There has been a huge debate over used games on the next-gen consoles recently, but that fight is only over physical discs. At this point, there are absolutely no expectations that games purchased through online services should be allowed to be lent to friends. Well, with the release of the latest Steam beta client, it seems that Valve is working on changing those expectations.

A member of NeoGAF recently noticed a few odd strings of text in the latest beta version of the Steam client. Specifically, a text file mentions a “shared game library” and two notifications about playing a borrowed game. Curious, I installed the beta client myself, and I can confirm that this text is found within the steam “Public” folder. This isn’t the first time new Steam features have been revealed through files included with beta releases, so we should probably expect an announcement from Valve in the coming weeks or months.

Earlier this month, Microsoft sent out a fact sheet describing features and restrictions of games on the Xbox One platform. While the reaction was mostly negative, it did have one big positive: Game sharing. With the Xbox One, up to ten family members can play any game you own even while you’re playing it. Frankly, it looks like this deal that Microsoft struck with publishers opened up the gates for Valve to implement something very similar with Steam.

The PS3, in a way, helped pioneer the sharing of digitally distributed games. Sadly, that wasn’t Sony’s intent. Until November of 2011, up to five consoles could be activated with a single account. Numerous groups of friends would then exploit this system to buy and share games using a single account. Sony finally smartened up, and restricted the number of simultaneous activations to two to thwart such behavior. While there won’t be any restrictions placed on lending physical discs, we’ve not heard much out of Sony about its policy for lending digitally distributed games with the PS4. Once bitten, twice shy.

As much as Sony has been hailed as the savior of the consumer in the last few weeks, this news leaves the PS4 as the odd man out. If both Steam and Xbox One allow online game sharing but the PS4 doesn’t, the tables might just turn against Sony’s favor. However, with the Gaikai streaming technology in its back pocket, Sony most likely has the infrastructure to respond rather quickly if this becomes a PR problem down the road. Let’s just hope that Valve pushes the issue sooner rather than later.

Now read: Your burning Xbox One policy questions answered by Major Nelson

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