One of the few popular features of the Xbox One is making a return. However, game sharing is not making its way to Xbox but Steam.

Starting with a beta rollout next week, Steam will allow you to share games with other users on the same computer.

The Family Sharing program appears to allow you to share games on the same hard drive among Steam users. All you have to do is request access to play a Steam friend’s game. When approval comes in, you can play it at any time your friend isn’t. (The original owner of the game gets priority to play.) To keep your progress separate of your friend’s, you’ll get separate save files and achievement tracking using the Steam cloud service.

The info Valve posted doesn’t explicitly indicate if you can work the system to play a friend’s game on a different computer. The FAQ says that sharing can be enabled on up to ten devices so that sounds like you can authorize sharing on up to ten computers that you log into your account on. I’d imagine that people will find out if you can pull that trick off very quickly next week.

However, that FAQ also seems to indicate that only one person can access your library at a point in time. So if you want to play your copy of Borderlands 2 and your friend is busy playing Metro: Last Light, they have to save before they get the boot. It’s not exactly the Xbox One family sharing program but it’s a start.

Family Sharing won’t open up all games to be shared, though. Games that require subscription fees, launch through a third-party client and those with regional restrictions aren’t eligible to be shared through this program.

Well, we all thought it was a good idea on the Xbox One. Once we get some hands-on testimonials as to how it works rather than press releases and FAQs, we can confirm that this is a good program.

Now, about refunds…

Source: Valve