For most of the service's first year, Stadia players were frustrated by their inability to share games with family members. If you and your kids or spouse (or roommates, or whoever) wanted to play the same game with more than one save file, you had to buy multiple copies. But no more! Earlier this month, Google finally relented and enabled family sharing on Stadia. Here's how to set it up.
Off the top, you'll need to have a Google family group set up to do any of this. If you don't already, there are a few ways to get that done. See here for more information.
Once you've done that, head to stadia.com from a desktop browser. Click your avatar in the top right corner, then click Stadia settings, then Family. You'll see the following screen:
Click "Set up." Note that while your group doesn't technically have to be your family, you will have to set a shared payment method that anyone in your group can use to make Stadia purchases. Google says this is to make sure your group is actually people you know and trust (who presumably wouldn't spend your money without asking first). You can use any credit card you have saved to Google Pay, or add a new one.
Once you've done that, you'll pick how your library is shared. The default option is to share every game with everybody in the group, but if you'd prefer, you can manually choose which games are shared.
To share or un-share an individual game, you'll have to find it in the store (which is a pain in the ass since there's still no search ಠ_ಠ) and change the toggle in its listing:
A game you might not want your seven-year-old playing.
Members of your family group will have access to not only game purchases, but also add-ons, DLC, and even your claimed Stadia Pro titles — even if they themselves aren't Pro subscribers. But only one instance of each game can be running at a time, which means you can't use family sharing to, say, play Red Dead Online with your mom. (Local multiplayer is still an option in games that support it, obviously.)
If you have young kids and want to restrict which games they have access to by age rating, things get a little hairy. You'll need to either create a supervised account for them or add supervision to their existing account. Once you've set up Stadia for them using that account, you can manage which games and social features they have access to from the Stadia family dashboard.
And that's it! Your family group now has access to your Stadia library, complete with discrete save files for each member.
For anything else Stadia-related you might be wondering about, check out our detailed Stadia guide here.