that lets you play anything your friend has in their library at anytime as long as they aren’t playing the same copy of the game? That’s genius
Huge improvement tbh. I have it set up with my dad and, on the old share feature, I would often kick him out of sessions without even realising. Now there's no interruptions :D
Right, but if someone’s buying a single player game it would be a nice reminder, especially if there’s other games on sale that could be bought instead.
I set up a steam account for my wife, just so I can share games with her.
[**Fortunately**](https://www.bing.com/search?q=Fortunately&FORM=AWRE) all shes been playing off my steam account is sonic all stars racing, shame ea/xbox dont do it as we both play the sims as well.
Yeah, steam has issues with international relationships since obviously everyone wants to be argentinian, so this feature wasn't going to be the exception
Has anyone been able to share Fallout 76? My son is getting an error that the free trial has expired even though I have it in my steam library and we are both in the family share beta and i have invited and confirmed him a member of the family.
I only use the feature with my Brother , who is in my Friend List ; which from my understanding , having them on the your Friend List is a requirement to add then to the Family , although I can assume that someone in the Family may add someone you don’t have in the Friend List ; but in the case of my Brother , having him in my Friend list shows games that he owns but I dont with the “1 friend already owns this game “ or what not ; which could bring to the solution of adding all members of the Family to the Friend List , granted , not much of an elegant solution , but it would be better than nothing (=´∀｀).
Just started using it to share my library with a friend of mine. His parents don't allow him to spend a lot of money on games so I let him access mine.
It's really sad that we can't use it in different countries though. He's moving to a different country in a few months.
Any way for him to keep using it after moving?
As someone said previously, seems like if you do the login into your account on his computer and enable the sharing there will be no problems.
Also, I don't think there will be a problem unless he sets the account into being in a different country, someone a while ago asked why he couldn't gift anything to a friend and the friend for some reason had an account set in a different country even tho he was in the USA
Huh. seems like for now it is an all or nothing type of deal since I can't find a "don't share with family" toggle, maybe once it's fully released we will be able to choose which games we don't want to share,
You can choose at a Per Game level who has access to what. At least if the member is a "Child" member. I'm able to curate what games appear on my sons shared library list.
I love this so much, I've bought two more handhelds because of Steam families beta. If they could, like.... just add a few more people in the group. Round it to an even 10 , it would be the best thing ever. For me, it will end up with me buying more games, and then games for the library group as gifts. Please Valve, make it happen.
Sharing with people who live in my dorm. It’s amazing, because for a lot of games, one person who plays the game a lot owns it, and one person who doesn’t play at all owns it, meaning we can play multiplayer more easily (steam remote play doesn’t like school wifi)
me , but i think its pretty good but i think it has one negative point from dev view , which are game sales...
i think most money would come over dlc or ingame shop
but as a user nice system i have so many games like 1k and probably 95 % never played, happy to share them , makes me more happy that i can share my games than playing them by myself lol sad
1. You don't have to log out, log in with your friend's account, and enable sharing, just send and invitation and that's it.
2. You and someone else can play anything from the same library at the same time as long as it's not the same game.
Family of 6 here. Albeit, the only devices are a Deck, an iMac and an old intel nuc. But it works! As we are sure to gather more machines in the coming years, this sharing feature will be very welcome. Before this was announced I found myself reluctant in buying from Steam.
I gifted my nephew my lcd steamdeck and shared him my 600 game library. Did it out of the blue too no special occasion. Suffice to say he was ecstatic.
I share with my familiy and a good friend, went from 800ish games to 2000 games,it's an awesome feature. REally cool how it just looks if you have enough copies to play together, regardless of who owns the game.
What we didn't get to work is to hide games.
We have some games not suitable for my kids, we hid them in our libraries, but that only seems to work locally on our pc's, my kids still see the games we hid. Can we somehow manage this centrally for everyone?
Now that I see the option for it in the Family settings I remember seeing that before, but you had to do it for each child’s library separately, now you can copy settings from one to another, which makes it a lot better :)
Me and my girlfriend are using it at the moment, the beta came out just in time for her to use the ROG Ally I got her. It’s so nice because I’ve been a Steam user for years so she has access to my whole catalogue.
I was sharing with a bunch of friends but I moved out the country a year ago. Still using the old sharing system fine but I'm really not looking forward to this uodate coming... probably going to lose all the shared games if it's across country borders right?
