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It was one of the better features that the new Xbox One had when it was first announced, but it was stripped away when we threw up our arms at the daily activations, perhaps never to be seen again. At least, on the Xbox One that is. On Steam though, family and friend sharing is very real, as Valve plans to trial it with a select few people within the next week.
If you're one of the lucky few chosen for the trial, you'll have to activate it yourself. In order to do so, you need to authorise another device to access your Steam account, at which point your entire library of games becomes available for them to download and play. However, you can't both play the same game at the same time.
If you do try though, it won't boot your friend out, but will give them a warning that within a few minutes their session will end and yours will start.
But it's not just one or two people. Up to 10 different friends and family members can play games from your library at once – quite a spread. This not only allows for you to let your mates try a game you want them to buy, but also allows families to have one account between them, making it much easier for parents to manage expenditure on it and age ratings of games.
If you want to sign up for the Steam Sharing beta, head over to the official page here.
Kitguru Says: This isn't quite as good as letting us sell on our games like the European courts legally allow us to do, but it's a great start and a real boon for families. [Thanks PCGamesN]
Unfortunately, there’s 1 thing in this article that isn’t entirely correct if we may believe the FAQ: up to 10 people can be connected to eachother with Family Sharing, yes, but only 1 user can have access to a library at the same time. This means that once anybody in the group plays a game from a library, then the entire library of that user is off limits until that person ends his/her session. The only thing the others can do is play games in any of the other libraries. In small groups, this means people will probably have to ‘schedule’ who plays from which library and when. It’s possibly the biggest complaint (at the moment) and therefor offers a lesser improvement than people would initially think when they hear about this feature. Hopefully they will adjust these limitations so people will only be denied acces to the specific game when it’s being accessed or something else to make this feature more appealing to the masses.
“Can a friend and I share a library and both play at the same time?
No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time.”
Quoted from the official FAQ (http://steamcommunity.com/groups/familysharing/discussions/0/846964363934331891/)