Steam :: Steam News :: Introducing Steam Families
steamcommunity.com
Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families, available today in the Steam Beta Client. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play. Create a Steam Family To get started, you can create a Steam Family and then invite up to 5 family members.

When you join a Steam Family, you automatically gain access to the shareable games that your family members own and they will also be able to access the shareable titles in your library. The next time you log in to Steam, this new ‘family library’ will appear in the left column as a subsection of your games list. You maintain ownership of your current titles and when you purchase a new game it will still show up in your collection.

Best of all, when you are playing a game from your family library, you will create your own saved games, earn your own Steam achievements, have access to workshop files and more.

Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time. For a more detailed look at how Family Sharing works, see the FAQ below.

Also adds parental controls for children’s accounts. Parental controls let you:

  • Allow access to appropriate games
  • Restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
  • Set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
  • View playtime reports
  • Approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
  • Recover a child’s account if they lost their password

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/11954402

  • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
    24·
    10 months ago

    That’s actually nothing new, it’s been like that with family sharing for ages. If the family share account gets banned, the owner of the game gets banned as well* so that they can’t keep making alt accounts to bypass the ban. Others in your family not being impacted by the ban would actually be an improvement - it used to be that if the owner is banned, anyone family sharing the game would be as well.

    *There are exceptions with a few games, like Dark Souls 3, which doesn’t ban your main account so you can use family share to play mods in coop. Elden Ring bans both, however.

    • AliasWyvernspur@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      I understand why, and it makes sense to me. But I wouldn’t want to take that chance.

      It’s not so much that I know a family member would knowingly cheat, but who knows if a friend might convince them to try a mod or something, and not know it could potentially get them banned, ya know?

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        10 months ago

        I get you.
        Here’s hoping this new thing allows them to make it work better eventually, as the current system is a result of the older family share system - before the owner banning was implemented plenty of games just disabled family sharing entirely as a workaround for ban evasion.

        Right now I believe the only workaround would be to use the parental controls to not share those games you care about enough.

        • AliasWyvernspur@lemmy.world
          1·
          10 months ago

          Being able to gift games, parental controls, etc. Plenty of other reasons to set this up. As long as we’d be able to just not share games in case this happened, I’d be cool with that.