Steam Announces Family Sharing & Can Officially Serve 64bit Linux Games

In the meantime, at Microsoft, chairs are being thrown furiously.

Family Sharing as it is planned for Steam is IMHO just a marketing stunt, and isn't a real share at all.

It ist kinda useless if you can share the whole library or nothing. What is the point in sharing it over max. 10 computers if only on one can played a game from the library simultaneously[url=http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html#/search=simultaneously&searchLoc=0&resultOrder=basic&multiwordShowSingle=on][/url]?

Why not locking the game/games which are currently played and leave the others available for the rest of the family/friends?

But Steam itself is still 32 bit, right? I wonder how they implemented integration between Steam services and games? I know it is possible to communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit applications, but that adds a few ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Anyone familiar with developing on Steam as a platform?

Wow, yeah, the sharing feature is super-weak. Basically, it's only really for multiple user accounts on the same computer as far as I can make out. Sure, you can add up to 10 PCs, but if you play ANY game on one, it effectively kicks everybody off the other 9 devices, because you don't share a game out, you share the entire library.

So... useless. Unless perhaps you flat share and work opposite shifts. Or some other corner case. Really disappointing.

Give valve patience in regards to library sharing. Obviously they're not going to roll out every possible feature all at once, that's just too much room for mistakes to be made. I think its fairly safe to assume that as time goes on more and more features will be added, and they will make us happy, and be worked on one step at a time. Imagine if they released sharing in every way that you and I want it, and something didn't work right? What if they ended up giving away tons of free games on accident, or if your friends achievements started over righting your own, or people gets cards drops for games they don't own? This would cause unrest in the steam community (or amongst developers, or both), and then they would have to roll back features they had already given us, pissing even more people off. I Like ValvE, they seem to really be on the ball in terms of providing for their customers, and I have little doubt that by this time next year, we will have a sharing feature we can all appreciate.

I guess that 'sharing' is pretty distinct from 'lending' too. I'd actually much rather have the ability to lend my games out to a small subset of trusted friends. 

But Steam itself is still 32 bit, right? I wonder how they implemented integration between Steam services and games? I know it is possible to communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit applications, but that adds a few ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Anyone familiar with developing on Steam as a platform?

The update listed here is to the Steam runtime, not to Steam itself. Steam has been able to launch 64 bit games for quite some time now, so that communication issue was sorted out a while ago. I haven't looked, but I'd hazard a guess that Steam provides a 64 bit lib that games can link do so that all the 64 -> 32 communication is done on Valve's side and not the game developer's.

The runtime is meant to be a test environment that developers can use to ensure that their games will run happily on Steam for Linux (this runtime is a set of Linux ibraries that Steam itself is distributed with), so having 64 bit support in there gives some peace of mind to developers who use it and doesn't really mean much for users.