After a trial period earlier this year, Steam’s new Family Sharing system and Parental Control Center are now available to everyone. Steam Families replaces both Family Sharing and Family View, creating a hub for all your game sharing needs.
A Steam family can consist of up to six members (including you), and the entire libraries of all users will be available to the “family” unit, except for games that developers have decided not to share for some reason. You no longer have to feel bad if you see your older sibling playing a game you want: you can share the title between devices, but not at the same time.
The biggest improvement in the Steam game sharing update is the ability for you and your family to play games in your library at the same time. For example, your wife can play your copy of Cyberpunk 2077 While playing War zone simultaneously without problems. And although playing a copy at the same time is still impossible, if there are two copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Within your family's shared library, you and your brother can play together.
With Steam Families, each user will have their own save game files, earn Steam achievements, access Workshop files, and more. It's a huge freedom for a child on Steam, which is why parental controls are a key addition as well.
Improved parental controls, but it's not all bad, kids
There are two membership (or “role”) options in Steam Families: adults and children. Adults can manage member invitations and apply account restrictions, while children are subject to controls set by adults and have no management power.
As an adult, you can control which games your child has access to, restrict their access to the Steam Store, friends chat and community, set time limits for playing, and recover your child's account if they lose their password.
Purchasing games for kids is also easier with Steam Families. Typically, buying a game for a child requires an adult to complete a gift purchase or lend them their card. Now, kids have the ability to add games to their cart and then ask an adult to pay for them. Using their email or mobile device, the adult can approve or deny the request.
Out with the old, in with the new
Steam Families is a nice enhancement to Steam's family sharing feature. For too long, little brothers and sisters had to watch while their older siblings hogged the PC all to themselves. Too often, parents were kicked out of their account in the middle of a race because their child opened an account. Terrariumsbut that will no longer be the case.
Steam clarifies that the old Family Sharing feature “will be retired over time.” While this won’t be an issue for most users, it could affect others. For example, the old game sharing feature allowed two (or more) people in different locations to share libraries, but that may no longer be possible.
Steam doesn't directly say that Steam Families will be limited to one ISP, though terminology like “This information is available from anywhere you access Steam, including your mobile device when you're away from home” leads us to believe, like Netflix, that it will be limited to a single household.
Still, this is a massive Steam update that will make a lot of people happy, though we suspect there will be others who will want a better game sharing setup from Valve.
