Highlights

  • Valve introduces Steam Families for easy game sharing among users, replacing previous features.
  • Parents can manage child accounts in a Steam Family, setting restrictions and monitoring activity.
  • Steam Deck offers portable PC gaming, powered by a custom APU for top performance in a compact design.

PC gaming giant Valve has announced a new sharing feature for Steam, which should allow players on the platform to share games with their loved ones. It's calling the feature Steam Families, and it's currently in testing on Steam beta clients.

While physical media in games is far from dead, the gaming market is increasingly dominated by digital sales and distribution. Unfortunately, digital platforms tend to vary in how convenient they make it to share one's games with other users, sparking headaches and frustration. This can be particularly true for parents, who often need to juggle multiple accounts for themselves and their children and manage game sharing while still trying to protect them from inappropriate titles, some of which are sold on the same marketplaces as family-friendly ones.

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Valve Announces Steam Families

It's this scene that Valve has stepped into by announcing Steam Families, a new feature that is available for users who opt into the Steam Beta Client. Once it leaves beta and is implemented across the whole Steam ecosystem, Steam Families will consolidate and replace the current Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View features. Currently, on the standard, non-beta Steam client, Steam Family Sharing allows a Steam user on a shared computer to view, request, and grant access to games installed in the libraries of other uses. Meanwhile, Steam Family View is a parental control feature, allowing adults to create Steam accounts for children and manage game access based on content, such as hiding inappropriate content or creating libraries of family friendly games.

Users on the current beta Steam client will be able to create their own Steam Family, adding up to five members via Steam, mobile device, or browser. Members of the same Steam Family can play shareable games that other members of the family own automatically, via a "family library." Players can even play their family members' games, even while those members are online playing a different game. The main restriction is that they can't play the same game simultaneously, unless the family owns multiple copies. Developers can also opt out of making their games shareable at their discretion, so not every game will appear in a family library. This ability was present in the previous version of Steam Family Sharing, and titles like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 were quietly removed from Sharing by their publishers.

Parents will also be able to control children's accounts in a Steam Family, limiting content visibility, restricting access to things like the Steam storefront or chatting, and setting playtime timers. Meanwhile, child accounts can make requests for feature access, game purchases, or playtime extension. As more people's gaming lives move online, the need to enable convenient controls for parents and kids alike becomes all the more important. And with the popularity of handheld PCs like the Steam Deck with families, it's on Valve to make sure parents can make games accessible to their loved ones with a minimum of hassle.