Report: Steam to Begin Letting Users Share Games

Steam

SteamYou can lend your friends a console disc. You can not lend them a game you buy on Steam. Or at least, you haven’t been able to previously. That might soon be about to change. Some code buried in the latest Steam client beta , first spotted by NeoGAF poster Grief.exe but which I can also see in my directory, has revealed the presence of something called a “shared game library”. For three lines of code, that seems to present a pretty clear plan: you can let other Steam users “borrow” your games, then take them back whenever it suits. As it stands, right now once you buy a Steam game that’s it. It’s yours, tied to your account, and you can’t trade it in, sell it or lend it like you could a physical console game. Letting PC gamers share their games, then, would be amazing, though how Valve is selling this to publishers I have no idea. Maybe every single full game can now be its own demo as well?

Read the full story at Kotaku.

Get Briefed Every Day!

Subscribe to my daily newsletter featuring current events and the top stories in AI, technology, media, and marketing.

Subscribe