With the PlayStation 5’s gameshare feature, you can play your friend or family member’s digital games on the same console, and you can share a PlayStation Plus subscription too. It’s an excellent way to expand your library or try out games you might not have otherwise played.

In order to set up gameshare on the PS5, you need to dig into the settings and sign into a secondary PlayStation Network account. Essentially, you’re tying an account to your PS5 console so that any other account can access its games. Think of it like the PlayStation 4’s “primary console” feature. Once the option is enabled, you don’t need to mess with it again.

Check the Console Sharing and Offline Play option

To start, you should be permanently signed into your primary PlayStation Network account, or what is likely your own account. Head to the PS5’s settings in the top right of the console’s main interface. Once you’re there, select Users and Accounts. Inside the Users and Accounts options is a list of choices, but we only need one of them. You want to choose Other near the bottom and then select Console Sharing and Offline Play.

Console Sharing and Offline Play will show you a screen with some text. This is where you need to pay attention to what it says. If it says “You don’t have a PS5 with [Console Sharing and Offline Play] enabled” at the top of the screen, you’re good to go. This basically means that your current account has not been linked to a PS5 console. That’s good, because we want to link it to a separate account in the next step. Hit Don’t Enable and back out to the main menu again. If it says “[Console Sharing and Offline Play] is enabled for you on this PS5”, hit Disable and back out to the main menu.

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Sign into secondary PlayStation Network account

This is a key step that can mess you up if you breeze through it. You need to sign into the account that you want to use digital games from. To do that, you want to select your account picture in the top right next to the settings gear icon and hit Switch User. In that menu, press Add User. You have to select Get Started under Add a User to this PS5 or else the PSN account will only be temporarily signed in and won’t show the option that you used in the last step. To complete this, you need the email and password of the secondary account.

Enable Console Sharing and Offline Play

You’re almost done! From the secondary account, drop back into settings, Users and Accounts, and then Console Sharing and Offline Play. This time when you press it, it should say “You don’t have a PS5 with [Console Sharing and Offline Play] enabled” at the top. Select Enable and you’ll have successfully turned on the gameshare feature.

If you want to share your main account’s games to another PS5 console, have that other person run through the steps on their own console and enable it on your account instead of theirs.

Pros and Cons of PS5 gameshare

In order to actually play the games from the secondary account, you need to download them while being signed into it. Once you do that, you can swap back to the main account and play them freely. There’s one major caveat though: you need to be connected to the internet in order to play your main account’s games. Because we tied the PS5 console to a secondary account, your main one needs to be online to access its own games. Besides that, you will get the benefits of PlayStation Plus, including the service’s set of free games even if only one account has access to them.

PS5’s gameshare feature is pretty straightforward once you understand where and how the option works. Once it’s enabled, you never have to look back.