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
Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.
Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.
For REAL!! Not playing same game with one copy makes sense. But the one instance per library was harsh. This is tremendous, and honestly, I’ll probably buy even more games knowing my kids can play them and I can stick to my same old same old if I don’t like it.
Seriously, it’s great to see Valve digging deeper into my heart with improvements to services like this.
No kidding. This solves a major issue with the Steam Deck as well, because now someone else can be playing on the Deck while you use your main PC for another game.
I have issues with this even with 3rd party applications. Wanna play PokeMMO, an emulator that doesn’t even exist on Steam, on your Steam Deck while you’re waiting to respawn in Trouble in Terrorist Town? Fuck you, you’re disconnected from that server now.
Guess I’ll just use my phone then, jfc
Yeah. Right now Family Sharing locks down an entire library instead of individual games so this wasn’t possible.
Its shit like this why I want to smack the “B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY” types who claim Steam does nothing with its 30%. Steam is one of the only companies out their in our late stage capitalist society that actually does things for its customer base without being forced to. We have digital refunds, completely remappable controllers, a linux operating system and portable computer that functions as a console when you dont want to use it as a computer, the only DRM in the world that doesnt actively suck, built in mod database/support, VR, official early access marketplace support (I know it has its issues), user game reviews with multiple sorting options, and thats everything I can currently think of. Steam is not only the only company I dont actively hate (Ok, I kind of like Costco too), vut I actually quite like Steam as a company.
Digital refunds isn’t them being good, it’s them getting sued by Australia.
They could have made it an AU only feature, though, and didn’t, to their credit.
Because I’m pretty sure EU was next in line to slap them in the face for not offering refunds.
and every other company would wait for every country to threaten them before enabling it there, because that’s 5 more months of extra profit!
I too hate everything that’s not completely perfect in every way
Ah yes, my comment openly states I hate steam because it isn’t perfect. It’s definitely written in there.
I think it’s also just generally a good thing for them. I’m way more hesitant to buy stuff from humble and fanatical because I can’t return stuff, so I rather pay a bit more to get it through steam.
And they repeatedly ignored my requests for games which didn’t work, as it was three weeks or thereabouts.
Ehh… Idk if that’s really on them. You can get around the playtime restriction by just playing offline, so there has to be an alternative restriction that doesn’t have that same vulnerability.
Three weeks is more than enough time to figure out something you own doesn’t even work.
I didn’t have the time to play it, tried to play it once and it didn’t work. I have a life and it often gets in the way, especially if I buy something on sale with the intention to play it later.
I’m honestly surprised you are defending it; if my car, bought new, stopped working through my continued usage in its first year, it would be repaired for free. A game which I booted up once after three weeks wouldn’t work… And I get told “no”. Not really acceptable. 30% fee for zero accountability and my money lost.
A car isn’t at max $70 lmfao, you’re comparing completely different worlds of cost. Also depending on where you buy said car, that isn’t the case lol, you buy a lemon… Get fucked it’s capitalism baby.
Or my phone, or my TV, or my (insert device here).
Faulty goods are faulty goods.
Err no. Grow up.
The problem is that without that rule, you can just buy a game, go offline and play the entire game, then return it. You could essentially play any game you wanted to for free
That already happens; I’ve got a few thousand games on Steam so I’m not taking the piss when I want to refund a faulty game. My total is probably five or ten refunds in the life of my account (almost 20 years).
without being forced to. We have digital refunds
Small nitpick, but it’s funny that you specifically listed their refunds first. Because they were forced into that. Some may remember how comically awful Steam’s customer support used to be. It was genuinely horrible, with resolution turnaround times measured in days and weeks instead of minutes or hours. There was no instant messaging or automated system; You had to email a sketchy email address, then wait days or weeks for them to finally respond. And chances were good that the response would basically boil down to “lul git fuckd loser, sux 2 b u”
Europe started pushing for them to be more customer friendly, because their refunds in particular were breaching some local European laws. In order to keep operating in Europe, they revamped their refund process entirely and recommitted to better customer service going forwards. But they only started the entire refund revamp in 2015 because they were going to be pushed out of European markets if they failed to comply.
