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Steam Family Sharing beta begins. First 1,000 players invited

steam family sharing beta valve

Hot on the heels of Valve’s Steam Box beta announcement, another Valve beta has begun. Steam Family Sharing is now available to 1,000 players with keys sent out to members of the Family Sharing group earlier this evening.

Family Sharing lets your friends play any game from your library so long as you give them permission. First, though, they need to log in on the same machine. Say you’re in the beta and you want to share your library with your friend then they need to come over to your computer and log into Steam. From there you can activate a sharing link between your two accounts and your library will appear as a remote library in their Steam game list.

Your games can then be downloaded to their computer, they can collect their own saves and achievements. There are restrictions, though. For one, if your friend is playing a game from your library and you boot up a game, too, then they’ve five minutes to quit the game before they’re kicked.

It will work great for if you’ve a friend who’s going on holiday and you’ve access to their library.

PC Gaming Wiki have broken down the process and are experimenting to discover every nuance of the new system.

There’s likely to be a great many changes made to it in the future.

Did you get one? I didn’t. That’s why my face is like this right now.