Steam’s latest family sharing system, just called Steam Families, comes with lots of rules designed to keep it from turning into a game lending free-for-all. Year-long cooldown periods prevent us from joining and leaving Steam Family groups as often as we want, for example.
I get it: Valve has to walk a line between making users happy and keeping developers from worrying that they’re losing sales to a bunch of little lending libraries, which would lead them to all opt out and make the feature useless. But there’s one stipulation about how we’re meant to use Steam Families that it seems like even Valve knows is a futile ask.
“While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to six close family members,” Valve wrote. “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.”
I’m sure lots of people will use Steam Families within a single household, and it includes some nice parental control features. But this statement about the “intended” use of the feature is obviously motivated by knowledge of how lots of Steam users have really been using Valve’s family sharing features since 2014: to share games with their friends.
And of course they are. It makes no difference to Steam users whether they’re sharing libraries with a sibling or with a Discord friend from Minnesota, except in that their Discord friend from Minnesota might have better games to throw on the pile.
One change Valve made for the new Families system, which to my knowledge wasn’t present in the previous system, is that there are region restrictions: A PC Gamer writer in the UK wasn’t able to share his library with a relative in Spain. Otherwise, the “household” thing is a soft rule, at least for now.
I’m not sure what requirements Valve could adjust to enforce that one household, close family intention, though. Make sure everyone has the same IP address? A shared home network like Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown? If it goes too far, like by booting kids out of their Steam Families if they leave home for college, the feature will surely become a huge customer service hassle for Valve.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that Valve isn’t really going to crack down on sharing games with friends—hence it refers to the “intended” use and not the required use—although the region restriction does complicate things for the multinational friend groups common in gaming. You can read more about how Steam Families work on the Steam support page.