I brought it up because until Steam did it NO digital game marketplace had refunds. Whether or not they got sued, Steam led the way
And its also frecking 10 years ago now they added refunds. It’s like people like using “thet got sued to add it” as some sorta “gotcha” that steam is bad, I don’t get some people
I’m starting to think these people think we use steam because we have to, and not because its a legitimately amazing games catalogue/storefront. It makes the “Steam is a monopoly” and “What happens when GabeN dies and Steam goes down the drain” comments make sense
You have to have never seriously engaged with the details of the Valve monopoly if you think that’s what we are upset about.
We know Steam is an amazing storefront—I buy my games there because it’s the best experience for the cost. But Steam charges a premium. And despite taking smaller cuts, competing platforms like Epic cannot actual pass those cost savings to consumers because Valve is strongarming game publishers into fixing prices.
The fact that you think Epic is consumer friendly in any way tells me all I need to know about engaging you any further on this topic.
I said no such thing. Please come back to this later with a fresh mind, and remember how wrongly you interpreted what was actually said for the sake of trying to fire off a quick response.
But if you’d rather disengage altogether then it is what it is. Cheers.
@Kedly What? This is flat out untrue. Back in 2008 Stardock’s attempt at a storefront via Impulse offered refunds: https://web.archive.org/web/20080708091849/http://tgnforums.stardock.com/315290
Later in 2013, EA of all companies would also offer refunds on their storefront, Origin: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/08/ea-begins-offering-refunds-for-its-digital-game-sales-on-origin/
And later that same year, GOG would offer refunds: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/gog-s-new-money-back-guarantee-is-more-about-trust-than-refunds
It was only a couple years after EA & GOG, in 2015, that Valve began offering refunds on Steam: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/06/valve-begins-offering-refunds-for-all-steam-games/
Impulse offered refunds for technical issues, and I could easily find examples of Steam doing the same in 2008 for GTAIV, EA only sold its own games, which made the legal hurdles it needed to jump through and the amount of developers it needed to get an ok from significantly lower, and GoG is GoG, an actually decent competitor to Steam, so sure I’ll give you that GoG beat Steam to the punch there
Your initial claim remains false.
As indicated, digital game storefronts offered refunds explicitly prior to Steam, and it wasn’t leading the way, especially given its policy was that all purchases were not refundable, up till 2015’s changes.
Leading the way isn’t making some exceptions to their policies occasionally, it’s making refunds a part of the policies from the outset when others aren’t.
Fine. My initial statement was incorrect. I still think Valve put a lot of leg work into getting fairly easy refunds in place for a digital storefront that thousands of different developers sell their games on, and that that is an insanely bigger beast than the other examples outside of GoG’s example, which I havent fully looked into, but my initial statement was more specific than that and thus wrong
Don’t forget private games, it’s a win-win because customers can buy games they don’t want to show to their friends and Valve get more money because they get more people buying those
embarrassingawesomegames.RIGHT! I FORGOT ABOUT THAT ONE
This stuff is great.
But ignoring all the real issues with Steam is stupid. Its people like you that require others to point out all the issues with Valve and how it won’t last forever.
And it’s bizarre that some of them seem to get angry when someone else points the issues out.
Looks weird from my side too, when someone starts frothing at the mouth about monopolies when steam is so much as mentioned.
Its the braindead takes that are getting the Ire, Steam ISNT a monopoly, and the 30% cut is industry standard
No ones ignoring the real issues. Steam isnt a monopoly and the 30% cut is industry standard. I’m not going to fault those who take issue with “Valve Time” or Valves shit communication. And frankly, the good stuff doesnt need to last forever, as soon as Steam enshitifies, GoG or Itch’ll be there to dethrone it, and Piracy’ll be there to get our games back if worst case scenario happens. You want better competition? Shit on Epic and EA to actually provide it
This is demonstrably wrong. The 30% cut is standard because Steam has used the same strategy as Amazon to fix prices across the market (a “Platform Most Favored Nation” clause—see the Wolfire Games v. Valve class action, specifically items 204 and 205 on pg 55). Competing storefronts cannot undercut Steam, so why would they take less than a 30% cut?
Epic Games Store—which is trying to undercut steam at a 12% fee—still list games at the same price as on Steam because of Valve has strongarmed publishers into fixing the prices. If Epic is charging 18% less but Valve is stopping publishers from reducing the game cost by that much, how is that not blatantly anti-competitive and anti-consumer?
enshitifies
Oh good, you are familiar with Cory Doctorow. He has an article on how Amazon abuses their position using the exact same playbook Valve uses.
