Steam Families Is Here | Hacker News Reader

Steam Families Is Here

store.steampowered.com

68 pointsdiggan49 comments

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.)

Ohh, finally. I’ve been playing with Steam "offline" for quite some time now (only singleplayer, so it doesn’t matter) so I don’t kick my wife out of whatever she is playing from my library. This is awesome.

I've been using the new Steam Families in beta for the past several months, and it's wonderful.

This feature is why I was willing to buy a Steam Deck several months ago, and I've been very happy with it.

Prior to that, I had been purchasing games on Steam as little as possible -- Epic Games Store, GoG, direct -- anything to avoid Steam, just because I was so frustrated with the old Steam Family Sharing setup and its library lock system.

Steam Families is everything that I've wanted it to be. Super pleased with it, and it's a very pro-user move. Highly highly recommended!

Yeah, Steam is surprisingly pro-consumer in unexpected ways. Not like they don't have their closet skeletons but they present themselves as nicer than others companies in the videogame sector with their actions.

I wonder if it is because ideology from the top or just a very robust good-reputation based company policy.

I remember in the early days the idea of not having physical copies and trusting Steam to continue to provide access to your content was quite a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. It's somewhat ironic that while they paved the way, they have kept a good reputation while others that followed have abused this trust.

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!

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.

Pretty much every single child thinks cheats are the greatest things ever when they first discover them. Usually you discover how boring and easy they make the game fairly soon after, but you still try them out.

Sure, but it's the parent's responsibility to teach the child to use such cheats in single player games to not ruin the experience for others in the process.

The tf2 cheaters have been at it for several years.

I feel like this might be a big deterrent for users that might add random friends or people online as a means of expanding their libraries instead of keeping it in their immediate family. Probably a nice side-effect from Valve's perspective.

It would definitely suck to be banned because of your young child experimenting with cheats or something along those lines.

Per-account bans would also be easily exploited by those who do want to cheat - buy a game once, make five smurf accounts, add them all to a family, and get six fresh starts for the price of one. Any loophole like that absolutely would be abused.

Maybe it would be better if it worked by a system of strikes? Like if one of the accounts that you are sharing cheats, that account gets banned and yours get a strike, this strike means you and the other accounts that use your copy are more closly and harshly monitored but you can still play, if another cheat is detected in that copy then you get a ban.

This would give breath room for parents to explain to their kids that they should not cheat without leaving that much leeway for cheaters themselves.

That would require every single game/anticheat to implement a "closely monitored" feature, and also still effectively halves the price of the game for cheaters.

Additionally, this only benefits people who share their game with cheaters - just don't do that. If you can't trust someone won't cheat with your copy of the game, they probably aren't a close family member.

Or maybe at least to allow users to restrict certain games from being shared?

If feel like it is completely normal for any kind of sharing to have these kind of rules.

It keeps people from using "don't blame me, family member did it" as an excuse / cover for cheating. I used to moderate a busy gaming forum, that excuse is baked into that community sadly.

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

Nah, I agree with it. It's sort of like private trackers invites, if an invitee is misbehaving, both the invitee and the inviter will be punished for it.

It's enforcing an honor system between peers.

I was just thinking how I wish that was the case on reddit, but for submissions.

Some magic where if you submit some article that is BS, deceptive rage bait, or just not up to whatever the subs standards are ... you as the submitter take the hit somehow.

It wouldn't be foolproof, but forums sometimes are inundated by users who love to post / submit stories and it chances the atmosphere of the forum from thoughtful to ... whatever low effort tweet is out there getting attention.

A very important part is that Steam requires that all accounts in a family have the same country in their account (the one used for store restrictions and for payments), AND (!) be from the "same household". For the latter they seem to be actually checking login history to see, I don't know how granular that check is (city/state), but it's still very interesting. So even if two people have the same country set in their Steam account, it doesn't mean they can make a Steam family.

And that exclude long distance relationships and the case when one of the family members is studying abroad. And this is a realistic scenario not a hypothetical one.

Or someone on a business trip or vacation

Hopefully it uses long term data and doesn't kick you out if you log in at another location a single time. I was assuming you can't make a family if you are consistently somewhere else relative to the rest of the family members.

