Tutorial How to share your games on Steam for free?
Published on 02/05/2023 at 09:05
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Steam is the number 1 platform for playing video games on PC. Since its inception and popularization, Steam has continued to evolve, including adding new features. For a few years now, Steam has been offering you the opportunity to share your games for free with your friends, and to be able to play their games in exchange.
Why share your Steam games?
Since its inception in 2003, Steam has offered a large game store. Basically confined to a few exclusives from its parent company, Valve, Gabe Newell’s platform currently offers no less than 50,000 titles. Between Counter Strike, Horizon Zero Dawn, and many other indie games, Steam is packed with new gaming experiences.
Of course, all of this has a price. Between €1 for some games, against the usual €70 for a blockbuster game (AAA). On average, we find games between 40€ and 70€, so imagine the bill after several years of PC games…
Fortunately, Steam has thought of everything and now offers a library sharing service. To put it simply, you will be able to play games owned by your friends for free, and vice versa.
Of course, you have to trust your friend completely since that person will need to log into your Steam account on their own computer.
The steps to follow to play your friends’ Steam for free
After logging into your friend’s Steam account, click on the Steam tab at the top left of the software. Then select Settings from the menu.
As a prerequisite, it is imperative to activate Steam Guard on both accounts in the Account tab. This is a double-authentication security measure so you don’t have your account stolen.
Here you have access to all the options of your Steam account. Like managing your downloads, controllers used, etc. In our case, we will focus on the tab Family.
In this menu, you will have access to several parameters. Check the box Allow Family Sharing on this computer. There you will have access to the different accounts that will be able to access your game library. Simply tick the box corresponding to your account (your nickname).
From now on, you will have access to your friend’s library, and he will have to do the same manipulation on his side to have access to your games.
You may have noticed, but there is an underlined Manage Family Mode link on the Family tab page. By clicking on it, you will have access to the history of people enjoying your games, as well as the different devices that have access to your Steam library.
From this menu, you can revoke at any time a PC whose content you no longer wish to share.
Attention !
It is important to know that you will not be able to play a shared game at the same time as your friend. In this case, I want to launch Warhammer 40K Darktide, but I get an annotation telling me that the account sharing this game with me is already playing this game and I might get cut off. If the person is already playing the same game, Steam will automatically redirect you to the game purchase page.
On the other hand, nothing prevents you from playing it at the same time as your friend who is playing another game.
Some games are not available for library sharing.
