Steam Families Might End Shared Account Bickering at Home

Growing up, I shared my Steam account with my brother. We constantly had to coordinate who could play what and when, which led to a lot of bickering between gaming-obsessed teens. The cure to that discord, Steam Families, is finally out of beta, allowing up to five family members to play games from a shared library at the same time.

Still, it’s not as easy as just sending your friend a request to access their massive library of games alongside your own. There are some limitations, and knowing how Netflix, Disney+, and more have cracked down on password sharing outside the home, it may not last forever.

Valve described in its news post how the system works. Essentially, once you join a family group, each other person in that family has access to your backlog of games. You’ll still need two copies of a game to play at the same time, but it means each individual group member has their own save games and collects their own Steam achievements or Steam Workshop mod subscriptions. 

The new system replaces Family Sharing. While that feature lets you combine Steam backlogs, it restricts members from playing games from a shared library at the same time. Though the feature is meant for an “immediate family,” relatively few restrictions exist on who can join your family, so long as they live in the same country. In an FAQ, Valve said it will monitor usage and “may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage” in the future.

You’ll find that not all games support Steam’s new library sharing feature. For one, it won’t work with any game that requires third-party authentication. If a developer doesn’t want their game enabled for Steam Families, they need to opt-out. When you visit the Steam Store page, you’ll see games like Rainbow 6: Siege are not available. Like Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, free-to-play games don’t appear under Family Sharing. Right now, it doesn’t seem like you can access your friends’ microtransactions through a shared account.

In addition, for the first time, the typically laissez-faire Valve is adding parental controls that work within the Steam Families. If the parent sets the separate account up as a child account, the parent can set what days and hours they can play and limit their selection of games. Instead of hounding their parents in person or digging through their wallets, children can also request purchases that the adults can pay for.

Valve said it will eventually retire the old Family Sharing feature, though it did not give an exact date. That system restricted users from playing games simultaneously from shared accounts. You know what, good riddance.