For gamers who have become parents, and with children who are also gamers, Steam has allowed you to share games with your kids, even if it’s not the most straightforward process. But Valve has since announced Steam Families, simplifying the process somewhat as well as removing some old limitations.
Valve says that Steam Families is replacing both Family Sharing and Family View. And one of the immediate benefits of this is that the old limitation of the former has been removed, allowing more than one person to play different games from a single library. You still can’t have more than one person playing the same game from one library though.
To use the company’s example, you can play your copy of Portal 2 while someone else plays your copy of Half-Life. But if you both want to play the same game, the newer instance takes priority, and the person previously playing will get booted from the game. Either way, saves and achievements, as well as Workshop add-ons, remain on an individual basis, so you won’t be sharing progress or mods, for example. The game in question has to support the feature in the first place though, and that’s up to the devs.
For parental controls, Steam Families allows parents to allow or limit access to games for their children, as well as features like the store, community or friends chat. There’s also playtime reports, the ability to set playtimes, as well as the ability to grand additional playtime or feature access, temporarily or permanently. You can also recover a child’s account this way if they forgot their password.
Finally, Steam Families allows parents to approve game purchases via email or mobile device. You’ll be notified when a child adds games to their cart, and you can approve or reject them from the aforementioned methods. Approved games are added to their account.
Despite the announcement, Steam Families is technically still in beta, so to use these features, all family members have to select it from the Client Beta Participation menu under Steam> Interface. The feature allows for six members to be registered as a family, though Valve may change this number in the future depending on usage rates.
It doesn’t look like there is an adult-to-child ratio required, and while adults can leave Steam Families freely, they’ll have to wait for a year after initially joining one before they can join another. Similarly, each family slot has a one-year cooldown before it can be occupied again. Children can only be removed by an adult, and adults can remove each other seemingly freely, the one-year cooldown period notwithstanding.
Valve has also prepared quite the FAQ list as part of the Steam Families announcement, which covers specific scenarios like what happens when someone playing a game in your library gets banned. You can give the list a read by hitting the link below.
(Source: Steam)
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