Steam Announces Limited Family Sharing

Does anyone remember how large the file of the beta client was? I might have to install it on my friend's laptop via my pitiful mobile internet. A quick check on the steam website says the regular Steam download is 1.5MB, but that seems incredibly small.

Edit: looks like the latest beta client update patch is 35MB, might be doable, we'll see.

Steam just hit 65 million active accounts, apparently with 6 million concurrent users.

Per the article, that's more than XBox Live.

Finally got a chance to play around with the Family Sharing, and it appears that though you can play games from another player's library, any DLC that player had will not be usable.

soonerjudd wrote:

Finally got a chance to play around with the Family Sharing, and it appears that though you can play games from another player's library, any DLC that player had will not be usable.

Huh.

Steam wrote:

WHO OWNS AND CAN ACCESS THE DLC AND IN-GAME CONTENT ASSOCIATED WITH A SHARED TITLE?
A guest will have access to the account holder’s DLC, but guests may not purchase DLC for a base game they don't own.

Maybe they need to download/install the DLC (via your library) before playing the base game?

Doesn't the DLC install automatically with the game, though? I should also note, the DLC is accessible from the same computer when logged in to the primary account (which owns the DLC). Just when logged in to the account sharing the library, I'm prompted to buy the DLC to use it.

Grumpicus wrote:
soonerjudd wrote:

Finally got a chance to play around with the Family Sharing, and it appears that though you can play games from another player's library, any DLC that player had will not be usable.

Huh.

Steam wrote:

WHO OWNS AND CAN ACCESS THE DLC AND IN-GAME CONTENT ASSOCIATED WITH A SHARED TITLE?
A guest will have access to the account holder’s DLC, but guests may not purchase DLC for a base game they don't own.

Maybe they need to download/install the DLC (via your library) before playing the base game?

I tested Skyrim and all expansions were there.

Is family sharing live for everyone? I never got an official invite to the beta and haven't seen any news about widespread rollout, but out of the blue yesterday I got a request from my son on the computer in my family room to share my library.

It seems to be working better than advertised as we tested The Walking Dead and were both logged into our own accounts on separate computers and were both able to play the game at the same time.

Very puzzling... but quite cool nonetheless.

Yeah, it rolled out to everyone a while back. We've been loving it at my house. My kids have always been in awe of my Steam library, now at least someone is getting use out of my pile.

Wow, I am in the beta and did not realize it is live for all. Good news

PaladinTom wrote:

Is family sharing live for everyone? I never got an official invite to the beta and haven't seen any news about widespread rollout, but out of the blue yesterday I got a request from my son on the computer in my family room to share my library.

It seems to be working better than advertised as we tested The Walking Dead and were both logged into our own accounts on separate computers and were both able to play the game at the same time.

Very puzzling... but quite cool nonetheless.

That is good news: as long as it's not a bug!

Duoae wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Is family sharing live for everyone? I never got an official invite to the beta and haven't seen any news about widespread rollout, but out of the blue yesterday I got a request from my son on the computer in my family room to share my library.

It seems to be working better than advertised as we tested The Walking Dead and were both logged into our own accounts on separate computers and were both able to play the game at the same time.

Very puzzling... but quite cool nonetheless.

That is good news: as long as it's not a bug!

Family sharing seems to be one-way also. While my son can see and use my library, he is unable to share his library with me.

Someone mentioned that it was only extended to all members of the family sharing group for now. I originally signed my two sons and myself up and we all three share to each other. Each account has to follow the same process on each computer. There's no implicit reciprocation.

Trying to set this up and a bit unsure of something. My son got a laptop. I installed Steam. I put my account on and set up family settings so he can only see certain games. I imagine that this is not the same as family sharing, tho, since cloud support could be hinky. Where do I go into my settings to actually set Family Sharing up. I think I should have access to the beta and such- just a bit unsure.

Here you go:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/VoTwuJk.png)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/pceKUSB.png)

I'm not sure what the authorized users bit is about, it may not be implemented yet. I'm hoping that means you can add people to your shared account list without having to log into all the machines you want to grant them access to.

Guessing I must not be in Family Sharing- thought I was. So, I can find the Family Sharing page on the web (http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/) but I have no idea how to find it in the client itself. I know this sounds like a dumb thing, and I agree, but I've tried a few different ways now that should work (but don't seem to). I've had issues finding some Steam content on the client in the past as well- don't think they make this clear, or I'm just oblivious- not sure which.

Go into Settings, then it's the screens LiquidMantis shows where you must authorize that device. Maybe he's in the client beta as well, though, because for me the Account section is a tab in Settings.

Oh, yeah. I'm using the Steam beta client too.

I got my invite to the beta and have been playing with it over the past few days. I have a beefy gaming rig in my office and an older pc with a lot of memory but a crappy video card hooked up to the television. Both are on wired network connections.

Frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised how well streaming works. Most games I tried worked without a hitch. Games that I had been playing with m/k in the office detected the controller hooked up to the television box and worked seamlessly.

I only tested New Vegas, Skyrim, Dishonored, The Walking Dead, CivV and X-Com. Everything worked great for the most part. Oddly, the Bethesda games were a little too dark and the sound was very low. Alas, even though I tried, I couldn't launch my heavily modded Skyrim game with SKSE, even though the shortcut showed up in my Steam list.

I also then tried loading The Witcher 2 (GOG version) through Steam. Most of the pixels of the opening cinematic froze even though I could still see it playing behind it. It loaded to the menu just fine, but when I started a new game it hung indefinitely on the load screen.

Lastly, I tried CivV and The Walking Dead from my laptop. If it wasn't for the text at the bottom of the screen showing the speed, I would have never known these games weren't locally installed. Amazing. I may be doing some travelling soon, and would love to see this work from the road someday.

The only downside is I have my office pc lock after 15 minutes and streaming requires the host pc to be unlocked.

Arise! So, I created a Steam account for my kids and my impressions are that it seems like a generous feature, but it actually has some awkward and unfortunate restrictions.

Set up: you might think you can just find a user through the Steam client and authorize family sharing, but it doesn't seem to work like that. In order to get it to work, I had to create a Steam account for the kids on their computer (obviously), then create a user account for myself on their computer, sign into my steam account from that user account, and then from there, have the client detect other Steam users on the computer and then authorize them for family sharing. Maybe I could have done this without creating a new user account, but I was trying to keep things partitioned. And, I think I get why they set up the process this way as it makes it relatively infeasible to rent out access to your Steam library.

The main frustration I have is that it looks like Family Sharing is set up on a 'per library' basis rather than a 'per game' basis. If I'm playing a game on Steam, the other computer is completely blocked from starting up that game or any other shared Steam game. Conversely, if the guest is playing a shared game and the account owner starts up that game or any other game, the guest is supposed to be kicked out after a short grace period. That said, I've seen at least one case where the kids started playing a shared game and I was able to start up the exact same game on my account without the kids getting kicked from their session.

Anyway, Family Sharing is obviously not supposed to allow both parties to play the same game at the same time, but I thought it was rather strange that Valve wouldn't allow the account owner to share out Game A while simultaneously playing Game B. It seems like this just encourages anybody who is sharing an account to play on an alternate platform, like GoG or Origin, while sharing is active.

Dropping into Offline mode should solve your issue, though not as much if you're wanting to play a multiplayer game that uses Steamworks to function.