Steam Families is here
Steam Families is here
Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families is now available for all users. 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...
This was previously available as a opt in beta, but is now available for everyone.
It's fantastic tbh. Less convenient for people who just abuse family share with random people, but for actual families or close groups of long-term friends it's glorious.
it's absolutely fantastic, my friends and i joined a steam family and they finally have 0 excuses to not play the games i've been recommending them for year (and neither do i)
How is it different from the beta one that we already had? I looked today and I'm still in the beta one and there is no other option to the actual one!
This is the same as the beta version, but is distinctly different from what we used to have. Previously playing a shared game locked down the entire library, now it just locks the one copy of the game. Previously you had to sign in on the same device to make it happen, now you can invite into the family remotely. Previously you could switch people in and out easily, now there's a six person limit on the family and a one year cooldown on both the slot and the member who chooses to leave a family.
Overall it's better as long as you didn't abuse the system before.
This implementation of steam families has been available in beta for several months. This is just the non-beta roll-out of the feature to everyone.
I can't figure out how to create accounts for my kids. They are under 13 and there's a checkbox saying people under 13 can't create an account.
Yeah, maybe they should have some sort of 'young child' accounts for children under 13, that are required to be in a family with more restrictions on store access and such.
I there are some regulatory hurdles as well, like data collection and ratings board stuff. It would probably take some work to implement those.
IIRC I'm 5 years older on steam than reality because of this. From my family's first computer onward, I am the parental controls.
It's great. We already set it up and worked without issues
It all looks simple and commonsense so far, as to be expected.
This has a nasty side effect barely related to the family features… it killed the Family View pin. The only thing that could coax bloody GeForce Now to sync with Steam cloud instead of killing the session instantly as you quit the game. There’s no other feature that can lock games from running like Family View did, isn’t there?
Does this mean we can “opt out” of the families beta and just use the main client again?
No, Steam families is now out of beta and is the default for all users I think. I'm not sure how long you can keep using the existing family sharing, but I'm guessing at some point you'll be forced to swap over.
I just checked the client and looks like it rolled everyone who was in family beta back to “No beta chosen”. That’s actually what I meant with that question, and I wasn’t clear enough.
To originally get the new family sharing to work, I needed to select the family sharing beta build, but it automatically seems to have put me back on the “normal build” since this feature rolled out.
how safe is it to use with my dad and brother? my dad likes rollercoaster tycoon so i shared it with him the old way.
The only risk is that if someone gets banned using your copy of a game, you'll be banned too.
So if you owned Rainbow Six, and your brother and as playing with your family copy and he got banned, you would be banned as well.
Thankfully we've hopefully grown out of that phase but that sounds good! I don't think I have to worry about that too much!
I've been on the beta for this, and it's a fantastic feature. I bought a Steam Deck and added it to my family with a separate account and it's been so incredibly convenient for us as a family.
Have they solved the issue that multiple people can't be playing at the same time, or the same game at the same time?
I don't even do families. One of us just goes into offline mode for the time. Slightly obnoxious.
The “same game at the same time” part is a licensing issue. It won’t ever be “solved” because it would get Steam into legal trouble to do so, just like the Internet Archive recently FAFO’ed. In order for two people to play the same game at the same time, you need to own two licenses for said game.
But it does solve the issue of multiple people using the same library at the same time. Now your family members don’t get booted off of Skyrim just because you launched Persona. It basically combines your libraries, so any of you can choose any of the listed games to play at any time. Just like having a physical shelf full of CD cases.
Yup.
The previous family share was gathering your library of games with the "console" in a single box and giving that entire to your friend. If you want to play anything, you need the box back.
Steam Families is now a common bookshelf, grab a game if it's there and play.Now we just need a way to use that shelf with the same account so I don't get booted from my steam deck games just because I left something running on my PC and vice versa.
Previously a family member could only play your shared library if you weren't playing any game.
With this new steam families, they can play any game except the game you're actively playing (unless the family collectively owns multiple copies). So if me and my son want to play Lethal Company together we need two copies.
Cool. Well that is certainly a step forward. Thanks.
It just basically combines your libraries now. So if the license is in use, nobody else can use it unless there are multiple licenses. Offline will still work for your own games and you can choose the best version to play. E.g. I have Isaac but only 1 dlc while my gf has all of the dlc so I can just play her version when she's not playing it.