Google is approaching the one-year anniversary of Stadia, and it’s about to deliver on one of its big promises. Stadia Family Sharing is now going live for some users.
Speaking to 9to5Google, Google confirmed that the feature is rolling out starting today and, in a Reddit post, the company further confirmed that the rollout will take about a week. The rollout was spotted by one staff members at Android Police earlier today and has since shown up for two of us here at 9to5Google.
The settings for Stadia Family Sharing are as expected in the app, showing up in the long-available “Family” section. Notably, though, a support page has also gone live this week that reveals how the feature will work.
With Stadia Family Sharing, account holders can share any game in their library with up to six people. This includes not only games that were directly purchased, but also games that have been redeemed with a Pro subscription, as we previously discovered. That means one person with Stadia Pro can share games they’ve redeemed with other users who lack that subscription, all for one monthly fee.
You don’t need to be an active Stadia Pro subscriber to share games or play shared games. However, if you share a game that you claimed with your Pro subscription and your subscription ends, the game will stop being shared with your family group.
When trying to access a game in Stadia Family Sharing, Google notes that only one person can be playing a specific title at any given time. If someone in your family is playing Orcs Must Die 3, for example, the title will be blocked for everyone else, but other titles will still be available to play. However, if two family members are sharing the same game in the same group, two people can still play at once.
If all shared copies of a game are being played by members of your family group, the family sharing icon will appear instead of Play when you try to launch it. Select the icon for more information.
Notably, Google also allows users to share their entire library or only specific titles. One setting will automatically share all games in a library, but another will require the user to specifically enabling sharing on individual titles. Game add-ons can also be shared, but only in the form of expansions. In-game currency cannot be shared.
More on Google Stadia:
- Stadia 2.42 prepares to add State Share to captures, Pro trial without credit card, more
- Far Cry 5, New Dawn now available on Google Stadia, more Ubisoft games coming
- Stadia set to gain AV1 codec support, likely to help reduce data usage
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