How to Share Games Using Steam Family Sharing
Owning and playing games could bring about joy to gamers. Unfortunately, not everyone’s well off, and the increasing game prices in recent years have left budget gamers in despair. Digitalization has killed the good old days and habits of borrowing game discs from our friends, but not all hope is lost. One of the most popular platforms, Steam allows you to share games using the Steam Family Sharing feature, and the feature recently got much better with a major update. Here’s how you can share Steam games with your friends and family.
Set Up Steam Family Sharing
Steam Familieson Steam allows your friends and family members to play your games while earning their own Steam achievements and saving the game progress to the cloud. One of the prerequisites to using the Family Sharing feature is that you need to be friends with the account and add them to your Steam Family to start sharing games.
Creating and managing a Steam Family is easier than ever. Although we’ll see the steps for the latter at the end of this guide, here’s how to create a Steam Family first.
Invite Someone to Your Steam Family
It’s easy to invite someone to your Steam Family. Here’s how to do it.
Configure Parental Controls and Playtime
One of the highlights of the new Steam Families feature is that it makes it much easier to manage your family accounts, especially if you want to monitor and limit kids’ playtime.
You can configure Parental controls right from your Steam Families page. Here’s how to do it:
Request Games as a Child in Steam Family
Steam Family also makes it easier for the adult in the family to approve purchases from the Request section for the games when your child requests. Children in your Steam family group can send buying requests to adults, which they’ll need to approve. Upon approval, the game will be added to the account of whoever requested it.
How to Leave a Steam Family or Remove Someone
If you no longer want to be a part of someone’s Steam Family or you want to remove someone from your Family group, here’s how to do it.
Do note that once you leave a Family group, you will have to wait at least a year before you can join the same group again.
Steam Family Sharing: Limitations
Now that you’ve set up and started playing your friend’s games without paying any money, let’s take a look at some of the limitations that this feature has:
Even with all the limitations in place, you’re still able to share your game library with your friends and family members, so that they can play the games without even having to actually pay for them. What are your thoughts on Steam Family Sharing? Let us know in the comments.
Abubakar Mohammed
Abubakar covers Tech on Beebom. Hailing from a Computer Science background, the start of his love for Tech dates back to 2011, when he was gifted a Dell Inspiron 5100. When he’s not covering Tech, you’ll find him binge-watching anime and Tech content on YouTube, hunting heads in competitive FPS games, or exploring Teyvat in Genshin Impact. He has previously worked for leading publications such as Fossbytes, How-To Geek, and Android Police.
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