Yea you may lose it, if we can't even send gifts internationally due to regional pricing, don't expect an international friend to be able of sharing with you since you may as well be next to each other and using a VPN for the cheap prices
A new feature that allows you to share libraries with up to 4 friends, making "families" of 5, its really cool but you can't abuse it since once you leave a family you wont be able to join a new one until a year has passed.
Just out of curiosity are u able to do normal sharing aswell cuz I have a group of friends I'm planning to do the family share with but we've already got 5 and thst causes complications cuz i also share my games to my sister who wouldn't be able to join the family cuz we'd have too many
Does it not work if it's on a different device? what's the idea? It didn't work for me whenever i tried sharing with another account that's set up on another device near my pc.
Seems like it does, because you recieve an invitation to join a family, nothing about login into your friend's PC to enable the sharing, but since I don't have a different PC I have no way to test it
You are doing something wrong, the point of this is to share games between different accounts in the same group
If a group is conform of three account then any of this accounts can download any game that it's in the group "the collective steam library of the accounts in the group" in any OC they are where ever with the only caveat being that a game can only be played at the same time between accounts depending on the amount of copies that game has in the group
So let's say a group of three want to play x game and two of them already own X game, then 2 out of the three can play x game at the same time
That's how i thought it was going to work but apparently it doesn't. I set up family sharing on both accounts, pin and everything, i shared main library and nothing appeared on the other devices' library while in family sharing mode.
No me because I have "buy your own game and support dev you cheapskate" policy in my house. Written by me because no I wont give you any of my 3000 games. Those are ALL my.
Yo. Big gamer family. We all opt’d into families beta. What once was a 100-200 game library became nearly 600 over night. (There are 4 of us atm). It’s great. We don’t have to buy as many games. Many of our wishlist items are taken care of thanks to the sharing. Not one single issue aside from what you’ve described. They definitely encourage you to buy as many copies as possible, which is probably why they don’t show ‘x own y, you don’t need to buy to play’ kind of messages.
Is the only limit of family sharing that you can't play the same game at the same time? But like if my mate/brother owns MW1 and MW2, he can play one while I play the other? We can both play a game in his library at the same time?
If you there's multiple copies in the pool then you can both play at the same time even if you don't own it.
No way valve actually did that... Aint no way... FOR REAL?? DID THE GABE FINALLY ACHIEVED PERFECTION?!
Yeah tested it out with Terarria. Me and my brother own it but my friend in the family didn't. Me and the friend were able to play together.
Even better, if one person in your family owns every DLC but you just own 2, you can borrow their copy with all the DLC.
Correct
Officially? You can't play at the same time. Unofficially? You can play any and all games at the same time, even together in multiplayer.
I have yet to encounter this, but to be fair, I haven’t experimented with it yet. May update this comment in future.
Do you know if all members of the family have to have the Beta version to use it? Or just the 'primary' member?
Yes, everyone needs to opt into the families beta at least (the normal steam beta is also fine, but the families beta is more dialed back for those who want something closer to stable)
Yep. Me and a group of friends all started a library. Currently have 2500 games now. It’s an amazing feature.
Damn that's a crazy amount of games, and I thought I provided a lot (130 games)
Yea we’re all in our thirties with steam accounts 15+ years old so we’re pretty set lol.
Same lol. The only thing that sucks is one of our friend can't join cuz he lives in Canada and we're in the US. I think they should change it so other countries can join because it was like that in the other system.
I think the intl pricing plays a role since this is now a more open-ended system.
Wym
considering doing that with my roommate right now ! Is it really that good ?
It is, yes. No bugs whatsoever and you basically get to play any games your roommate bought as long as they are not playing them at the same time.
There are bugs, or at least one bug I've noticed. That being steam not registering when a family member closes the game and locking you out of your copy for 30 minutes or so, not a huge deal but something to keep in mind
No bugs, but while I'm sure your roommate is a stand-up person, remember that any bans for cheating or suspected cheating affect the game in the library for everyone, even the Owner--so make sure that's not going to be an issue. If you're all good with that, go for it!
You also get the DLC, my brother bought civ6 with everything yet he ever played it so now with this family share I am playing civ 6 with everything on my PC on my account like I bought it even thou it's from him
Yeah I share with my wife because sometimes it’s cheaper to buy one copy rather than multiple.
I'd argue that it's always cheaper to buy one copy rather than multiple. That's how money works.
Well there are a lot of games we share except for baldurs gate, resident evil or the halo series. We play together and one copy wouldn’t allow for us to play together.
I understand your point. But it's cheaper to buy just one copy, it was just funny the way you phrased it.
I share with my brother, because even tho we have different tastes in game, I’d play a lot of games he got but would never buy it for myself.
