Steam Family Sharing Now Requires a Two-Factor Authorization Process

Steam announced the Family Sharing near the end of 2013 that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games. Steam Family Sharing allows those in your trusted circle to play one another’s Steam games while each earning their own Steam achievements and storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It’s all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

Valve announced this week that they have made some significant changes to the way Family Sharing works in the most recent Steam client beta, where lenders must now identify the Steam users who may access and play their shared games on shared computers. This means that Family Sharing is now a two-factor authorization process, where up to ten Steam accounts on up to ten machines may be authorized to share your library at a given time. Any of these ten users may log into any of your ten authorized machines to access and play your shared games. Additionally, users may still request access to your shared library by sending you a request from any machine where you’ve installed games.

This allows lenders more control while reducing the risk of VAC or other bans resulting from an unknown user accessing and abusing shared games on an authorized machine. It sounds like a good decision to us as it does prevent abuse of games. Should the VAC bans rollover to the owner of the games? To us it sounds like it should be done to the offending account!