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.
RavenWings Mar 19
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 March 2024 at 3:05 pm UTC
Quoting: RavenWingsIf 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:
QuoteWhat 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.
RavenWings Mar 19
Mountain Man Mar 20
Quoting: Mountain ManI 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.
Quoting: RavenWingsI´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.
Quoting: CatKillerIn 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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