After a beta period earlier this year, Steam's new family sharing system and parental controls hub is now available for everyone. Steam Families is replacing both Family Sharing and Family View, creating a nucleus for all your game-sharing needs.
A Steam Family can comprise up to six members (including yourself), and the full libraries of all the users will be available to the 'family' unit, except for games where developers have opted out of sharing for whatever reason. No longer will you need to feel bad if you're watching your big brother play a game that you want – you can share the title across devices, just not at the same time.
The most important upgrade to Steam's game-sharing update is the ability for you and your family to play games from your library at the same time. For example, your wife can play your copy of Cyberpunk 2077 while you play Warzone concurrently with no issues. And while playing one copy at the same time is still a no-go, 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 files, earn Steam achievements, access workshop files and more. That's a lot of freedom for a child to have on Steam – which is why parental control are also key additions.
Improved Parental Controls, but it's not all bad, kids
There are two member (or 'role') options within Steam Families – adult and child. Adults can manage member invites and apply account restrictions, while children are subject to controls put in place by the adults, and have no managerial power.
As an adult, you control what games children have access to, can restrict their access to the Steam Store, Friends Chat and Community, set playtime limits and recover your child's account if they lose their password.
Purchasing games for kids is also easier thanks to Steam Families. Usually buying a game for a child requires an adult to complete a gift purchase or let them borrow your card. Now, children have the ability to add games to their cart, and then request an adult to pay for it. Through their email or mobile device, the adult can then approve or deny the request.
Out with the old, in with the new
Steam Families is an exciting improvement to Steam's family-sharing. For too long little brothers and sisters have had to watch along while their older sibling hogs the PC to themselves. Too often dad's have been booted from their account in the middle of a run because their child opened up Terraria, but that will no longer be the case.
Steam clarifies that the old Family Sharing feature "will eventually be retired". While this won't be an issue for most users, but it might affect some others. For example, the older game-sharing feature allowed two (or more) people in different locations to share libraries, but that might 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 wherever you access Steam, including your mobile device when you are away from home" lends us to believe, like Netflix, that it will be limited to one household.
Nevertheless, this is a massive Steam update that will make many people happy, although we suspect there will be others who will want a better game-sharing setup from Valve.
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