Steam Family Sharing has officially been announced, a new service that will allow close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games. According to Steam, the feature will go into a limited beta test starting next week.
Steam Family Sharing will not only allow close friends and family members to share their libraries of games, but each person will earn their own Steam achievements and store their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. That means you won’t have to worry about messing up your friend’s keybinds or saves when you’re sharing a game. The feature will be enabled by authorizing a shared computer, and once the device is authorized, the library of Steam games will be accessible for others on the machine to access, download, and play.
Obviously, two people can’t be playing the same, shared copy of the game at the same time. So don’t think that you’ll be able to play cooperative games by buying a single copy. The lender will always access and play their games at any time, and if a friend that is borrowing the games is currently playing, they’ll get a notification to either purchase the game or to quit playing.
Source: Steam
