Steam Families Is Here

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/4605582245626919823

by diggan • 2 years ago

68 49 2 years ago

store.steampowered.com

thestgman1• 2 years ago

Thank you Steam!

safety1st2• 2 years ago

Interesting as an example of how for-profit corporate software design models a family.

the_af• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, do you see anything obviously soulless with Steam Families?

Is it about the limit of 5 people in a "family"?

I can't seem to find anything fundamentally wrong with this, they seem to be treating the library as if you had physical copies of each game "disc" and one device per family member. Is it artificial? Well, yes, because the games are actually digital, but I suppose they do want you to buy two copies if two people want to play at the same time.

safety1st2• 2 years ago

I meant what I said literally, it was neither Reddit faux-political snark nor a negative/positive moral statement. Who you consider to be in your family is a very personal affair and a random corporation doesn't know what your definition of family is, it also can't just let you add anybody because it's a profit based enterprise. It's interesting to look at the design choices made here like the 1 year "cooldown" on family membership and the fact that you can get banned if the person you shared you game with misbehaves. Basically they require you to put some skin in the game when you share, which is interesting from a standpoint of software design

coreyh14444• 2 years ago

Question for the crowd: My son has been playing in my Steam account for several years now and I don't care much about my achievements, but he does. I'm thinking I create a new account for myself, change the email addr for the old account, create a new family and add him. Good idea? Any gotchas to be aware of?

Woshiwuja• 2 years ago

None i know of, should be pretty straight forward

devsda• 2 years ago

My advice, give it some time.

Like the cheating ban, there could be more restrictions/actions in place on accounts once they have figured out and addressed all the ways someone can abuse or take advantage of this.

Once the dust settles, you can take a call based on that.

HanClinto2• 2 years ago

None I can think of. Sounds solid enough to me!

vitus• 2 years ago

This has been available in beta for some number of months, and it's been a much better experience than the original Steam family sharing setup, where you essentially shared the entire library instead of individual games.

With Family Sharing, if one of your family members was playing a game from your library, and you started playing some other completely unrelated game, then you'd boot them from their current game. This makes some sense if you think about this from the perspective of sharing a console, but not so much if you handed them a physical disk to play on their own console.

With Steam Families, you only kick the person off if they're playing the same game that you want to. (And of course, you can still have multiple copies of the same game in the family library, in which case you only evict someone if there are no more copies available. Or I guess if they're explicitly playing your copy for, say, DLC that you own.)

Semaphor• 2 years ago

Ohh, finally. I’ve been playing with Steam "offline" for quite some time now (only singleplayer, so it doesn’t matter) so I don’t kick my wife out of whatever she is playing from my library. This is awesome.

guappa2• 2 years ago

Recover a child's account if they lost their password

Thank god! :D

amalcon• 2 years ago

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. Other family members are not impacted.

I understand why, obviously, but this is going to get acrimonious quickly.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

Seems totally fair to me. Don't loan your games to people you can't vouch for. It creates and preserves a circle of accountability. Similarly how you wouldn't loan your car to a friend who doesn't have insurance. If you do it it's on you if he bins it.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

Pretty much every single child thinks cheats are the greatest things ever when they first discover them. Usually you discover how boring and easy they make the game fairly soon after, but you still try them out.

Trucont• 2 years ago

I feel like this might be a big deterrent for users that might add random friends or people online as a means of expanding their libraries instead of keeping it in their immediate family. Probably a nice side-effect from Valve's perspective.

It would definitely suck to be banned because of your young child experimenting with cheats or something along those lines.

jsheard• 2 years ago

Per-account bans would also be easily exploited by those who do want to cheat - buy a game once, make five smurf accounts, add them all to a family, and get six fresh starts for the price of one. Any loophole like that absolutely would be abused.

duxup3• 2 years ago

If feel like it is completely normal for any kind of sharing to have these kind of rules.

It keeps people from using "don't blame me, family member did it" as an excuse / cover for cheating. I used to moderate a busy gaming forum, that excuse is baked into that community sadly.

thefz• 2 years ago

I understand why, obviously, but this is going to get acrimonious quickly.

Nah, I agree with it. It's sort of like private trackers invites, if an invitee is misbehaving, both the invitee and the inviter will be punished for it.

It's enforcing an honor system between peers.

duxup3• 2 years ago

I was just thinking how I wish that was the case on reddit, but for submissions.

Some magic where if you submit some article that is BS, deceptive rage bait, or just not up to whatever the subs standards are ... you as the submitter take the hit somehow.

