Google announced family sharing for its Stadia cloud gaming service, causing one of the more consumer-friendly features of digital game marketplaces to its program.
Family sharing will provide any group of Stadia users linked through Google’s Play Family Library system to use one digital license for a game purchase over multiple accounts.
That way, you only want to buy one copy of a game for a parent and child, or two siblings to both play it independently with separate save data. And in an excellent move, only one account requires a Pro subscription to be capable to declare free games and share them with the group.
Google states the feature is started and may take about a week or so to stretch all users. Earlier reports from 9to5Google and Android Police published the feature showing up in the Stadia settings panel, before Google’s official announcement on the Stadia Reddit page.
The family sharing feature goes through the Google Play Family Library system that allows Android users to share mobile apps and services across multiple accounts in a single household.
It seems like a slightly convoluted process to fix it all up. Still, the most excellent way to begin is by setting up Google Play Family Library by following the tutorial here and then following the steps on this separate tutorial here for creating a Stadia account for your child or family member if that person takes already have a Stadia account.
Google says you will require to have a valid payment method attached to share your library.
There are some restrictions. Google maintains two accounts can’t play the same shared game at the same time unless both accounts have independently purchased it or have both declared it as part of the Stadia Pro subscription.
And if you share a game you claimed for free with Stadia Pro, and you let your subscription lapse, or you cancel it, that game won’t be possible to share any longer. Although Google makes say any title you purchase through the Stadia store is eligible for sharing, and that includes free games claimed with Pro.
You might be questioning in what situations would this be useful to families. Wouldn’t just having one Stadia account on multiple devices suffice, mainly if you can’t play the same game on more than one screen at the same time?
Effectively, Google has opened the door here for friends to create family groups and share their games, instead of just limiting it to one household.
While there are lots of settings to allow a parent to control what children play doing this family sharing feature including turning off sharing for particular games and setting age rating limits the implied understanding here is that you don’t have to be technically part of the identical household to take benefit of these features.
The key limitation, however, is that you can’t play the identical game at the same time, so that will limit how aggressively Stadia players try to use family sharing as a way to split the cost of games or use a friend’s library as their own.