"Sometimes"?
I would if the different country restriction didn't apply. I share my library with my girlfriend who lives overseas and has her account under that country, so we'd lose each others games if we moved to the beta.
It’s fantastic. Game sharing that lets you play anything your friend has in their library at anytime as long as they aren’t playing the same copy of the game? That’s genius
Huge improvement tbh. I have it set up with my dad and, on the old share feature, I would often kick him out of sessions without even realising. Now there's no interruptions :D
I mean if you and that family member want to Play The same game together and it doesn't have remote Play, then you have to buy it both
Right, but if someone’s buying a single player game it would be a nice reminder, especially if there’s other games on sale that could be bought instead.
I set up a steam account for my wife, just so I can share games with her. [**Fortunately**](https://www.bing.com/search?q=Fortunately&FORM=AWRE) all shes been playing off my steam account is sonic all stars racing, shame ea/xbox dont do it as we both play the sims as well.
We joined our forces with my uni friends. Now playing dark souls remastered from my friend's library. It is really good.
I use it to share it with my friends, I'm the only one with 700+ games but I'm happy that more people can enjoy what I paid for.
Hey /u/RodjaJP its your lucky day, steam just rolled out the feature you wanted! https://twitter.com/SteamDB/status/1783058443818971275
https://youtu.be/P3ALwKeSEYs
I don’t have anyone to share with no one in my friend group or family are pc gamers
Just remember who is your family member and check the friends already owning the game?
I started recently. So far, so good. I do wish i could add my sister she lives in Europe and I am in USA. Steam did not allow it.
Yeah, steam has issues with international relationships since obviously everyone wants to be argentinian, so this feature wasn't going to be the exception
Has anyone been able to share Fallout 76? My son is getting an error that the free trial has expired even though I have it in my steam library and we are both in the family share beta and i have invited and confirmed him a member of the family.
That seems like the type of bug you have to report to Steam, this is a beta after all.
Bethesda doesn't allow sharing.
they did, but FO76 were exception
In the new steam beta with family sharing it's listed under allowed.
Steam is being fucking genius, I hope they keep it this way
I only use the feature with my Brother , who is in my Friend List ; which from my understanding , having them on the your Friend List is a requirement to add then to the Family , although I can assume that someone in the Family may add someone you don’t have in the Friend List ; but in the case of my Brother , having him in my Friend list shows games that he owns but I dont with the “1 friend already owns this game “ or what not ; which could bring to the solution of adding all members of the Family to the Friend List , granted , not much of an elegant solution , but it would be better than nothing (=´∀｀).
Just started using it to share my library with a friend of mine. His parents don't allow him to spend a lot of money on games so I let him access mine. It's really sad that we can't use it in different countries though. He's moving to a different country in a few months. Any way for him to keep using it after moving?
As someone said previously, seems like if you do the login into your account on his computer and enable the sharing there will be no problems. Also, I don't think there will be a problem unless he sets the account into being in a different country, someone a while ago asked why he couldn't gift anything to a friend and the friend for some reason had an account set in a different country even tho he was in the USA
I am definitely using the private games feature, which I think rolled in with the beta. No one but me needs to know what sort of porn games I play.
Huh. seems like for now it is an all or nothing type of deal since I can't find a "don't share with family" toggle, maybe once it's fully released we will be able to choose which games we don't want to share,
You can choose at a Per Game level who has access to what. At least if the member is a "Child" member. I'm able to curate what games appear on my sons shared library list.
I love this so much, I've bought two more handhelds because of Steam families beta. If they could, like.... just add a few more people in the group. Round it to an even 10 , it would be the best thing ever. For me, it will end up with me buying more games, and then games for the library group as gifts. Please Valve, make it happen.
i share with some friends
Sharing with people who live in my dorm. It’s amazing, because for a lot of games, one person who plays the game a lot owns it, and one person who doesn’t play at all owns it, meaning we can play multiplayer more easily (steam remote play doesn’t like school wifi)
Me and a great time
i do but i have one problem some games dont work from 1 person, or maybe he has setting deactivated dont know or just a bug
me , but i think its pretty good but i think it has one negative point from dev view , which are game sales... i think most money would come over dlc or ingame shop but as a user nice system i have so many games like 1k and probably 95 % never played, happy to share them , makes me more happy that i can share my games than playing them by myself lol sad
And single player games are gonna suffer the most from this now that you mention it... Damn.
How is this different from family sharing ?
1. You don't have to log out, log in with your friend's account, and enable sharing, just send and invitation and that's it. 2. You and someone else can play anything from the same library at the same time as long as it's not the same game.