It wouldn't be foolproof, but forums sometimes are inundated by users who love to post / submit stories and it chances the atmosphere of the forum from thoughtful to ... whatever low effort tweet is out there getting attention.

deng• 2 years ago

This comes very very late, but man, it's still great. The restriction that you couldn't play a game from your own library as long as it was shared was a ridiculous restriction, especially since it could easily be circumvented by going offline, so finally this nuisance is a thing of the past. I'm even more excited by the parental controls, though. They look really usable and properly thought through, which unfortunately is a rarity nowadays, where nothing gets implemented that has the potential to reduce engagement. It really looks like some actual parents had a say in this. Thank you!

duxup3• 2 years ago

My oldest son JUST signed up for steam.

I was just lamenting having to login to his computer with my login to share. Problem solved!

kthejoker2• 2 years ago

Awesome, much better than before.

Amazon Music just introduced profiles.

Hopefully an encouraging trend in 2024 that tech finally realizes households exist and have different needs than individuals.

HanClinto2• 2 years ago

I've been using the new Steam Families in beta for the past several months, and it's wonderful.

This feature is why I was willing to buy a Steam Deck several months ago, and I've been very happy with it.

Prior to that, I had been purchasing games on Steam as little as possible -- Epic Games Store, GoG, direct -- anything to avoid Steam, just because I was so frustrated with the old Steam Family Sharing setup and its library lock system.

Steam Families is everything that I've wanted it to be. Super pleased with it, and it's a very pro-user move. Highly highly recommended!

red1reaper2• 2 years ago

Yeah, Steam is surprisingly pro-consumer in unexpected ways. Not like they don't have their closet skeletons but they present themselves as nicer than others companies in the videogame sector with their actions.

I wonder if it is because ideology from the top or just a very robust good-reputation based company policy.

dnel• 2 years ago

I remember in the early days the idea of not having physical copies and trusting Steam to continue to provide access to your content was quite a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. It's somewhat ironic that while they paved the way, they have kept a good reputation while others that followed have abused this trust.

SkeuomorphicBee• 2 years ago

That is great. Now they just need to add a easy way to alternate between different profiles on the same computer, because having to log-out and log-in every time you want to hand the controller to someone else in the family is a big hassle.

I understand the now a days most people have their own computer, so the log-out/log-in is not a problem for most people; but some of us have a gaming desktop connected to the living-room TV that is shared by the whole family, and in this case a way to change profiles without having to do all the hassle of logout/login is really needed.

Xombie38• 2 years ago

You could use the recently new change account feature where you open Steam and all your accounts appear in one window and you're already logged in to all of them and you just click on your profile icon and it opens that account and when you are ready to switch you click the drop-down box next to your username and select "Change Account" and after it closes, the window with the profile icons pops up again and you can select another account and you don't have to use a password each time. Make sure you tick the check box when you confirm the request to change the account. It makes it much easier to log in and out of different accounts.

rcarmo• 2 years ago

Does that work on a Steam Deck or on the “Big Screen” interface? I’d like to have that in Bazzite.

Haranrk• 2 years ago

Gabe newell should be protected at all costs

Tiberium• 2 years ago

A very important part is that Steam requires that all accounts in a family have the same country in their account (the one used for store restrictions and for payments), AND (!) be from the "same household". For the latter they seem to be actually checking login history to see, I don't know how granular that check is (city/state), but it's still very interesting. So even if two people have the same country set in their Steam account, it doesn't mean they can make a Steam family.

elashri2• 2 years ago

And that exclude long distance relationships and the case when one of the family members is studying abroad. And this is a realistic scenario not a hypothetical one.

Atotalnoob• 2 years ago

Or someone on a business trip or vacation

echoangle3• 2 years ago

I wouldn't really call a long-distance relationship or studying abroad the same household, so I don't think this is a good argument against the system.

jordemort• 2 years ago

Been using the beta with my kid for a few months, it's great. I got to take the parental lock code off of my own account and I no longer have to hide Genital Jousting from my own library.

thunkle• 2 years ago

Can I prevent access to the game community art section which often has inappropriate content regardless of the games rating?

crtasm• 2 years ago

Settings -> Library -> Disable Community Content ? I don't know about locking access to the setting though.

...oh - that only prevents it being shown by default, there's still a button to load it.

TrianguloY• 2 years ago

Families seem to like this, which is good, but the previous method also allowed independent friend sharing, which this new one removes.

In the old family sharing, if you share your library with a friend (a close one, you still need to log into their computer) and that friend shared with you, each of you still have other 4 independent and non-shared friends to choose.

With the new method each new friend is also shared, and counts towards the limit of both of you.

I understand the family sharing is meant for families, but without a similar "friend sharing", feature you can no longer share your games with a close friend the same way you would share a physical disc, and for me that's a great loss.

jacknews• 2 years ago

It should have been this from the start, the old method of having to share an entire library at a time seemd to be an obvious technical limitation rather than a good policy choice.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 2 years ago

I love it, but I would rename it "Steam household" so that people stop confusing it with the term "extended family"

t0bia_s• 2 years ago

Or jus buy a DRM free games on GoG and let them install/play to any family member as you wish.

Steam Families Is Here

Related Stories