Steam Family Sharing is now live for all Steam users, Valve has announced. So now everyone can share their library with whomever they want. All users on the same account can earn their own achievements and save their game progress to the Steam cloud.
You can set up sharing now by authorising it on shared computers, but there are some caveats. Aren’t there always?
Users can only share their libraries on up to 10 devices and across up to five accounts. And it’s your entire library you are sharing. You can’t select specific games. Games that require third-party keys or subscriptions cannot be shared, and the shared library can only be used by one person at a time.
The account’s owner is always given priority. So if someone has shared their library with you and then logs in, you’ll be kicked out after a few minutes. You do get notified, however.
DLC is also shared, but only to people who don’t already own the base game. So if you’ve got Skyrim, but don’t have the DLC, you won’t be able play the DLC that’s in another library. If you don’t have the base game, you’ll get access to it all. Which is… odd.
Region restrictions remains in place, as well.