Following its successful beta launch, Steam Families is officially here! Read on to learn more about how this new feature can enhance your family's gaming experience.
Steam Families Now Available to All
For years, Steam users have juggled the limitations of Family sharing and the restrictions of Steam Family View. Today, Valve finally addressed these pain points with the official launch of Steam Families, which streamlines game-sharing within households while offering enhanced parental controls.
"Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features," explained Valve in a recent Steam news post. "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."
Steam Families allows up to six members, including adults and children, to create a family group and share a curated game library. Once a family is established, all games in the organizer's library are automatically shared with everyone in the group, removing the cumbersome process of having to individually authorize each device for game access.
In addition to this, unlike the previous system, everyone can play different games simultaneously. As Valve explains: "Let's say that you are in a family with 4 members and that you own a copy of Portal 2 and a copy of Half-Life. At any time, any one member can play Portal 2 and another can play Half-Life."
This essentially eliminates the frustration of the previous system, where only one person could access the library at a time.
However, Valve notes that if two family members want to play the same game simultaneously, one of them will need to purchase a separate copy. This ensures that there are enough owned copies for everyone to play at the same time.
Steam Families introduces a clear distinction between adult and child accounts within a family group. Adults retain full access to their libraries, while parents can leverage parental controls for child accounts. These controls allow parents to do five things:
⚫︎ Restrict access to games deemed inappropriate for a child's age
⚫︎ Establish daily or weekly time limits for how long children can play games
⚫︎ View playtime reports
⚫︎ Approve or deny child requests for additional playtime or purchases
⚫︎ Recover a child's account if they lost their password
Be careful, however, with creating your "family." In the past, concerns existed about Family Sharing being misused for account sharing with friends outside the family unit. To address this, Valve has implemented safeguards.
Users can only leave and be part of a Steam Family group once per year, effectively preventing them from creating multiple "families" to share games with a wider circle. This means that if you join a family group and later decide to leave, you'll have to wait a full year before you can create or join another. Steam Family groups with a recent departure face a similar limitation—each family slot must remain unoccupied for one year before a new family member can be added.
Do note as well that if a family member cheats or engages in other malicious behavior in online games, the entire family group could face penalties, including account bans.
The Steam Family Sharing feature is about to kick the bucket soon. If you've been using it to share games with your loved ones, you might want to consider switching to Steam Families. Just update your Steam client to the latest version and enjoy sharing a gaming library together!
Steam Client Update - September 11th
Information on Steam Family Sharing
