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
  • BlackmistEnglish
    430·
    7 months ago

    Isn’t that exactly the same as how it worked before?

    There may have been a brief moment where that didn’t happen, and then people discovered they could make cheat accounts, share their own games with them and get only the cheat accounts banned, and then make new ones and repeat.

    • Jaybob32English
      300·
      7 months ago7 months ago

      It is. My vac ban is currently 4990 days old. Thanks son!

      • RetrogradeEnglish
        120·
        7 months ago

        TIL to make my future children their own steam accounts

        • JojoEnglish
          50·
          7 months ago

          And buy them their own copies of online games.

          • RetrogradeEnglish
            100·
            7 months ago

            Instead of the sax talk, I’m going to sit them down to chat about how cheating in video games is bad m’kay

            • JojoEnglish
              70·
              7 months ago

              Parents, talk to your kids about saxophones. That, and cheating on video games, are the most important subjects to cover.

            • JojoEnglish
              10·
              7 months ago7 months ago

              Deleted: duplicate comment

    • extantEnglish
      20·
      7 months ago

      Currently each steam account is given a unique steam id number which is how most steam games identify the player and when you family share you are just associating that new steamid with your steamid so you can share certain purchases with if the developer allows it. Since each account is unique if I ban one it doesn’t ban the other. In the past you could use the steam public web API to query a steamid to see if it was a family shared and it would respond with the parent account and you could compare that to your ban list and then ban the new account. A few years ago steam removed that capability for privacy protection and moved it to the game developers partner only access so a game developer could implement that same check but very few did and older or abandoned games are rife with cheaters now.

      Now it would steam they are automagically making that check now or instead of a steam id it’s a family id, I have no idea but if it prevents account whack-a-mole and brings back automation I’m all for it.