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
Sigh… I’m getting tired of the Valve apologetics in every thread. They make good products, yes. They also abuse their market share to implement anticompetitive policies. The first doesn’t absolve them of the second.
Truth is, no one has any idea what it would look like if there were actual competition among the PC games platforms. Steam may be the best possible world, or maybe we don’t know what we’re missing.
Anyone who wants to learn more about Steam’s anticompetitive practices:
Epic gives me free games and I still don’t like them… The “problem” is Valve is Steam-rolling the competition because people want to give them money.
Yep. Because honestly, Steam is better than Epic in almost every way. When you want to buy a particular game X, you get a lot more from your purchase if it’s on Steam (workshop, friends, multiplayer, etc.). There is strong inertia and network effects that keep us all preferring Steam.
Epic can’t compete with the Steam experience. But if Epic was able to list everything 18% cheaper (the difference in fees between Epic and Steam)—then they would rightly be able to compete on price.
I understand now and that does make sense. No point in undercutting your competition if you can’t pass those savings to the customers.
What is a PMFN?
“Platform Most Favored Nation”. It’s a type of clause in platform/marketplace agreements that prohibit a seller from losting their product for a lower price on a different sales platform. Specifically, it prevents selling on a different marketplace with lower fees (e.g. Epic Games or a publishers own website) and passing the difference to the savings to the consumer.
Oh, I hadn’t read of it in that form, thanks!
Doesn’t Amazon have the same stipulation on every item listed on their site?
Edit: I think I misunderstood you here. I thought Amazon’s game division was complaining about Steam. That would have been very hypocritical.