Geekscape Games: Steam Family Sharing First Impressions

The month of Valve is over, and all of those features announced with the Steam OS are but a distant memory. All except one, that is. The Steam Library Family Sharing just hit its public Beta, and some of us here at Geekscape got our hands on it just a bit early. Here are our initial thoughts.

The Steam Family Sharing program was announced back in September to much acclaim and fanfare. It allows user to authorize another computer and let someone have access to their Steam Library. Simple as that. But how does it work in practice?

I was invited to the Press Beta Test a few weeks back, and I was very excited to give the service a try. I had just built a pretty powerful gaming PC for my Dad and he was itching for some new games. Signing up was simple enough, I just went into my Steam settings on my account and opted into the Beta, and restarted. Then I was stuck.

There was no new interface added to my Steam, so then started the long and arduous process of hunting through every single menu looking for Family Share. I crawled through the settings and found only an option to view authorized accounts and computers, but no way to ADD anyone. The original press release said that users could request access to the library of someone else, so I figured the borrower had to ask the lendee. So I walked over to my Dad’s PC and started the long and arduous process of finding the request for authorization option.

Is it found by right clicking on your friends list? Nope. Is it found on the lendee’s profile page? No. Is it found on the store page for a particular game you want to borrow? No. There IS no option to request authorization. There IS no option to GRANT authorization, and here lies my biggest gripe with the service. The vague stipulations attached to actually getting the program to work.

When the product was first announced, the general consensus was that any user could be authorized (up to 10) and then have access to your games. If you wanted to play a game and they were using it, they would be given  “A few minutes to finish up or buy the game for themselves.”.  That sounds like if your Dad in another room (or state/country/planet) is playing your Bioshock and you want a crack at it then he’d be kicked off. That’s not how it works.

Wanna know how it works? The lendee (owner of the games) has to log into their account on the borrowers machine, then log out. Then the borrower logs in and can see a separate list of games from the lendee’s library. There is NO option to remotely authorize an account or computer. If you want to lend your games to a family member or friend that you do not have physical access to you are out of luck. The only way around this would be desktop sharing.

So far the remote authorization is the only complaint I have with the service, and from just lurking the Family Sharing support forums it seems everyone else shares my opinion. The service works great and every game that my Dad tried fired up no issue.

We are going to continue testing Steam Family Sharing and see if we run into any glaring issues. Valve has said they are going to be adding more features when Steam OS and Steam Machines beta is launched. Hopefully they will add in remote authorization.