Valve has finally done it! They've overhauled Steam Family Sharing with the new Steam Families set of features now available in Beta and it fixes the most annoying issue with it.
Currently, with Steam Family Sharing, if one person is playing a game your whole library is locked. You can either boot them off, or wait. Now, that's changed. As long as you're playing different games - it's all good. Obviously if other members in your Family Group have a copy, multiple people can play the same game at the same time.
This new Steam Families replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, putting everything under one banner and this introduces new features too. These new additions include new parental controls so you can set proper limits now including:
- 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.
Children can also request purchases for you to approve or deny!
Valve also clarified that if someone in your group got banned using your copy, you will also be banned.
See the full announcement on Steam.
It took a long time for Valve to do this, many features here people have been requesting for a long time. Glad to see it land, at least in Beta for now. It's quite likely the Steam Deck gave Valve a little extra push to do it, as it has been a source of complaints there too. But as we've seen time and time again, Valve do react to feedback and constantly improve.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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mZSq7Fq3qs 19 Mar 2024
Does this allow me playing a game with my steam deck and another game with my pc?
1 Likes, Who?
It was getting a bit annoying when my kids are playing in the living room on my chimera os box and I cannot use my desktop or steamdeck.
So awesome change!
So awesome change!
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Does this allow me playing a game with my steam deck and another game with my pc?Not unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account. You could already play on both with the one account if one of the devices is in offline mode.
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Awesome! I thought they would never do this, since I suspect they get a lot of pressure from many publishers against these kind of features.
Thanks Gabe!
Thanks Gabe!
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Not unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
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I'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.Not unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
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So I already tried it and... it's been weird.
We have 2 decks at home, so we both updated to beta and I created a family group to invite the other person.
Right after this, both decks became unusable since there was some kind of problem where trying to access any game would show us a black screen saying that Steam can't find the content and some long error code. No matter if we restarted or anything, gaming mode was unusable.
Fortunately, desktop mode works perfectly.
So, since we mostly play on gaming mode, we reverted back to stable branch and, to our surprise, the family group is still there (not accessible through the steam menu options) and we can play as if we were still in a group.
I guess we'll stay in stable for now, but at least we were able to start the group and share games without the limits from before family groups.
We have 2 decks at home, so we both updated to beta and I created a family group to invite the other person.
Right after this, both decks became unusable since there was some kind of problem where trying to access any game would show us a black screen saying that Steam can't find the content and some long error code. No matter if we restarted or anything, gaming mode was unusable.
Fortunately, desktop mode works perfectly.
So, since we mostly play on gaming mode, we reverted back to stable branch and, to our surprise, the family group is still there (not accessible through the steam menu options) and we can play as if we were still in a group.
I guess we'll stay in stable for now, but at least we were able to start the group and share games without the limits from before family groups.
1 Likes, Who?
I'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.I meant whether they're still blocking the same account (my own games on my account, nothing shared) on two devices.
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I meant whether they're still blocking the same account (my own games on my account, nothing shared) on two devices.Yes, that's still blocked.
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I'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.Not unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
I don't think it's against Steam TOS, their support also invited me to create a new account when I got a VAC ban ~15 years ago.
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RavenWings 19 Mar 2024
Sounds great, especialy the parental controls! I´m gonna wait for the stable release, but there are two things I´m wondering right now:
If I´m the owner of the game, can other accounts kick me out by starting the same game, or does the owner always have priority?
Can I start a child´s account with all games banned and then choose to make specific games available? It sounds like it works the other way around and that could be quite painfull with >4,5k games in my library...
Last edited by RavenWings on 19 Mar 2024 at 3:05 pm UTC
If I´m the owner of the game, can other accounts kick me out by starting the same game, or does the owner always have priority?
Can I start a child´s account with all games banned and then choose to make specific games available? It sounds like it works the other way around and that could be quite painfull with >4,5k games in my library...
Last edited by RavenWings on 19 Mar 2024 at 3:05 pm UTC
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If I´m the owner of the game, can other accounts kick me out by starting the same game, or does the owner always have priority?That's covered in the FAQ I linked to earlier in my comment:
What happens if the game I want to play from my Steam Family is in use?So there's no "kicking" - if you're the owner of the game, but someone in your family is already playing it, you either ask them to stop playing, or buy another copy. You can't kick them, and they don't get to kick you.
If another member of your Steam Family also owns the game with identical DLC, Steam will launch that copy instead. If there is no copy with identical DLC, Steam will look for any copies of the same game and ask you if you want to switch to playing one of those copies instead, but your saved games may or may not work with different sets of DLC. If there are no other copies available in your Steam Family, you can either wait for the game to be available or buy another copy.
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RavenWings 19 Mar 2024
Thanks, scaine. I looked through the FAQ. It doesnt get mentioned specificly if the actual owner has special control, but you´re probably right and its treated more like a license-pool for the group. I´d actually prefer if the owning account always had priority. Not the biggest issue I guess, but it might get problematic with suspended games on Steam Deck.
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In case anyone else is curious, I grabbed a SteamDB query of games that have a price that are excluded from Family Sharing.
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Mountain Man 20 Mar 2024
I suspect disabling family sharing will quickly become the default for most studios.
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I suspect disabling family sharing will quickly become the default for most studios.I don't.
Family Sharing has been a Steam feature for over a decade, and of the 67,264 paid games on Steam 189 opted out. The new Family Sharing doesn't do any more to depress sales than the old one did - probably the opposite - it just doesn't really suck for the end user like the old one did.
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I´d actually prefer if the owning account always had priority.Me too. I think they did it this way to discourage "out of home" families. If you're all under one roof, it's trivial to say "I want to play MY game now, off you get". But if that family member is in another house, it's less convenient. Probably moot in this day of instant messaging, but hey ho, I think that's what they're aiming for.
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In case anyone else is curious, I grabbed a SteamDB query of games that have a price that are excluded from Family Sharing.Haha - it's a gallery of negativity. With only a tiny handful of exceptions - EA, Ubisoft, Facepunch all the kinds of developer you'd expect to worry about precious sales! Probably a strong cross-section of Denuvo titles there too.
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