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 acce...
A bunch of people are going to become related all of a sudden really quick!
Honestly though, my partner and I already use the family sharing extensively, so I hope this is an improvement. It is kind of tedious right now that you have to physically log in to the other person's machine to be able to add them to your family sharing plan, so any kind of improvement on that front is welcome.
We have three accounts linked: mine, SO, kids (they share one). I occasionally gift games to my SO and kids accounts, and each time I need to login to their accounts to accept/add the gift key or whatever. I go through this nonsense so my kids, SO, and I can play different games at the same time, but the kids can still only play one at a time (hasn't been a problem so far).
I have three kids and haven't made individual accounts because it's annoying enough as it is to manage three, but if this makes it easier, I'll probably get them their own accounts.
I already tried it, apply ASAP for the Family Beta. Now both of my kids can simultaneously use my library as long as they play a different game. Before, only one of my kids was allowed to borrow from my library, the rest of it was locked down. Amazing update.
This is amazing! And a long-overdue change. Now both of my kids can simultaneously use my library as long as they play a different game. Before, only one of my kids was allowed to borrow from my library, the rest of it was locked down.
As far as I know, it's mainly games with DRM that might trigger on multiple installs/computers. So companies will disable family sharing. Not sure how common this is.
I used to use old (current before the update hits stable) family sharing and I'd say among 250 games, at least more than 220-230 were available on family sharing. This included MGSV:PP and Max Max back when they were released. I don't know if developers become more restrictive on family sharing over the years, but seeing that old designations will carry on to the new Steam Family thing, I reckon this will be a huge hit in the age of crackdown on password sharing in other media platforms.
We have 1278 paid games that are included and 55 that are excluded from family sharing. Seemed to be mostly ubi, rockstar and ea games. Games that you claimed while they had a limited 100% discount are also excluded. The last few are live-service or mmo games.
"Family sharing" is now a feature listed on every store page. Same place as singleplayer, trading cards, cloud saves and similar.
As far as I know no major changes has happened in which games support it, but that may change now that sharing gets more attention.