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.
Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
up to 5 members
game sharing
parental controls
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
While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.
To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.
This sounds like they are going to limit usage to geo-locational. Or that’s just supposition by me but I don’t see any other things this would target.
It would be nice if they could someday find a better way to enforce this. What if your kid has shared custody with their other parent, and they aren’t in the same household all the time? What if they’re studying abroad and aren’t even in the same country?
I don’t have the solution, but I do hope someone eventually finds a better way to do it.
Worth noting that this could also potentially be due to differences in censorship/rating laws across country lines. For instance, Germany has some strict regulations regarding Nazi imagery in media. So games need to have a specific Germany-friendly version if they feature that kind of imagery. And Steam may not be able to serve two different versions of the game with a single license.
Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.
Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.
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This sounds like they are going to limit usage to geo-locational. Or that’s just supposition by me but I don’t see any other things this would target.
It would be nice if they could someday find a better way to enforce this. What if your kid has shared custody with their other parent, and they aren’t in the same household all the time? What if they’re studying abroad and aren’t even in the same country?
I don’t have the solution, but I do hope someone eventually finds a better way to do it.
Probably less geo-location and more just shared IP block/address
I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.
I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.
Worth noting that this could also potentially be due to differences in censorship/rating laws across country lines. For instance, Germany has some strict regulations regarding Nazi imagery in media. So games need to have a specific Germany-friendly version if they feature that kind of imagery. And Steam may not be able to serve two different versions of the game with a single license.
Wireguard makes everyone one big happy family!
If this is based on store region, VPN is not enough. You’ll need a payment method from that country as well.
Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.
Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.
You should remember that valve already threatened VPN users after everyone was buying games in Argentina.
They mean you vpn into your home network.