How To Share Games Using Steam Family Sharing

Set Up Steam Family Sharing

Steam Families on 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:

You can add up to 6 Steam accounts only. You can either share your whole library or don’t share anything. Not all games support Steam family sharing. If you’ve shared your library with multiple users, only one of them can access it and play the games at any given time. The number of players who can play the same game at once is directly proportional to the number of copies of the game in the family. The account that’s sharing holds the first priority. If you start playing a game and someone else is playing the same game, then they will be given a few minutes to save their progress and quit playing. Region restrictions. The accounts you share games with should be residing in the same country.

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.