Steam :: Steam News :: Introducing Steam Families
steamcommunity.com
Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families, available today in the Steam Beta Client. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play. Create a Steam Family To get started, you can create a Steam Family and then invite up to 5 family members.

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
  • Patches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • bitwaba@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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.