Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
- up to 5 members
- game sharing
- parental controls
- 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
- child purchase requests
This is so amazing I’m wondering how on earth they got publishers on board with this. I guess technically they don’t need their permission, but I see some hilariously oversized coffee mugs being thrown across board rooms in anger after reading this announcement.
Probably because it’s mostly just a QoL update which also restricts people to one family group - which was always the intention but it closes a loophole where person A could share with person B and B could separately share their library with person C unless all three are in the same family group and geo location. Plus there’s now a year penalty to switch family group or refill a slot that has been vacated so you really have to commit to it. In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I’m a little bit sad because I shared my library with my brother and niece in other countries in Europe and that’s no longer doable. Ah well
In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.
There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.
I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.
A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.
I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.
This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. My son is 13 and we share a Steam library. It’s not usually an issue but sometimes he does want to play something that requires online connection at the same time as me. Now that problem should be permanently in the past.
Even if he moves out in who knows how many years he can still take all his games with him. This is why I never feel guilty about spending money on Steam/Valve; I know that as long as GabeN lives, I won’t get stabbed in the back.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game.
This is going to be hilarious. Can’t wait to see the whining online.
Isn’t that exactly the same as how it worked before?
There may have been a brief moment where that didn’t happen, and then people discovered they could make cheat accounts, share their own games with them and get only the cheat accounts banned, and then make new ones and repeat.
It is. My vac ban is currently 4990 days old. Thanks son!
TIL to make my future children their own steam accounts
And buy them their own copies of online games.
Instead of the sax talk, I’m going to sit them down to chat about how cheating in video games is bad m’kay
Parents, talk to your kids about saxophones. That, and cheating on video games, are the most important subjects to cover.
Parents, talk to your kids about saxophones. That, and cheating on video games, are the most important subjects to cover.
Sorry grandpa, saxophones are cool again
Currently each steam account is given a unique steam id number which is how most steam games identify the player and when you family share you are just associating that new steamid with your steamid so you can share certain purchases with if the developer allows it. Since each account is unique if I ban one it doesn’t ban the other. In the past you could use the steam public web API to query a steamid to see if it was a family shared and it would respond with the parent account and you could compare that to your ban list and then ban the new account. A few years ago steam removed that capability for privacy protection and moved it to the game developers partner only access so a game developer could implement that same check but very few did and older or abandoned games are rife with cheaters now.
Now it would steam they are automagically making that check now or instead of a steam id it’s a family id, I have no idea but if it prevents account whack-a-mole and brings back automation I’m all for it.
It’s the only way I can see it working. Otherwise, you could just make infinite cheat accounts.
Well, 5 cheat accounts a year.
i mean theoretically they could just make it count as a strike, and if your account gets 3 strikes this way then your account is out as well
That’s two cheating incidents too many.
Oh no
Sadly it doesn’t seem to add the possibility of whitelisting/blacklisting games. I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
You can mark a game as private and it won’t show to the other family members. I verified this just now after signing up for the beta and setting up an account for my spouse. The games I marked private don’t show up on their families library.
That’s only for VAC games, right? The historical advice given by modders is to share your library, and use another account to mod it. If you accidentally login to the online portion of a game with a mod enabled, only that account is banned not the library owner.
This specifically says that getting banned on a shared account will also ban the owner who shared the game. Likely to prevent exactly what you described, where people could evade bans simply by sharing their library with a throwaway account.
I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
When I found this out years ago I booted everyone off my family and haven’t added anyone since. Ain’t trying to catch a ban
You can mark games as Private in your library now. It hides your ownership, play stats, etc. It doesn’t specifically say it disabled Family Sharing but it’d be silly to keep that. There is also a Hidden Games section which stops it from showing up on your list.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-4966
My adult children will be ecstatic for my new ability to set their playtime limits and see reports.
but mooooom im 35
Can a familt have more than two adults?
Yep
good to see steam being accepting of poly relationships and communes
Or… siblings?
Or, like, me sharing single player games with my buddies. But you do you.
…and you…and you…and you…
Or simply being two parents plus an 18 year or older child.
My sons will still be my family when they celebrate their 35th birthday… They’ll hopefully have their own places, but that doesn’t change that they are my family.
While it’s perhaps morbid, could there ever be a feature of Steam Inheritance? Eg, a person owns many thousands of dollars in games, passes away, and has a family that might like access to them.
Has some legal difficulties where you’d need to verify identity and have contact with lawyers to execute it, so it’s not exactly a software problem.
We kind of dealt with that for my Dad, but it was never really an issue. My brother just assumed control of the account and that was that. We already had all the access info, so it wasn’t like we had to ask them for anything. We just got it setup on this new Family thing yesterday though, so I can actually access most of his games again (for some reason on the old Family Sharing, his games got blocked out).
No. Because it’s a contract between you and Steam. These digital contracts haven’t been around for long enough for society to figure out inheritance standards yet, so the companies have all the power to just force your family to repurchase.
Nothing is stopping you from just handing your login credentials to your family. If they can’t figure it out then they were not worthy of your library.
That doesn’t mean that implementing fail safes would still be nice. I think Google has it so that your information can be dumped into another family’s email if the account hasn’t been active in 500 days or something along those lines.
Why not just have a select Steam inheritor account if inactive for more than XXXX amount of days. It could also crack down on dead steam accounts.
Google has e-mails an documents other family members are interested in.
Nobody wants you niche steam games, or to be associated with your terrible K/D ratio
This will be interesting for you to learn: You not wanting a thing is not the same as nobody wanting that thing. This applies to all things.
