Earlier this week, Valve announced a new Family Sharing program that will allow Steam users to share their library of games with up to 10 users authorized as "friends or family."
Obviously this is a big win for gamers as you are now able to share digital games, something once exclusive to physical disks. Now you have the ability to share your entire catalog of games. HUGE! But developers are clearly going to be upset over this, right? I mean, they are losing out on potential sales. Maybe not.
"As a game developer and player, I'm excited about the Family Sharing program," Supergiant Games studio director Amir Rao told USGamer. Supergiant Games is best known for smash hit game, Bastion, and is currently working on the soon-to-be-released Transistor.
"As a studio, we're not worried about the possibility of lost sales due to the Family Sharing program in the same way we're not worried about potential lost sales due to piracy (Bastion has no DRM and Transistor won't either) because we ultimately care about creating a good experience for the paying customer.
"Valve is increasing the value of paid games for their audience by allowing customers to share them with close friends and family," he added.
While Rao's reaction doesn't necessarily reflect the opinion of other developers and publishers, it's nice to see dev support of such an idea is present. What'll be really interesting to see is if Microsoft attempts to bring back it's own digital family sharing plan for the Xbox One as a result.