I don’t care about the things you mentioned, but yes, those are also issues.
I was talking more about the issues around gambling and making loops specifically to take advantage of gamers with problems.
As well as the real problem that a single leader leading a company/nation will mean that company/nation always fails. The successors will inevitably mess it up sometime.
You say this like the competition hasnt already failed at the get go. Valve has the market share it has because no one else is offering anything better. Itch and GoG offer some things Valve doesnt, and because of that I wont say ALL of Valves competition is shit, but MOST of the competition STARTED off as your worst fear for what Valve MIGHT become
You are doing exactly what I said.
Valve is good, but they have shit features and I’m not sure why you’re defending them (but maybe you’re just a troll/ignoring my points?).
I don’t care about the competition - it’s like saying a person is molesting a child but hey, those two over there are molesting multiple children and murdering them! So they’re worse!
Marketshare is also a poor predictor as it’s often the first person to market as opposed to what’s best.
Think of it another way - Google has the most marketshare of search. Is it the best and is it doing only good things? If you say yes to both then I can’t help you further.
Just like you dont care about the competition, I dont care about CS:Go. I havent really defended anything they’ve done with CS:go. Right from the start I’ve focussed on two arguements, Steam’s (not a) monopoly, and its 30% cut
You can’t just ignore the arguments that don’t fit your world view/argument. In that scenario I could just look at the negatives of Steam and the positives of Epic and say that the Epic Store is better than Steam because I ignore all the stuff that doesn’t fit my argument.
It’s not just Cs go but multiple games like Dota Etc. They have specifically built a whole market and ecosystem to convince you to buy stuff and gamble effectively.
A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly.
The vast majority of games you pay for on Steam can be taken from you in a couple of clicks from a Valve employee. The second there’s a chance in management everything can go out the window very quickly because their position is ripe for abuse.
1: Steam is NOT a monopoly, competition exists for it, its just that most of it is garbage, and the few that arent, GoG and Itch, Steam outcompetes
2: This is a problem of Steams competition being bad, not with Steam itself
A company can be considered a monopoly without having 100% of the market. Microsoft is considered a monopoly, so is Google.
As for the rest, I don’t know how their competitors being bad changes the fact that you don’t really own the games you purchase on Steam.
I’m sorry bud, but Monopoly doesnt mean “Really large company” Steam has competition, it doesnt do anything to hamper competition, and its easy enough for new competition to arise. It is not a monopoly in any sense of the word. It is the top player as a digital videogame marketplace because it is leaps and bounds better than all of its competition. You dont like the risks of digital ownership? Understandable, GoG exists to fill that niche.
If you have the power to sway the market in the direction that you want, you’re the only one with that power and you’re the default option for your product then yeah, you very much are a monopoly and that’s the position Steam has in its market.
It’s currently in court for adopting anti competitive policies regarding pricing.
Valve is a multi billion dollars company, it doesn’t need you to defend it bud.
It definitely doesnt need me to. I’m just calling bulshit on arguements that are bulshit. And it being in court for that doesnt mean its going to lose, I’d be surprised if someone wasnt attempting to sue them if it meant they could get more money, welcome to capitalism. And Steam has the position it has and is the “default” game store entirely because it is an amazing storefront and its competition sucks. You have to go out of your way to install Steam, the same amount of steps as any other digital storefront. Anyways idealists like you who dont even have a toe in the real world exhaust me, so I’m going to block you now
Microsoft was found to have a monopoly over operating systems software for IBM-compatible personal computers.
You: “But other OS exist! So it’s not a monopoly! People could just install another browser if they weren’t happy!”
This isn’t Steam specific; this applies to almost every digital marketplace. Yeah, it sucks, but there’s some things you just have to accept. When’s the last time you bought a physical copy of a PC game?
You don’t need to buy physical copies. Games from GoG and, for example, itch.io can be downloaded DRM free.
Yeah, it sucks, but there’s some things you just have to accept.
This reminds me of a certain CEO who said gamers need to “get comfortable not owning games” so that subscription models can grow. I can imagine so, so many gamers in a couple years saying this sentence about that and so many more new exploitative practices.
