I know that this is supposed to be a family, but it’s a surprised dog face to me.
This is a lot easier to manage than the old library sharing where I was always going between machines, changing accounts and sharing libraries with people with multiple desktop logins on multiple machines. Changed the family over today. I am concerned this new system will get abused by groups of independent adults like Netflix was and publishers will withdraw games or prices will increase. Just pirate please and don't ruin a good thing because for parents with dependent kids at home the cost of living is rough.
Being able to remotely manage parental controls from my login for younger kids is also awesome. It feels like it was made by an actual parent instead of a single 20 something tech bro like some other parental control systems. It is fucking abysmal that so many streaming apps make it hard to find age appropriate content or set sensible access controls. Like seriously Crunchyroll - you are owned by a fucking filthy rich media megacorp Sony and you cant provide search by age, content ratings or helpful labeling.
Been using this in Beta for a few months now. Very cool
Samesies
Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
This is a great improvement to this feature. It's refreshing when these type of convenience features are considered and implemented.
I'm really glad to see this. My husband and I game together a lot so we will still buy individual copies of a lot of games. Theres some games though that I'd like to try but never will because I won't buy them, and his library is basically never available when I want it to be. Happy that we can now share some of those really weird one off games!
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
Hm.. so if you don't trust your kids to not do dumb things in games you also play then don't share them
As much as i don’t really like this there would have been a loophole where you use fake temporary family members to continue cheating.
Back in the day some games also banned your homes external ip address which would have a similar effect.
Very handy. Been using it with my daughter and loves the amount of games she can choose from.
This is a great feature! I can finally have both my kids play whatever game they want at the same time.
Finally! Now I can switch back to the "normal" Steam Beta build for other experimental features, Steam Family was on a separate beta build which didn't allow me to try other things...
You can only add family members in the same steam store region.
Unfortunately over here it seems to be doing IP-based location as I'm not able to add my brother who lives in a different part of the same town.
just have him login to your computer, then log him out, then add him as a family member, steam will see both use the same ip/computer, and bam, your good
Steam
Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
Steam News | Steam Beta Client news
Useful tools:
SteamDB
SteamCharts
Issue tracker for Linux version of Steam