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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.
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.
I know that this is supposed to be a family, but it’s a surprised dog face to me.
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.
It's fixed now. But flatpak steam on gnome/Wayland would display a black screen on the store when opted into the family beta for a while. Stable was unaffected.
Ah, flatpak. That might be the difference.
This is a great feature! I can finally have both my kids play whatever game they want at the same time.
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.
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.
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
Been using this in Beta for a few months now. Very cool
Samesies
I have three sons, they live in the West Coast, I live in the Midwest. I can't join a family with them. That's a bummer.
Why not? My Steam Family is just a group of friends spread out all across the country. Geographic distance shouldn't be an issue.
They're doing IP location checks, and they're doing them badly (there's not really a way to do them well). It's not working for me with people in the same town, and other people are reporting it's randomly working or not working with locations in the same neighborhood.
I don't really know how it works but according to a lot of other people here it doesn't work unless you are in the same region. This isn't the only person here saying they can't use it because they don't live near their family.