I wouldn't really call a long-distance relationship or studying abroad the same household, so I don't think this is a good argument against the system.

I agree. Though children with split custody I wish was something that was considered a use case more often.

I think in this case they should focus more on explaining that this is for household family not for families in general.

That’s the case for every family feature ever though. Family is always short term for household. You can’t add your grandparents, cousins and uncles to your Spotify family either (if they don’t live in your household). And I don’t think anyone hearing about a family feature which allows sharing subscriptions expects otherwise.

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

My advice, give it some time.

Like the cheating ban, there could be more restrictions/actions in place on accounts once they have figured out and addressed all the ways someone can abuse or take advantage of this.

Once the dust settles, you can take a call based on that.

None I can think of. Sounds solid enough to me!

Interesting as an example of how for-profit corporate software design models a family.

Out of curiosity, do you see anything obviously soulless with Steam Families?

Is it about the limit of 5 people in a "family"?

I can't seem to find anything fundamentally wrong with this, they seem to be treating the library as if you had physical copies of each game "disc" and one device per family member. Is it artificial? Well, yes, because the games are actually digital, but I suppose they do want you to buy two copies if two people want to play at the same time.

I meant what I said literally, it was neither Reddit faux-political snark nor a negative/positive moral statement. Who you consider to be in your family is a very personal affair and a random corporation doesn't know what your definition of family is, it also can't just let you add anybody because it's a profit based enterprise. It's interesting to look at the design choices made here like the 1 year "cooldown" on family membership and the fact that you can get banned if the person you shared you game with misbehaves. Basically they require you to put some skin in the game when you share, which is interesting from a standpoint of software design

Can I prevent access to the game community art section which often has inappropriate content regardless of the games rating?

Settings -> Library -> Disable Community Content ? I don't know about locking access to the setting though.

...oh - that only prevents it being shown by default, there's still a button to load it.

Families seem to like this, which is good, but the previous method also allowed independent friend sharing, which this new one removes.

In the old family sharing, if you share your library with a friend (a close one, you still need to log into their computer) and that friend shared with you, each of you still have other 4 independent and non-shared friends to choose.

With the new method each new friend is also shared, and counts towards the limit of both of you.

I understand the family sharing is meant for families, but without a similar "friend sharing", feature you can no longer share your games with a close friend the same way you would share a physical disc, and for me that's a great loss.

That is great. Now they just need to add a easy way to alternate between different profiles on the same computer, because having to log-out and log-in every time you want to hand the controller to someone else in the family is a big hassle.

I understand the now a days most people have their own computer, so the log-out/log-in is not a problem for most people; but some of us have a gaming desktop connected to the living-room TV that is shared by the whole family, and in this case a way to change profiles without having to do all the hassle of logout/login is really needed.

You could use the recently new change account feature where you open Steam and all your accounts appear in one window and you're already logged in to all of them and you just click on your profile icon and it opens that account and when you are ready to switch you click the drop-down box next to your username and select "Change Account" and after it closes, the window with the profile icons pops up again and you can select another account and you don't have to use a password each time. Make sure you tick the check box when you confirm the request to change the account. It makes it much easier to log in and out of different accounts.

Does that work on a Steam Deck or on the “Big Screen” interface? I’d like to have that in Bazzite.

> Recover a child's account if they lost their password

Thank god! :D

Gabe newell should be protected at all costs

My oldest son JUST signed up for steam.

I was just lamenting having to login to his computer with my login to share. Problem solved!

Or jus buy a DRM free games on GoG and let them install/play to any family member as you wish.

Been using the beta with my kid for a few months, it's great. I got to take the parental lock code off of my own account and I no longer have to hide Genital Jousting from my own library.

It should have been this from the start, the old method of having to share an entire library at a time seemd to be an obvious technical limitation rather than a good policy choice.

Awesome, much better than before.

Amazon Music just introduced profiles.

Hopefully an encouraging trend in 2024 that tech finally realizes households exist and have different needs than individuals.

I love it, but I would rename it "Steam household" so that people stop confusing it with the term "extended family"

Thank you Steam!

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