Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
This is a great improvement to this feature. It’s refreshing when these type of convenience features are considered and implemented.
Ubisoft and EA already opted out lmao
And no one was surprised
Just wished it worked across countries/steam store regions
I’m really glad to see this. My husband and I game together a lot so we will still buy individual copies of a lot of games. Theres some games though that I’d like to try but never will because I won’t buy them, and his library is basically never available when I want it to be. Happy that we can now share some of those really weird one off games!
I know that this is supposed to be a family, but it’s a surprised dog face to me.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game
Hm… so if you don’t trust your kids to not do dumb things in games you also play then don’t share them
As much as i don’t really like this there would have been a loophole where you use fake temporary family members to continue cheating.
Back in the day some games also banned your homes external ip address which would have a similar effect.
Imagine moving to a new place and being banned because the last person who lived there cheated in the specific game you play lol.
Ip address isn’t tied to the house, but the subscriber.
But most ISP don’t have static Ip for private customers, so you experience just suddenly being banned because you received an Ip address someone got banned.
I tried to sign up for a Facebook account (hate it, but market place seemed like my only option for something I was after) and had my account automatically banned on creation. Twice. They demanded photos of my face, which I begrudgingly gave them, and still never approved my account.
I signed up for a new one with the exact same information from my mobile data plan instead and it worked fine, and I never got banned
cheating
Dumb things
These are not the same thing.
Finally! Now I can switch back to the “normal” Steam Beta build for other experimental features, Steam Family was on a separate beta build which didn’t allow me to try other things…
The family beta had weird issues on Linux (Gnome/Wayland) until recently too so I’m glad to see this getting a full release.
I’ve been on it for a while (on Garuda, no Gnome) and it’s been stable. I don’t recall any issues. Maybe I just got lucky.
Very handy. Been using it with my daughter and loves the amount of games she can choose from.
This is a great feature! I can finally have both my kids play whatever game they want at the same time.
This is a lot easier to manage than the old library sharing where I was always going between machines, changing accounts and sharing libraries with people with multiple desktop logins on multiple machines. Changed the family over today. I am concerned this new system will get abused by groups of independent adults like Netflix was and publishers will withdraw games or prices will increase. Just pirate please and don’t ruin a good thing because for parents with dependent kids at home the cost of living is rough.
Being able to remotely manage parental controls from my login for younger kids is also awesome. It feels like it was made by an actual parent instead of a single 20 something tech bro like some other parental control systems. It is fucking abysmal that so many streaming apps make it hard to find age appropriate content or set sensible access controls. Like seriously Crunchyroll - you are owned by a fucking filthy rich media megacorp Sony and you cant provide search by age, content ratings or helpful labeling.
This is fantastic! I was just trying to set up my kid on a computer and the old way was seeming too clunky and slow, and she wanted to do something else so we never finished it.
Nice & handy addition! ✌️
You can only add family members in the same steam store region.
Unfortunately over here it seems to be doing IP-based location as I’m not able to add my brother who lives in a different part of the same town.
just have him login to your computer, then log him out, then add him as a family member, steam will see both use the same ip/computer, and bam, your good
Yeah this has been a sticking point since the beta, they never responded to the thousands of comments complaining about it. It’s pretty bullshit and makes this feature useless in many circumstances.
Between my wife’s enormous Steam library and Whisky/Crossover on my M2 MacBook, I’ve been playing more games than ever since the beta of this popped up. It’s actually quite impressive how many games just work - albeit with some compromises in places.
Can you share more about how you got steam to work that way? Right now I play some games through a VM with horrible performance.
If you’re using an M-series Mac, download the Windows Steam installer and Whisky. Install Steam through Whisky then simply install games through Steam as normal.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, but /r/MacGaming on Reddit is a useful resource.
There are some that simply won’t work because the hardware won’t run them (Red Dead 2 is the most disappointing one for me), but have a play and see what works.