The truth is, we don’t need to accept it. They need us to accept it so they can get away with it.
Pushback is crucial.
deleted by creator
It’s not steam’s fault that the competition is garbage 🧐
Don’t forget Steam Link! It’s one of my favourite features. You’re not even really tethered to any particular device to play your games since so many devices support the app. I play games that are single-player “console” style games in my lounge room for comfort and Steam Link means I can use my very good PC instead of buying into yet another console generation.
Yeah I love how they pioneered marketing gambling and loot boxes to children, so visionary
CSGO cases pulled $1 billion revenue in 2023. The steam store brought in $8.5 billion in that same year. That’s a 30% cut of all sales traffic on steam vs. in-game loot crates on a single title.
Loot boxes pull insane numbers. And yes they exploit children and problem gamblers. Love to see so many Valve fans downvote you :/
I too love how you can make shit up on the internet
It’s literally facts lol
The other reply to my comment has some links, but there’s no way you like Valve and don’t also know about Counter-Strike loot boxes and the third party market sites.
The company is called Valve.
Fair point. I interact with their storefront more than I’ve played their games, so my brain jumps to the word Steam before it does Valve.
Sigh… I’m getting tired of the Valve apologetics in every thread. They make good products, yes. They also abuse their market share to implement anticompetitive policies. The first doesn’t absolve them of the second.
Truth is, no one has any idea what it would look like if there were actual competition among the PC games platforms. Steam may be the best possible world, or maybe we don’t know what we’re missing.
To learn more about Steam’s anticompetitive practices:
- See the complaint from the pending class action case Wolfire Games v. Valve (at a minimum items 204, 205 on pg. 55) for how Steam’s PMFN clause affect publisher pricing.
- See Cory Doctorow’s Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly as a starting point for how a PMFN affects the market unfairly and harms the consumer.
What is a PMFN?
“Platform Most Favored Nation”. It’s a type of clause in platform/marketplace agreements that prohibit a seller from listing their product for a lower price on a different sales platform. Specifically, it prevents selling on a different marketplace with lower fees (e.g. Epic Games or a publishers own website) and passing the difference as savings to the consumer.
Oh, I hadn’t read of it in that form, thanks!
Doesn’t Amazon have the same stipulation on every item listed on their site?
Edit: I think I misunderstood you here. I thought Amazon’s game division was complaining about Steam. That would have been very hypocritical.
Epic gives me free games and I still don’t like them… The “problem” is Valve is Steam-rolling the competition because people want to give them money.
Yep. Because honestly, Steam is better than Epic in almost every way. When you want to buy a particular game X, you get a lot more from your purchase if it’s on Steam (workshop, friends, multiplayer, etc.). There is strong inertia and network effects that keep us all preferring Steam.
Epic can’t compete with the Steam experience. But if Epic was able to list everything 18% cheaper (the difference in fees between Epic and Steam)—then they would rightly be able to compete on price.
I understand now and that does make sense. No point in undercutting your competition if you can’t pass those savings to the customers.
What happens when the leadership or ownership changes hands?
He’s already said that he’d sink the company before he’d sell it. I believe him… it’s not like he’s not already rolling in money. What else do you offer him?
Edit: sink in this context being releasing all the drm.
The man’s not gonna live forever, ownership changing is a matter of time, not raw money. And I dread that time.
Well trashing steam wont fix that issue, thats an issue with all Steams competition being garbage
The other part of the question remains however, what happens when leadership changes, even supposing no sale of the company?
We go back to piracy. Easy enough
Edit: Wait. Do you guys think we use Steam because we HAVE to? GoG exists bros, we’re using Steam because we prefer it. If Steam goes to shit we’ll just stop using it
Do you guys think we use Steam because we HAVE to? GoG exists bros, we’re using Steam because we prefer it.
Do you think many are aware of options like GOG? Every other time I’ve seen it mentioned/suggested, it’s often accompanied by, “What’s GOG?”
Uh yes I do. Itch and GoG are pretty well known, specifically because they are competent competitors to Steam
Valve can be attributed with saving PC gaming. When people were terrified of buying “digital only” games on this fugly client called Steam—which only had Valve games and a few no name indies—the PC gaming shelves in places like Walmart and EB Games looked like a clearance section. Just a hodgepodge of games in no particular order, worn out looking boxes of new games picked up and put back down, meanwhile the PlayStation and Xbox walls flourished and even GameCube got more love from a merchandising standpoint.