Or, you set your steam account up as a company. Still a “person” for legal purposes, but can be handed down.
Totally just joking, but maybe…
Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.
Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.
For REAL!! Not playing same game with one copy makes sense. But the one instance per library was harsh. This is tremendous, and honestly, I’ll probably buy even more games knowing my kids can play them and I can stick to my same old same old if I don’t like it.
Seriously, it’s great to see Valve digging deeper into my heart with improvements to services like this.
No kidding. This solves a major issue with the Steam Deck as well, because now someone else can be playing on the Deck while you use your main PC for another game.
I have issues with this even with 3rd party applications. Wanna play PokeMMO, an emulator that doesn’t even exist on Steam, on your Steam Deck while you’re waiting to respawn in Trouble in Terrorist Town? Fuck you, you’re disconnected from that server now.
Guess I’ll just use my phone then, jfc
Yeah. Right now Family Sharing locks down an entire library instead of individual games so this wasn’t possible.
BuT wHy iS eVeRyOnE RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK? ThEy aRe A mOnOpOlY!!11!!!
- Some fuckwits
I suspect we’ll be fine until Gabe dies. Then, it depends on who ends up with the company and what they do with it.
To be fair, a lot of monopolies are great in the beginning. It’s the inevitable power-tripping downslide that sucks.
I still love Steam and Valve though.
The only reason this hasnt happened with valve is because it’s a private company. Publically traded companies are the cancer of ou society tbh
Well and GaBeN is still alive.
He need to find a successor before his time
From what I’ve heard, his son is cool, so we might get two generations of awesome steam.
Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.
Laughs in Rockefeller and standard oil
Steam is a private company and being run by a decent human. Didn’t have to be both.
I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.
Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually “RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK”.
Who can be in a Steam Family?
While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.
To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.
This sounds like they are going to limit usage to geo-locational. Or that’s just supposition by me but I don’t see any other things this would target.
Probably less geo-location and more just shared IP block/address
I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.
Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.
I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.
Wireguard makes everyone one big happy family!
If this is based on store region, VPN is not enough. You’ll need a payment method from that country as well.
Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.
Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.
You should remember that valve already threatened VPN users after everyone was buying games in Argentina.
They mean you vpn into your home network.
It would be nice if they could someday find a better way to enforce this. What if your kid has shared custody with their other parent, and they aren’t in the same household all the time? What if they’re studying abroad and aren’t even in the same country?
I don’t have the solution, but I do hope someone eventually finds a better way to do it.
game sharing
Do family members have to be in the same residence, or can they be in different locations?Edit: never mind got my answer from this comment.
Optimist me: Steam looking into curating the next generation of customers.
Pessimist me: child protection laws made it too much of a headache for Steam to monetize the kids.
Also, 2 weeks ago Last Epoch disabled family account sharing because it was being abused for real money trading:
We have unfortunately had to disable family sharing on Steam for Last Epoch.
This feature enabled the use of significant RMT (Real Money Trading) and Botting options, and was removing our ability to ban/remove accounts, faster than they could share them with their entire networks.
I don’t think any one specific thing is responsible for this change, but the 5 account limit seems like it would certainily be a welcome change for the Last Epoch devs.
The 5 account limit was always there.
But you could freely rotate in new accounts. Now you have to wait a year.
Both!
This is good
and
I wish it was easier to manage multiple steam account on a single computer because some of us have more family than devices
It seems easier these days than it was back in the old times. Four of us in the family hopping around on 2 desktops and 2 old laptops. Pretty fluid! Not sure if you’re experiencing something specific?
I was also using the heck out of the ‘local fire share’ feature in steam, i only had to download Ark survival evolved (128gb!)1 time!
What I would really like is to be able sign on to my windows account and then log into steam as me without typing in another password BUT the kids can’t log into steam and then switch to my account because they don’t have my password and they’re not signed in to Windows as me.
There is actually a way to quickly switch accounts now.
These changes are great although on a slightly unrelated note. I can sort of understand why they don’t allow you to do it but it’d be nice if I could play something on my Deck while playing something on my PC too. Sometimes I’m just idling waiting for friends in a game and want to pass the time. I know you can just switch off Wi-Fi in the Deck to do that but it is still mildly annoying.
This is pretty fantastic. I have two kids that I share with, and when one plays any game from my library currently, my entire library gets locked out from the other kid. Changing this to a game by game basis makes so much more sense.
Yeah I’m excited. My wife and I don’t buy two copies of games, so it’s been hard to play games the other has
You can avoid this by bringing one of them off the Internet but it’s a real pain. It’s not so bad on the Steam Deck but bringing a desktop offline intentionally seems crippling. No Streaming music, no email alerts.
Either way I’m excited for the change. It makes way more sense.
There’s no reason Pajama Sam from 1997 can’t be played at the same time as Stardew Valley on 2 separate PCs.
Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.
There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.
We’ve discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.
I feel like this is how it should work all the time for account related “exploits”.
If you’re willing to fuck with your firewall settings every time you want to play the game just to pay for one game license instead of two, fine. You payed for the game with intelligence and frustration instead of money.
Omg I was just complaining about this in another thread. I wish it hadn’t taken them so long, but I’m stoked it’s happening!
Doesn’t the offline mode solve this?
My account has been locked up because my daughter has three separate BG3 games going with friends. Last week my son said we need to put a time limit on her because nobody else can play on Steam.
And from you! Glad this has finally been amended.
Ok now this is exciting news!!
