From Steam to Origin, which services let you share your PC game library with family and friends?
Remember the old days when you could just go grab a SimCity CD-ROM out of your older brother's room to play on your own PC, then take it over to your friend's house and show him how awesome it was? Afterwards, his mom took you and your best buddy to hang out at the mall and there you bought more games and forgot all about SimCity. That is until your brother realized it was missing and what followed turned into a very unpleasant experience for you.
Well, those days are over. Today, almost all of our games are delivered to us digitally over the internet. Skipping the trip to the store every time we need a gaming fix has made life convenient but at the expense of flexibility in what we can and cannot do with the games that we "own". I put that in quotes because typically you do not actually own anything, but they are only given a license to use that digital content according to the store's terms of service.
I don't like paying for things twice. So as a parent with young children I'm always cognizant of how I obtain games that I may want to share with them either now or in the future. For me, if the price of the game is the same, the next thing I look at it is in which stores it is available on. The ease of sharing games with your family or others is going to be completely up to the storefront where your purchase from. Even then, some publishers may restrict some of their games from being shared at all.
Steam
The most popular storefront for PC gamers has allowed sharing for quite some time now, and it's easy to set up.
You will need to have Steam Guard enabled.
The trickiest part of sharing with Steam is that you will need to log into the same computer that your friend or you have previously logged in to with your Steam account. Once you do that, you will need to click on Settings -> Family -> Family Sharing Library and you should see an account there to share with. You'll need to do that for each computer you want to share with.
One of the best features sorry best among all features about Steam's family sharing is that each person gets their own cloud saves, so you don't have to worry about the users with whom you share with ruining your saved data, but there are some limitations too. Oh No!
Only one person can play a single shared title at a time. If the owner attempts to play a game that someone else is already playing, that user will have to exit the game. You can share it with five other accounts and can authorize up to ten computers. You can also manage all the users and computers you have authorized in through the Steam application itself.
Steam also provides a feature called Family View, which allows you to select features of Steam (such as chat or forum content) and a list of youngster approved games that should go into your Family Games library. During Family View setup, you'll need to enter a PIN which can be used to disable family view and gain access to everything else again. This needs to be set up on each account that you share with.
Microsoft Store
Microsoft Store may be one of the most welcoming and challenging when it comes to sharing games with your friends and family. Somewhat similar to Steam, it allows you to share with up to five users on up to ten different devices. However, unlike Steam, you can play on multiple PCs simultaneously. My kids now can both play Minecraft on their own PCs from the copy that I actually didn't purchase but received with an Xbox One Minecraft bundle, which is another positive side benefit of the Microsoft Store. With the tag of Play Anywhere titles, you get the rights to play on both console and PC.
You will need to create a family group for your Microsoft account and each user will need their own Microsoft account, including children. You can manage the members of your family group here.
Once the family group is created you then simply need to login to the PC as the user you want to share the game with an open the Microsoft Store to download the game. Each user will need to have their own game saves and, as mentioned, can play simultaneously. This approach should also work for other content on the Microsoft Store such as apps, movies, or TV shows.
Another bonus for parents is that Microsoft will allow you to set screen time limits, location sharing, content filtering, and even send you a weekly report of your child's activities on their PC.
GOG
CD Projeckt's GOG.com is a bit of an outlier on this list in that it does not sell games with DRM attached to it. Games are solely protected by the honour system. You can download any game you own and do with it what you want, such as store it on external hard drives for backup. However, giving it to a friend is specifically not allowed according to GOG.com's FAQ:
Your account and games are for your personal use only. If you want to share them, you can always buy a gift for that person. The DRM-free nature of our services means that we trust you that this will not be abused.
So don't do it.
However, you are allowed to install your games on as many as computers you want within your household. Therefore, sharing with your family members is fine as long as they are living with you. However, those users won't be able to take advantage of GOG.com's free cloud saving feature.
Epic Games Store
The newly launched online storefront from the makers of the ever-popular Fortnite does not seem to offer any family-friendly features at this time. This isn't all that surprising as this is not one of the must-have features to get a new store out there. Hopefully, Epic decides to add this feature to their service soon.
Origin
Origin does not provide a way to share games with others at this time either. They do, however, offer a gifting feature, but you will have to pay for the game again in order to share it with others.
