Your progress will also carry over if you decide to buy it.
By them sharing their library with you, you get full access to the game and any owned DLC to download and play.īecause used games don’t exist on PC, being able to try out games you’re interested in before committing is extremely valuable. Your friend has it though, and you want to see if it works on your setup, specs etc. Imagine for a moment there’s a game you want to play, or even try out, but one you don’t own. You can authorise up to five different "guest" accounts, on ten different PCs.
Steam Family Sharing allows you to share your entire games library with friends or family members, making your entire collection available to them any time they want to play, or vice versa. It’s relatively new in Steam’s life, but it has been around for two years. Yet one feature is seemingly never brought up. Not to mention its amazing connection utilisation when you want something downloaded.
The client itself is full of ways to customise your experience that modern consoles could stand to learn from.
It’s also the first place PC players check for game discounts every six or so weeks. It’s the foremost digital store for games on PC, and has been for years. Steam’s ubiquity as a platform cannot be overstated. So, are you ready to try out Steam’s Family Sharing feature right away? If so, let us know how the process went by shooting your opinions in the comment section down below.The one Steam feature you should be using a lot more of. This is something that other digital distribution services should also consider. Well, even with all the limitations in place, you’re still able to share your game library with your friends and family members, so that they can play the games without even having to actually pay for it.
SEE ALSO: 15 Best Free Steam Games You Should Definitely Play Share Steam Games With Ease Region restrictions will remain in place when lending or borrowing content.Additionally, VAC-banned games cannot be shared. Your Family Library Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned (Valve Anti-Cheat) if your library is used by others to conduct cheating or fraud.However, the other person will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing. If you want to play one of the games from your shared library and someone else is playing games using your library, you will get access to all your games immediately.If you’ve shared your library with multiple users, only one of them can access it and play the games at any given time.So, all the Steam games do not support family sharing. Some of the Steam games may be unavailable for family sharing, due to technical reasons.You can just either share your whole library or don’t share anything at all. You cannot share a specific game from your library.You can only authorize family sharing for up to 5 Steam accounts on up to 10 devices at a given time.Now that you’ve set up and started playing your friend’s games without paying any money, let’s take a look at some of the limitations that this feature has:
Once you’ve enabled and authorized access to your game library for a particular Steam account, the particular user has to simply log on to Steam with their username and password to access your shared library. The shared games will show up in the “Library” page alongside the user’s own games. Sharing Steam Games via Steam Family Sharing Well, that was easy, right? If you want to repeat the procedure on another computer, simply follow the same steps all over again. If you didn’t do that, the accounts simply won’t show up. Note: In order to make the eligible accounts appear on the window, the accounts need to be logged in atleast once from the same computer that you’re using to enable family sharing.
The eligible accounts that can access your game library will be listed below, for which you can enable/disable the Family Sharing feature separately by checking or unchecking the box by their username. Here, tick the option that says “Authorize Library Sharing on this computer”. Once this is done, you can go to Steam->Settings again and click on “Family” to check out the Family Sharing settings.You can do this as per your preference, but turning Steam Guard off is strictly not recommended. You can choose to receive Steam Guard codes either by e-mail or from the Steam app on your smartphone.