Valve has announced that it will discontinue the Steam library-sharing feature in early 2025. Moving forward, the new “Steam Families” system will be the only way for users to share their games with friends and family.
Introduced in early 2024, Steam Families has now been rolled out to everyone and brings several improvements over the previous sharing system. One of the key features is the ability to share your library with multiple people simultaneously. While it still does not allow multiple users to play the same game at the same time, this change is seen as a significant enhancement.
Valve had previously hinted that it would phase out the basic library-sharing feature, but an official timeline has not been provided until now. Although an exact date hasn’t been set, the transition is expected to happen sometime between January and March 2025. Valve will likely provide a more detailed announcement as the date approaches.
How to set up sharing on Steam?
If you want to change how you share within Steam, Valve provides easy access to include friends or family within the Steam Families system.
Available since September 2024 for all users, go to the settings and click on “Settings”. Some options will appear, so click “Family and Sharing” and create a family there. From there, you can invite new members using the name they use on their accounts.
The Steam Families system is more complete than the simplified sharing system that will be removed, allowing users to apply parental control rules. The owner of the “family” can also recover the account of children who no longer have access to their account as long as they are part of the group for at least 30 calendar days.
