Family Sharing...Follow

That sounds remarkably pointless. For family at home, you may as well just share your Steam account (i.e. keep it logged in). For family/friends outside the home, no one would want to fight for their own account time.

Edited, Feb 22nd 2014 6:19pm by Jophiel

Yup, might as well not have it at all if that's the way they are going to implement it.

That's what everyone seems to have assumed. But reading the discussions on the Steam forums, that is not the case.

If you have Darkness II, and Skyrim. And your playing Skyrim, your friend or family member cannot play Darkness II (or any games from your library).



Edited, Feb 22nd 2014 8:20pm by TirithRR

I'd imagine it's so that on paper they can say, "We allow players to share their games, just like Consoles(*). Buy our SteamBox!"

Your other discs are too worried if Dishonored is still OK to work properly.

I tried something last year with my son - maybe it was Family Sharing. He set it up on my computer (and my steam account) when he was home. After we both had issues accessing our games - let alone each other's games. Then we had to call each other - no one likes to have to call their mother to access their games.

So we undid everything.

I still share nook books with him.

Eh, I'm fine with paying $5 or less for a game and not sharing it. I just think that an advertised method of "sharing" is stupid when it doesn't really allow it or adds so many strings as to make it unusable.

Do you mean to say "Console Disk" instead of "hardcopy"? Because these days for the PC market, that statement is just no longer true for a large number of games.


Edited, Feb 25th 2014 11:42pm by TirithRR

It seems that Family Sharing is fully released now. And it appears that you actually have to log into a computer, authorize that computer, then log out and have the other accounts log into the authorized computer. You cannot do it completely remotely without giving someone your login details.

I did this with my wife's laptop and our spare laptop. Honestly at least its a start. She doesn't have to kick me off Steam every time she wants to play GTA, because you know I talk to SO many people on Steam, but that's not the point. Before it was hassle all the time now its just a hassle once then after the initial setting its good to go.


I asked on the Steam forums for a beta invite and got a random one sent, messed around with it or a week a few quirks to be sure.

First was the logging in authorizing the account then logging out and etc. its a bit annoying. But I understand it because its ment for people close to you.

Another weird thing is if your playing over the network its just a pure remote desktop session. One of our old laptops with a Geforce 120M cant play stuff at high details but my main PC can. So I used the remote play option. You log into your account on both the PC and Laptop and if your on the same network it won't kick you off from the other machine. You click the game you have installed on your PC on the Laptops Steam and click "Stream" it will stream the game to your laptop over your network.

The thing is it actually plays the game on the main PC but takes inputs from the remote host. So essentially no one can do anything on the main PC because the game is running. Also "authorized" accounts cant stream, only install and play your library. I was having issues because the laptops screen is 1366x768 and my monitor is 1920x1080 so the game was too big for the laptops screen. I messed around but just gave up since I havent had much time to game recently (yay college)

Yeah pretty much. I understand the process has to be running on the PC but I figured it would be in a closed window or something. Like the PC doing all the calculations but sending the rendering to the Laptop via the network.

I mean the way Steam does it is a way that has been around for a long time, just built in now.

I have absolutely no idea how this works, but would that even be possible? I mean, how much data would that be per second?