Steam Family Sharing Announced

Soon Steam will enable us to share our entire game libraries with close “friends and family”. On the surface, this seems like an amazing idea but the details paint it as a more “restrictive” feature.

This was taken from the “Steam Family Sharing” FAQ that Valve put up:

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.

This singular fact dissolved any interest I had with this feature.

I share Steam games with my brother. I do so via Steam’s built-in offline mode which allows the two of us to play Steam games at the same time. Single player games do not require an internet connection and thus I can happily share them with my brother.

With this new Steam sharing method, the only benefit my brother would get out of this is his own set of Steam achievements and cloud saves. He doesn’t care about Steam achievements and local saves are fine.

Unless there’s a change to how this game sharing or offline mode works, I don’t see any benefit in using this between my brother and I.