Digital is the future! At least, that’s been the mantra around here for a while. But sometimes digital has drawbacks that physical media users have enjoyed for years. For example, loaning a game to a friend.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to loan a game digitally? This question has been on my mind since the reversal of the Family Sharing plan on the Xbox One. There were rumors at the time that Steam would go this way as well. And today, they announced that sharing is caring.

Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members 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.

While I’m bummed that this sort of feature was killed by consumers on the Xbox One, I’m excited to see how it plays out on Steam.

Read more at the official Steam Blog: http://store.steampowered.com/news/11436/