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
  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    While it’s perhaps morbid, could there ever be a feature of Steam Inheritance? Eg, a person owns many thousands of dollars in games, passes away, and has a family that might like access to them.

    Has some legal difficulties where you’d need to verify identity and have contact with lawyers to execute it, so it’s not exactly a software problem.

    • Olivia@lemmy.todayEnglish
      27·
      9 months ago

      No. Because it’s a contract between you and Steam. These digital contracts haven’t been around for long enough for society to figure out inheritance standards yet, so the companies have all the power to just force your family to repurchase.

      Nothing is stopping you from just handing your login credentials to your family. If they can’t figure it out then they were not worthy of your library.

      • ITGuyLevi@programming.devEnglish
        13·
        9 months ago

        Or, you set your steam account up as a company. Still a “person” for legal purposes, but can be handed down.

        Totally just joking, but maybe…

      • UsernameIsTooLon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        That doesn’t mean that implementing fail safes would still be nice. I think Google has it so that your information can be dumped into another family’s email if the account hasn’t been active in 500 days or something along those lines.

        Why not just have a select Steam inheritor account if inactive for more than XXXX amount of days. It could also crack down on dead steam accounts.

        • Olivia@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          Google has e-mails an documents other family members are interested in.

          Nobody wants you niche steam games, or to be associated with your terrible K/D ratio

          • isles@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            9 months ago

            This will be interesting for you to learn: You not wanting a thing is not the same as nobody wanting that thing. This applies to all things.

    • paddirn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      9 months ago

      We kind of dealt with that for my Dad, but it was never really an issue. My brother just assumed control of the account and that was that. We already had all the access info, so it wasn’t like we had to ask them for anything. We just got it setup on this new Family thing yesterday though, so I can actually access most of his games again (for some reason on the old Family Sharing, his games got blocked out).