Steam Family Sharing

[Aslanna]

September 11, 2013 - Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

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.

"Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared," explained Anna Sweet of Valve. "Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests."

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.

So much for people using the tired argument "Well you can't share digital games on Steam".

[kyoukan]

Kindle has a similar function where you can lend books to friends, and they become available in your library. Amazon did a ton of research with their own customers as to why they didn't buy a Kindle or why they own a Kindle but continue to buy real books. The number one answer by far was because their customers like to lend their books and magazines to friends when they are done with them. It is why people share music too. People like to share their media and sharing media with your friends to also enjoy validates your taste and opinion.

I am inherently mistrustful of digital distribution even though I am pretty progressive when it comes to technology. I am unsure how to take these kinds of gestures. I expect them to go away almost entirely once all brick and mortar game and book stores cease to exist. The reason these big media companies like digital media is because you can't share it and if someone wants to read/watch/play something you say is awesome, they have to go buy it.

[Winnow]

Shame there are so many console retards out there or Xbox One would have something similar. Still might later on despite the morons.