Now we trust Valve with our digital libraries the way we’d trust a bank with our money. They’ve earned that trust, and I can’t say the same for Sony or Nintendo which are happy to charge you repeatedly for the same game. Microsoft actually does a pretty good job of making your old games still playable in some form, so Kudos to them.
So will we be surprised when Epic Games Store goes tits up? No. Will we care when we lose all our games? No, they were all free. Should we support Valve as long as they continue to be the champions of PC gaming? You better if you care about where it goes.
100% These idiots shit on Valve like the PC marketplace wouldnt be infinitely worse without them. If you truly care about the PC sphere getting better, shit on Valves lack of competition, dont try to tear down the best example we have. That being said I’m hesitant to say ONLY option as at this point GoG and Itch are passable competition, even if what they provide is TINY compared to what Valve has brought the PC Gaming Sphere
I’ve used GoG. It’s good. Never used Itch.
who claim Steam does nothing with its 30%
I don’t think that’s the argument against it. Just that it’s inordinately high. But Valve is a corporation so not unexpected.
The 30% it’s always been the standard though, so not just Valve. That figure comes from retail, where 30-50% is still standard practice. You could argue that retail has higher costs, therefore needs the higher cut, but when Valve created Steam, they probably went with what worked.
What I really hate about Steam and all online shops, is that you can’t resell something you purchased second hand. If I can resell my physical copy of a game or movie, I should be able to do the same with the digital version. Also the fact that they can remove access to the product you bought whenever they want. In my opinion, we need a law that specifies that what you buy is yours, and you get to do whatever you want with it, even if the manufacturer doesn’t like it.
Valve is in a really dominant position and has almost always been, so they got a lot of sway on what the industry standard is. So can’t really blame other corporations here for the 30%.
they probably went with what worked.
That’s one way to say it. I think early on they had the cost advantage to retail and needed to convince people to buy digitally instead of traditionally, so lower cut. But of course they, as any company, would keep it near to as high as possible while being competitive. I’m not trying to shit on Valve by saying that, it’s just how it works for any company.
What I really hate about Steam and all online shops, is that you can’t resell something you purchased second hand.
I think that was actually one usecase for NFTs or whatever. There was much talk about it a while back but after the whole jpeg fiasco and shitcoin stuff I think it was all killed off.
You realize there have been payment processors and retail stores long before valve existed right? And markups/cuts have always been commonplace.
Friend, I don’t know if you noticed but we’re talking specifically about game distribution platforms here. I really don’t know what you thought your comment would add to the discussion. What next, you’re going to tell me that money existed before Steam too lol.
Also catalog filtering. I wish GoG had a search filter half as good as Steam’s!
Out there*
My adult children will be ecstatic for my new ability to set their playtime limits and see reports.
but mooooom im 35
This is pretty fantastic. I have two kids that I share with, and when one plays any game from my library currently, my entire library gets locked out from the other kid. Changing this to a game by game basis makes so much more sense.
My account has been locked up because my daughter has three separate BG3 games going with friends. Last week my son said we need to put a time limit on her because nobody else can play on Steam.
You can avoid this by bringing one of them off the Internet but it’s a real pain. It’s not so bad on the Steam Deck but bringing a desktop offline intentionally seems crippling. No Streaming music, no email alerts.
Either way I’m excited for the change. It makes way more sense.
There’s no reason Pajama Sam from 1997 can’t be played at the same time as Stardew Valley on 2 separate PCs.
Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.
There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.
We’ve discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.
I feel like this is how it should work all the time for account related “exploits”.
If you’re willing to fuck with your firewall settings every time you want to play the game just to pay for one game license instead of two, fine. You payed for the game with intelligence and frustration instead of money.
I definitely paid with some time investment, but you bet I wrote a short script to automate toggling that rule on/off. It’s also not like I had to run that script every time I wanted to play a game. Only to play a game in my brother’s library while he was playing something else or when I wanted to play one of my games and he was already in one.
Summing up the time investment vs. the cost of games, and using a time-money conversion rate that assumes I had a well paying job in my field and wasn’t still a student, it was definitely profitable.
