Valve is removing the ability to share games on Steam via Library Sharing, replacing it with the controversial Steam Families.
Valve to Retire Steam Library Sharing Soon
One of the best features of Steam as a platform is the ability to share games from your library with your friends. For years, this has allowed users to play games they do not own themselves, making for a great way to show a game to your friends or even save a few bucks on a specific title.
However, it seems that this venerable feature of Steam will be going out the door in just a few months. That’s because Valve has confirmed that the Steam library sharing will be retired in early 2025.
While at first, this may seem like a bad choice on the part of the company and a detriment for the users, things aren’t as bad as they seem. This is because Steam already has the Steam Family feature, which will fully supersede the library sharing next year.
What Is Steam Families?
Introduced in September of this year, this feature consolidates Steam Family Sharing and Family View into one game-sharing hub that’s much more flexible than the previous system. For the past few months, both Steam Families and the older library sharing feature have co-existed, but Valve seems to now think the latter is redundant.
Fortunately, it seems that Steam Families is somewhat better than the older alternative. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the new system is that players can now share games from the same library at the same time. This is because Steam Family members can even share games when the Steam client is launched in offline mode. This means that two or more players can share a game at the same time, as long as only one of them is playing online.
Previously, this was impossible as users of the shared Steam library would have to “take turns” playing a game, just like sharing one PC in real life. Essentially, if a friend shared a game with you, they could kick you off when they started the game on their end.
Another thing about Steam Families is that now all games in your game library are automatically shared with other family members when you join the family. This could be both a bad and a good thing. For example, if you have a friend or family member, with whom you want to share all of your games, you can do it much more easily as it will save you the hassle of going through each title to share it manually. However, if you are for example a parent, you may have to go through your library by hand to restrict games you don’t want your child to play, like overly violent ones.
What Are Some Downsides to Steam Families?
One major benefit that the legacy Steam library sharing had is that players could more flexibly share games with many others. The current Steam Families feature allows for groups of only up to five different players. This means that you would no longer be able to share a single game with like 10 other people, although that happens rather infrequently.
However, a bigger disadvantage is the long waiting times between changing family groups. In theory, you can make a “family” with friends and share a common Steam library of games. However, if you want to join a different group, you might have to wait a long time. There is a one-year waiting period between joining Families, and each Family slot has a similar waiting time imposed on it. This means you will have to wait at least a year after a Family member leaves before a new person can join that same slot.
Another thing is that while adults can voluntarily leave a Steam Family at any point, minors will need to be removed from the Family by an adult member. A more detailed guide about how all the features of Steam Families works can be found on the official Steam page here.
Conclusions
As with every new major feature to Steam Families, this one has also been met with positivity and skepticism by the player base. While the new feature has its merits over the older system, there are also some downsides when it comes to who can actually benefit from it. One might think that both Steam Families and the older library sharing feature can coexist, allowing users to use whichever fits them better. However, Valve seems to think the older system is obsolete and simply takes up too many resources.
In the end, time will tell if Steam users will quickly adapt to the new way of sharing games on the platform, or if they will demand the company change the new system.
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