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Steam Guest Passes: Beta Begins
Author: valve valve
Category: Valve news update Valve news update
Publish Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 04:03:05 -0800

Later this week, new menu options will appear within Steam as we initiate the closed beta for Guest Passes, a new feature that will allow owners of certain Steam-enabled games (purchased either via Steam or at retail) to send a friend limited-time trials for those games.

During the beta period the new menu items will appear on all Steam accounts, though the ability to send the Guest Pass will be inactive. When this closed beta concludes, Valve will extend the Steam Guest Pass Beta to Day of Defeat: Source owners.

Similar to the Free Weekends, Guest Passes are another example of advanced service and functionality that can only be offered through Steam, the leading platform for content delivery and management.
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I'm guessing once you give someone a temporary pass to a game you own, you can never issue that temporary pass to a game again?

Do you need to own a Steam/Valve product in order to create a Steam account? In other words if I have a friend who doesn't even have Steam, could I tell him to download it, register, and then provide him with a temporary pass that would allow him to play say CS:S for example?

Answer him McDonald, dammit!

Afaik you can start a steam account without any games, so i expect you'd be fine to do it that way.