Valve rolling out game lending feature with Steam Family Sharing

Tek7@Work

Tek7@Work

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Valve has announced it is rolling out a new game library lending service on its Steam platform, which will allow up to ten authorized devices to share the same library of games.

Dubbed Steam Family Sharing, the system is designed to accommodate asynchronous Steam library access across multiple shared computers. If two users attempt to play from the same library at the same time, the borrowing player will be prompted to either quit their current game or buy a separate copy.
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Source: Valve rolling out game lending feature with Steam Family Sharing

I'll be joining the Family Sharing Steam Group to sign up for the beta as soon as I get home from work tonight. :)
 
With both of my siblings having their own computers now, this will be a hugely beneficial thing. Would love if I could share multiplayer games, too (one purchase of War for Cybertron for the three of us? That'd be sick), but at least this means my brother can play my Dragon Age Ultimate and I can play his Skyrim Legendary without trouble. Dang. Yes please. YES PLEASE.
 
Odale said:
I hope Microsoft is taking notes.
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I'm pretty sure Valve ripped this one right out of the Microsoft playbook. The Xbone was originally intended to have this feature, but MS did an amazing job of clusterbombing their own brand (immediately before the head of Xbox jumped ship for Zynga, if that tells you just how severe the butchering was) with the always-online requirement, the requirement to have the Kinect One connected at all times (even to play single-player games that don't use the Kinect), and the unfortunate (for Microsoft) timing of the revelation that MS was handing user information over to the government for YEARS as one of the first (and, according to some documents, very eager) participants of the PRISM program.

Always-on Internet + always connected high-tech camera and microphone + cozy relationship with a government program that has been exposed as a massive breach of citizens' privacy?

Yeah, no.

Tangent time: I'd like to slip in a shameless plug for the PS4 right here, but I haven't seen anything that's convinced me to drop $400 plus the cost of a second controller plus tax just on the initial investment in a new console ecosystem when I have a perfectly good home gaming system with a x86 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and social sharing features already (yes, I'm talking about my computer). Respect where respect is due, though: Sony's showing a lot of love to indie developers and I've found myself wanting to buy a PS4 and a Vita more on principle than any real desire to play PS4 or Vita exclusives (but my passionate frugality vetoed that expense).

Microsoft pulled a 180 on their successor to the 360 (source of the joke: every gaming "journalist" on the Internet) and relented under the overwhelming fury of an understandably outraged consumer base, axing the always-connected requirement and the features (none of which, IMO, came close to justifying the absurdly anti-consumer stance MS adopted) that came with it.

In follow-up interviews, MS employees actually had the gall to make it sound like we plebes raised our torches and pitchforks and had turned down some amazing and generous gift from MS (which still makes my blood pressure rise, but that's a topic for a separate thread) for reasons as petty as privacy and consumer rights.

Yes, Don Mattrick left (and when a person lands at Zynga, you have to wonder if they jumped or were pushed) and Microsoft has been trying (and with a decent amount of success) to reverse the damage of the Xbone announcement debacle.

So Valve follows that disaster up by announcing that Steam will add the one good feature that Xbone axed. I can't help but wonder if the decision was fueled partly by fear of court cases currently being decided in Europe (regarding consumer rights to re-sell digital goods) and partly out of Gabe Newell's very public loathing of Microsoft and their decision to close down Windows 8 in a (arguably misguided) bid to get some of that sweet, sweet app store cash.

Either way, competition is good and this feature is going to be well-received by a lot of people. I'm curious to see how it works, but I don't see myself using it often as I already own way too many Steam games (thanks in large part to indie game bundles) and the sharing is an all-or-nothing deal. I could see myself sharing my library with Elihu (he's like a brother, so he counts as family! :)), but not many other people. I don't think my wife would be interested in playing most of my Steam games and, if she was, I could just hand her the keyboard and mouse to the computer in the living room and let her check a game out.

Regardless of motive, this is good news and I'm really interested in seeing how it turns out.
 
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