You’re definitely right on the frustration front though: I bought many games just to not have to deal with this. It was mostly used for games one of us was on the fence about. Or (like in the Outlast case) only one of us really wanting to play a game and the other just playing along because playing together is fun no matter the game.
Now, in the former case, it might be back to sailing the seas.
And from you! Glad this has finally been amended.
Yeah I’m excited. My wife and I don’t buy two copies of games, so it’s been hard to play games the other has
Omg I was just complaining about this in another thread. I wish it hadn’t taken them so long, but I’m stoked it’s happening!
Doesn’t the offline mode solve this?
Achievements don’t track in offline mode, so not a perfect solution.
Only the parent can play while being online. Their two kids must be logged in.
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.
This is going to be hilarious. Can’t wait to see the whining online.
Isn’t that exactly the same as how it worked before?
There may have been a brief moment where that didn’t happen, and then people discovered they could make cheat accounts, share their own games with them and get only the cheat accounts banned, and then make new ones and repeat.
It is. My vac ban is currently 4990 days old. Thanks son!
TIL to make my future children their own steam accounts
And buy them their own copies of online games.
Instead of the sax talk, I’m going to sit them down to chat about how cheating in video games is bad m’kay
Parents, talk to your kids about saxophones. That, and cheating on video games, are the most important subjects to cover.
Deleted: duplicate comment
Sorry grandpa, saxophones are cool again
Currently each steam account is given a unique steam id number which is how most steam games identify the player and when you family share you are just associating that new steamid with your steamid so you can share certain purchases with if the developer allows it. Since each account is unique if I ban one it doesn’t ban the other. In the past you could use the steam public web API to query a steamid to see if it was a family shared and it would respond with the parent account and you could compare that to your ban list and then ban the new account. A few years ago steam removed that capability for privacy protection and moved it to the game developers partner only access so a game developer could implement that same check but very few did and older or abandoned games are rife with cheaters now.
Now it would steam they are automagically making that check now or instead of a steam id it’s a family id, I have no idea but if it prevents account whack-a-mole and brings back automation I’m all for it.
It’s the only way I can see it working. Otherwise, you could just make infinite cheat accounts.
i mean theoretically they could just make it count as a strike, and if your account gets 3 strikes this way then your account is out as well
That’s two cheating incidents too many.
Well, 5 cheat accounts a year.
Oh no
BuT wHy iS eVeRyOnE RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK? ThEy aRe A mOnOpOlY!!11!!!
- Some fuckwits
To be fair, a lot of monopolies are great in the beginning. It’s the inevitable power-tripping downslide that sucks.
I still love Steam and Valve though.
The only reason this hasnt happened with valve is because it’s a private company. Publically traded companies are the cancer of ou society tbh
Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.
Well and GaBeN is still alive.
He need to find a successor before his time
From what I’ve heard, his son is cool, so we might get two generations of awesome steam.
Laughs in Rockefeller and standard oil
Steam is a private company and being run by a decent human. Didn’t have to be both.
I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.
Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually “RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK”.
I suspect we’ll be fine until Gabe dies. Then, it depends on who ends up with the company and what they do with it.
Optimist me: Steam looking into curating the next generation of customers.
Pessimist me: child protection laws made it too much of a headache for Steam to monetize the kids.
Both!
Also, 2 weeks ago Last Epoch disabled family account sharing because it was being abused for real money trading:
We have unfortunately had to disable family sharing on Steam for Last Epoch.
This feature enabled the use of significant RMT (Real Money Trading) and Botting options, and was removing our ability to ban/remove accounts, faster than they could share them with their entire networks.
I don’t think any one specific thing is responsible for this change, but the 5 account limit seems like it would certainily be a welcome change for the Last Epoch devs.
The 5 account limit was always there.
But you could freely rotate in new accounts. Now you have to wait a year.
Who can be in a Steam Family?
While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.
To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.
This sounds like they are going to limit usage to geo-locational. Or that’s just supposition by me but I don’t see any other things this would target.
It would be nice if they could someday find a better way to enforce this. What if your kid has shared custody with their other parent, and they aren’t in the same household all the time? What if they’re studying abroad and aren’t even in the same country?
I don’t have the solution, but I do hope someone eventually finds a better way to do it.
Probably less geo-location and more just shared IP block/address
I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.
Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.
