Earlier today Google started to roll out the Family Share feature for Stadia, allowing you to share your Stadia library of games with anyone you like. Those people will need to be a part of your Google Play family group, but adding them to that is easy enough to do.
If you’re interested in setting this up, so you can share games with anyone in your family or friends who live elsewhere, we’ll walk you through how to share your Stadia game library with the users you want to add to your family.
Of course you will need to make sure you have access to the family share feature first.
Share your Stadia game library with friends and family
Check to see if you have access
First and foremost you need to see if you have access to Family Share. To do this, open up the Stadia website and then click on your avatar in the top right corner of the webpage.
Then click on settings, and under the settings menu you should see the Family tab along the side column.
Click on Family and then you should see a few different buttons in there that you can interact with. These will be how you initially set up the entire thing and get going with the rest of the process.
Set up a family group
This should be the top button you can click in this menu. Once you click it, you’ll be presented with two options on how you want the family share to work.
Which are to automatically share all of your games, or manually share games on a case by case basis.
Both should be fairly obvious in what they allow. If you choose to share games manually, then you’ll need to share each game on its individual store page.
Choose family or friends to share your Stadia game library with
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to actually set up a family group to share games with. This means you’ll need to pick people to add to this group and allow them access to make purchases on their Google account using your chosen payment method.
Since they’re in your family group, payments can be made by them using the family group. They will have this option of payments when buying things on Google Play. Or when buying games on Stadia.
So make sure you only add people you trust not to abuse this capability.
To choose who to add to your family group, go back to the settings page on the Stadia website and, under the family section, click the button that says manage group. This will take you to the families.google.com website where you you can see yourself, and anyone else in your family that you add.
You can add a total of up to five people, and this is a shared family group with anything else on Google Play. So it’s not a separate one just for Stadia.
Click on the add buttons next to your profile picture to choose members, and once you’re done click the send button to send out the invitation. Each person will need to accept that invitation to be added to the group.
Manage your game and payment requests
If you set up some rules, then this section is where you’ll manage any requests to purchase something. Such as a new game for the family member’s Stadia account.
If they request to buy something, you’ll see it pop up here and then you can approve or disapprove it.
This is located in the same family section on the Stadia website. As of right now none of these features can be managed or used from the Stadia app.
So you’ll have to do it from the actual website in your browser. That being said you can do it from your phone if you go to the desktop version of the site.
Add games to your Stadia family share list
To add games to the family share list, you have to head to the store section of Stadia’s website. This is another thing you cannot do from the app. Once in the store section, find a game you own and click on it.
Just below the play button you should see a toggle for family sharing. This will be disabled if you have things set to require individual manual sharing. If things are set to share all automatically then it will already be enabled. If you chose the former option, click the toggle and this will enable the game to be played with anyone in your family group.
You’ll then need to do this with every single game you want to share. This is the perfect solution if the people in your group are kids. You may not want them having access to certain games.
And if that’s the case then you can set things to manual share. Then you can pick and choose. If you’re sharing with friends who are other adults or family who is of an age you deem acceptable to play anything available, then you can set things to have all games shared automatically. And you might as well.
That’s basically all there is to the setup. Once you’ve got it all in place, your friends and family can start enjoying any games you’ve purchased.