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Steam Families Is Here

store.steampowered.com

1–10 of 52 posts

Re: Steam Families Is Here

#4
Question for the crowd: My son has been playing in my Steam account for several years now and I don't care much about my achievements, but he does. I'm thinking I create a new account for myself, change the email addr for the old account, create a new family and add him. Good idea? Any gotchas to be aware of?

Re: Steam Families Is Here

#5
This has been available in beta for some number of months, and it's been a much better experience than the original Steam family sharing setup, where you essentially shared the entire library instead of individual games.

With Family Sharing, if one of your family members was playing a game from your library, and you started playing some other completely unrelated game, then you'd boot them from their current game. This makes some sense if you think about this from the perspective of sharing a console, but not so much if you handed them a physical disk to play on their own console.

With Steam Families, you only kick the person off if they're playing the same game that you want to. (And of course, you can still have multiple copies of the same game in the family library, in which case you only evict someone if there are no more copies available. Or I guess if they're explicitly playing your copy for, say, DLC that you own.)

Re: Steam Families Is Here

#7
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 understand why, obviously, but this is going to get acrimonious quickly.

Re: Steam Families Is Here

#8

Question for the crowd: My son has been playing in my Steam account for several years now and I don't care much about my achievements, but he does. I'm thinking I create a new account for myself, change the email addr for the old account, create a new family and add him. Good idea? Any gotchas to be aware of?

None i know of, should be pretty straight forward

Re: Steam Families Is Here

#9
post #7

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 understand why, obviously, but this is going to get acrimonious quickly.

Seems totally fair to me. Don't loan your games to people you can't vouch for. It creates and preserves a circle of accountability. Similarly how you wouldn't loan your car to a friend who doesn't have insurance. If you do it it's on you if he bins it.

Re: Steam Families Is Here

#10
This comes very very late, but man, it's still great. The restriction that you couldn't play a game from your own library as long as it was shared was a ridiculous restriction, especially since it could easily be circumvented by going offline, so finally this nuisance is a thing of the past. I'm even more excited by the parental controls, though. They look really usable and properly thought through, which unfortunately is a rarity nowadays, where nothing gets implemented that has the potential to reduce engagement. It really looks like some actual parents had a say in this. Thank you!
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