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
This is so amazing I’m wondering how on earth they got publishers on board with this. I guess technically they don’t need their permission, but I see some hilariously oversized coffee mugs being thrown across board rooms in anger after reading this announcement.
Probably because it’s mostly just a QoL update which also restricts people to one family group - which was always the intention but it closes a loophole where person A could share with person B and B could separately share their library with person C unless all three are in the same family group and geo location. Plus there’s now a year penalty to switch family group or refill a slot that has been vacated so you really have to commit to it. In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I’m a little bit sad because I shared my library with my brother and niece in other countries in Europe and that’s no longer doable. Ah well
In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.
There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.
I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.
A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.
I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.
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This is so amazing I’m wondering how on earth they got publishers on board with this. I guess technically they don’t need their permission, but I see some hilariously oversized coffee mugs being thrown across board rooms in anger after reading this announcement.
Probably because it’s mostly just a QoL update which also restricts people to one family group - which was always the intention but it closes a loophole where person A could share with person B and B could separately share their library with person C unless all three are in the same family group and geo location. Plus there’s now a year penalty to switch family group or refill a slot that has been vacated so you really have to commit to it. In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I’m a little bit sad because I shared my library with my brother and niece in other countries in Europe and that’s no longer doable. Ah well
I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.
There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.
I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.
A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.
I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.