How to build a Steam Machine with Steam OS
Official Steam Machines aren't coming until November, but you can build your own today
FAMILY SHARING
Steam Machines are designed to be used in the living room, and Steam OS is well suited to sharing your games among the family. Just like in the desktop version of Steam, Steam OS supports Family Sharing. This lets you share games installed on your Steam account with up to 10 others. We found it worked well on our Steam box. When you log in to a Steam OS box that has more than one account on it, the other person’s games will be available to download and play; when you select a game to download, a sharing request will be emailed to the person who owns the title so they can authorise the game to be shared. They don’t need to be logged in to Steam to approve a request either, so will be able to confirm requests when outside the house using a smartphone.
^ You can play other people’s games on your account, as long as they give you permission
You can then play the shared game to your heart’s content, as long as the other person doesn’t use their Steam account; as soon as they sign in, you have four minutes to save your game before you’re kicked out back to the Steam interface. It’s a useful system which seems to work well, but it’s still not as flexible as just passing around a console game disc.
Steam OS is still in beta, and there are some rough edges which need ironing out; chiefly, support for more graphics chipsets is vital, and we’d like to have the ability to use a PC’s analogue sound outputs rather than relying on HDMI. Steam OS also needs better ways to filter the Store by operating system, and more Linux support for major titles, but this is likely to come as the OS gains a larger installed base.
In the meantime, what Steam OS gives you is a way to play hundreds of indie titles without having to buy a copy of Windows or download and install drivers. It also gives PC manufacturers a chance to show what they can really do, by building custom PCs dedicated to running Steam OS, without having to make the usual compromises that a general-purpose PC is saddled with. We’re excited to see how things develop.