I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.
Wireguard makes everyone one big happy family!
If this is based on store region, VPN is not enough. You’ll need a payment method from that country as well.
Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.
Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.
You should remember that valve already threatened VPN users after everyone was buying games in Argentina.
They mean you vpn into your home network.
Worth noting that this could also potentially be due to differences in censorship/rating laws across country lines. For instance, Germany has some strict regulations regarding Nazi imagery in media. So games need to have a specific Germany-friendly version if they feature that kind of imagery. And Steam may not be able to serve two different versions of the game with a single license.
This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. My son is 13 and we share a Steam library. It’s not usually an issue but sometimes he does want to play something that requires online connection at the same time as me. Now that problem should be permanently in the past.
Even if he moves out in who knows how many years he can still take all his games with him. This is why I never feel guilty about spending money on Steam/Valve; I know that as long as GabeN lives, I won’t get stabbed in the back.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
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.
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).
Sadly it doesn’t seem to add the possibility of whitelisting/blacklisting games. I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
You can mark games as Private in your library now. It hides your ownership, play stats, etc. It doesn’t specifically say it disabled Family Sharing but it’d be silly to keep that. There is also a Hidden Games section which stops it from showing up on your list.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1150-C06F-4D62-4966
Edit: I just tested it with current Family Sharing (not this beta version). Both Hidden and Private prevent games from showing on another shared account.
You can mark a game as private and it won’t show to the other family members. I verified this just now after signing up for the beta and setting up an account for my spouse. The games I marked private don’t show up on their families library.
I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
When I found this out years ago I booted everyone off my family and haven’t added anyone since. Ain’t trying to catch a ban
That’s only for VAC games, right? The historical advice given by modders is to share your library, and use another account to mod it. If you accidentally login to the online portion of a game with a mod enabled, only that account is banned not the library owner.
This specifically says that getting banned on a shared account will also ban the owner who shared the game. Likely to prevent exactly what you described, where people could evade bans simply by sharing their library with a throwaway account.
This is so amazing I’m wondering how on earth they got publishers on board with this. I guess technically they don’t need their permission, but I see some hilariously oversized coffee mugs being thrown across board rooms in anger after reading this announcement.
Probably because it’s mostly just a QoL update which also restricts people to one family group - which was always the intention but it closes a loophole where person A could share with person B and B could separately share their library with person C unless all three are in the same family group and geo location. Plus there’s now a year penalty to switch family group or refill a slot that has been vacated so you really have to commit to it. In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I’m a little bit sad because I shared my library with my brother and niece in other countries in Europe and that’s no longer doable. Ah well
In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.
There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.
I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.
A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.
I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.
This is good
and
I wish it was easier to manage multiple steam account on a single computer because some of us have more family than devices
There is actually a way to quickly switch accounts now.
It seems easier these days than it was back in the old times. Four of us in the family hopping around on 2 desktops and 2 old laptops. Pretty fluid! Not sure if you’re experiencing something specific?
I was also using the heck out of the ‘local fire share’ feature in steam, i only had to download Ark survival evolved (128gb!)1 time!
What I would really like is to be able sign on to my windows account and then log into steam as me without typing in another password BUT the kids can’t log into steam and then switch to my account because they don’t have my password and they’re not signed in to Windows as me.
These changes are great although on a slightly unrelated note. I can sort of understand why they don’t allow you to do it but it’d be nice if I could play something on my Deck while playing something on my PC too. Sometimes I’m just idling waiting for friends in a game and want to pass the time. I know you can just switch off Wi-Fi in the Deck to do that but it is still mildly annoying.
Can a family have more than two adults?
Yep
good to see steam being accepting of poly relationships and communes
Or, like, me sharing single player games with my buddies. But you do you.
…and you…and you…and you…
Or simply being two parents plus an 18 year or older child.
My sons will still be my family when they celebrate their 35th birthday… They’ll hopefully have their own places, but that doesn’t change that they are my family.
Or… siblings?
time limits are a super cool way to maximize addiction
What would be a good method to minimize gaming addiction in kids?
I agree that time limits aren’t ideal, but is there a better solution besides vetting every single piece of media a child wants to consume? I grew up with both, and it just taught me to be sneaky, which then ended up with me exposing myself to some truly awful stuff on the internet
I have no clue my man