This bit is a bit fucked up:
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
I guess it’s to prevent creating family members for the purpose of cheating
Not sure I agree, how else are they meant to prevent the ocean of “It wasn’t me, it was my brother” excuses from hackers smurfing accounts?
I’d recommend (to everyone) that if you’re unsure -or have even the slightest doubt about the person you’re going to give access to your Steam account- to politely decline and play it safe.
They should know the account it is that’s currently using it. They’re not using your account when playing your games
Unless I’ve misunderstood; that’s exactly why I asked the question in my original comment. I’ll explain my / the reasoning:
I own a game on a Steam account (A) and want to hack (and evade bans) using another Steam account (B).
I share my library/game from account (A) to account (B) then hack on account B and only account B gets banned… What’s to then stop me from making Steam account C, D, E, F… etc? Absolutely nothing. Hence the double ban.
I stress that if you do share a game / your Steam library with others you trust them explicitly.
Restrict the number of accounts that can join that family group. And/or remove the ability to share the library from the main account for repeated offenses.
Or require multiple family members accounts to have to cheat before the owner account is banned.
stop sharing your library with strangers and kick your brother’s ass when he gets you banned
I think it’s a great rule. If you’re sharing your library with others, don’t be am asshole and cheat. If you do you’ll be a disappointment to them too. More social pressure to not cheat is only a positive in my opinion, but also I will never cheat and I only share my library with people I’m confident won’t cheat as well. I don’t associate with people who want to ruin other’s fun. If you do then that’s on you. It’s your choice to risk getting banned.
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Sounds like a great life lesson to be taught by a responsible adult to a 24 year old discovering cheats.
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Not sure where you’re going with this - I was implying that there are consequences for cheating, like losing access to a game library even if temporary.
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I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games.
Well it’d be just the one game that they cheated in. That’s where you can sit the kid down and tell him that cheating has consequences. Ideally this talk would’ve happened before you share access though - I’m thinking of it as making sure the kid knows how to drive before you let them borrow the keys to your car.
EDIT: just to be clear, when I brought up the kid losing access to a library, I meant the shared access being revoked by the parent.
It is not different from how the previous shared libraries worked. I guess it’s there to stop cheaters from buying a single copy of the game and sharing it with throwaway accounts.
That sort of behaviour should be easy to track if it happens more than once though
I mean, someone should get banned from cheating. I can see why this happen though, since the account playing does not own the game the account which has the game linked gets banned instead. If the account cheating has the game they are instead playing on their copy and that gets banned instead (i assume).
However the ban should be linked to the account and not the copy of the game. I do not understand why this isnt the case. Maybe because someone could just make a new account and link that to play on instead, therefor never having to buy more than one copy of the game while cheating.
Yeah, it’s most likely to prevent someone from using the family feature to get away with cheating.
As it stands now, if you get caught cheating you must create a new account and repurchase the game. So the main deterrent is the full cost of a game.
With the steam family function you could potentially create 5 new accounts per year, and simply remove them when they get caught cheating. The only deterrent would be the wait period.
So I agree with their decision. The downside is that you must trust someone before adding them to your family. If your cheating son gets you kicked off counterstrike, then just remove him from your family. They’re never too old to drop off at the fire station.
I mean, it’s been here for beta years and yes, it is absolutely fantastic. The one year penalty keeps me from handing it out like candy to extended family and friends (plus we all have that cousin who can’t be trusted) while I can let my wife and kids play games on my account without them kicking me out of mine.
The parental controls are good too, although I’m not using them yet since my kids are too young to really pick their games from the library themselves.
Been using this in Beta for a few months now. Very cool
Samesies
So how do I create a Steam Family? I can’t see an option to do so anywhere but I am most likely just missing it… or it hasn’t been rolled out to the UK yet
edit: found it! For anyone else who is lost like me, go to the top right and click on your use name and then Account Details. From there, Family Management is on the left and it’s obvious
