While Valve has had family sharing as a feature with its Steam client, it wasn’t exactly the best, and at times, it didn’t work as intended. That all looks to be a thing of the past, as Valve has revealed an updated version of this called Steam Families, which is accessible via a new Steam beta client.
As mentioned on the Steam blog, Steam Families features introduce significant updates and improvements to family sharing, parental controls, and child purchase requests. With Steam Families, you can invite up to five family members and manage them via your Steam client, mobile device, or web browser.
From there, everyone who is invited will be able to access your games as if they were their own, and even if someone plays a game on your account, it won’t kick you off of Steam like it used to, which is something that I wished Valve had incorporated a long time ago. So did my son, who, when I told him about the new Steam Families, remarked, “Why did it take them so long to do?” That’s a valid question, indeed.
Perhaps it has something to do with the growing number of Steam players and new Steam Deck owners. Whatever the reason, I’m just glad to see that Steam Families is happening.
Here’s how this works or will work once you get the beta. Let’s say you have a copy of Tekken 8 and Granblue Fantasy Relink. Perhaps you want to play Tekken, and someone in your family wants to play Granblue Fantasy Relink. So, you shoot them over an invite, and once accepted, you can add them to your family. Then you can add the person as a child or an adult for security reasons. This also has specific implications depending on what you select.
Once that’s done, the person or persons will have complete access to your library. This changes if you change certain options, but I left it wide open for my needs so my children can have full access to my games. Instead of asking to borrow a game, they can just install and play at any time. They’ll also have their own save files as well, instead of sharing yours.
The other benefit is that I can also share my children’s games, though watching my son go through the list of all my Steam games makes me wonder who got the better end of this deal.
In testing this, I noticed at least one game that didn’t let me share it with my children. That being Luminous Avenger iX 2. Valve did mention that not all games will be eligible, and it will be up to the developers to opt-in. I’m sure I’ll find more as my children decide to raid all my games.
Although this all seems fantastic, and it is, there is a downside. Well, there are two downsides. As I mentioned, not all games will be eligible, and it’s up to the developers to opt in. Also, if someone else playing your games gets banned, you’ll also be banned.
So, there you have it. A better way to share games via Steam Families, and all I can say is that it’s about damned time.