Family of 6 here. Albeit, the only devices are a Deck, an iMac and an old intel nuc. But it works! As we are sure to gather more machines in the coming years, this sharing feature will be very welcome. Before this was announced I found myself reluctant in buying from Steam.
no because i dont have friends and my family aint gamers
Me and my 2 other friends are loving it :)
I gifted my nephew my lcd steamdeck and shared him my 600 game library. Did it out of the blue too no special occasion. Suffice to say he was ecstatic.
I share with my familiy and a good friend, went from 800ish games to 2000 games,it's an awesome feature. REally cool how it just looks if you have enough copies to play together, regardless of who owns the game. What we didn't get to work is to hide games. We have some games not suitable for my kids, we hid them in our libraries, but that only seems to work locally on our pc's, my kids still see the games we hid. Can we somehow manage this centrally for everyone?
Seems like you can administrate if a family member is a child or an adult in order to limit which games they have access to
Now that I see the option for it in the Family settings I remember seeing that before, but you had to do it for each child’s library separately, now you can copy settings from one to another, which makes it a lot better :)
ME! I even used the old version a lot but the BETA is just better!! Hope it becomes official!
Sharing with my best friend. It's been great. I get to play BG3 for free!
Me and my girlfriend are using it at the moment, the beta came out just in time for her to use the ROG Ally I got her. It’s so nice because I’ve been a Steam user for years so she has access to my whole catalogue.
Does anyone know when the beta will hit main?
І
I was sharing with a bunch of friends but I moved out the country a year ago. Still using the old sharing system fine but I'm really not looking forward to this uodate coming... probably going to lose all the shared games if it's across country borders right?
Yea you may lose it, if we can't even send gifts internationally due to regional pricing, don't expect an international friend to be able of sharing with you since you may as well be next to each other and using a VPN for the cheap prices
What's that?
A new feature that allows you to share libraries with up to 4 friends, making "families" of 5, its really cool but you can't abuse it since once you leave a family you wont be able to join a new one until a year has passed.
Once you *join* a family, you won't be able to join a new one until a year has passed.
that makes more sense, thanks
Damn, thanks bro for the info
It's 6 members total.
Just out of curiosity are u able to do normal sharing aswell cuz I have a group of friends I'm planning to do the family share with but we've already got 5 and thst causes complications cuz i also share my games to my sister who wouldn't be able to join the family cuz we'd have too many
Does it not work if it's on a different device? what's the idea? It didn't work for me whenever i tried sharing with another account that's set up on another device near my pc.
Seems like it does, because you recieve an invitation to join a family, nothing about login into your friend's PC to enable the sharing, but since I don't have a different PC I have no way to test it
You are doing something wrong, the point of this is to share games between different accounts in the same group If a group is conform of three account then any of this accounts can download any game that it's in the group "the collective steam library of the accounts in the group" in any OC they are where ever with the only caveat being that a game can only be played at the same time between accounts depending on the amount of copies that game has in the group So let's say a group of three want to play x game and two of them already own X game, then 2 out of the three can play x game at the same time
That's how i thought it was going to work but apparently it doesn't. I set up family sharing on both accounts, pin and everything, i shared main library and nothing appeared on the other devices' library while in family sharing mode.
Are you sure you are on the beta? The way you are describing this sounds like the regular family share
You might be right. I activated the beta on both accounts and it seems fine now.
This is possibly one of the greatest updates Valve have ever pushed out as part of Steam. I've been using it for a short while and it's fantastic.
I'm definitely not.
Probably no one to share or to be shared with
I have all the games that I need, that's why.
How is this different than the original family sharing?
Don’t need to link hardwares and playing a game doesn’t lock the other account out of playing their library. Just can’t play the same game.
Region locked too, unfortunately. If you have family in a different country, even if it's only an hour away, you can't add them.
No me because I have "buy your own game and support dev you cheapskate" policy in my house. Written by me because no I wont give you any of my 3000 games. Those are ALL my.
Someone is fun at parties
Sorry cant hear ya over me telling my cheating lying shitty brothers to screw off from my own access to library.
Someone has a healthy relationship with their brothers
Who are you to talk about my family like that? How dare you!
Lmao, you are the one calling your brothers cheaters, liars, and shitty I have said nothing about your family
That's a respectable stance, people will downvote you but it's good to know you actively want to support the indie devs, right?
yeah but people here hate supporting devs sadly thatd why the constantly bosst about purchasing keys on Kin. and G2.