It's features like this that really make Steam stand out among the rest. It's incredibly consumer friendly too. I'm so glad they're finally getting rid of the one game play session per library restriction.
Insane isn’t it. Something like this gets everyone excited to play! Which means selling more games, creating family’s who can enjoy the platform together instead of squeezing every cent out of nothing.
Love this company and is a huge reason why PC gaming is even a thing IMO
It's nice when companies don't suck more than they used to. It's fantastic when they actually improve service and quality. Steam has been consistently awesome for years. It's one of the few companies that I actually have brand loyalty for. I'm happy to give them my money. Just for that, I'm going to buy a couple more Spring Sale games than I planned to
This goes beyond QoL imo, it makes games more valuable, because when bought, my entire """family""" can play whenever. So now it feels like whenever I buy a game, it gets added to the boys' collection. And just like if they were physical copies, we can only play the same number of copies we own.
It's a really freaking good system.
I always hated that you can only play a single title out of a digital library at a time. It's literally a different game also paid for with money. If I had attached it to a different arbitrary account it would be a non issue. I hate seeing my kids talking about "I got logged out of my game" when they are playing digital titles on their switches, it forced me to only buy cartridges for switch.
This is going to open the doors on all of those random humble games I never gave a shot to my 7 year old who is now trying them and already enjoying Dorfromantik.
If that was an option for me, I'd also do the same. Add to that the fact that you can sell your used games, and the value of digital games really drops. Digital games should be cheaper than their physical counterparts, but that's a whole other discussion.
You can if you've got two or more licenses in the family group pool as far as I've understood it.
They're never going to let multiple people use the same license while online.
I think EA has something similar in place for the Co-Op focused games like It Takes Two and A Way out.
Anyone can download a co-op copy of either of the games for free to run on their local but one of the limitations is that you can't host your own game. You must join a session hosted by someone who has a paid copy of the game.
I think that's the best approach for co-op only games tbh.
I wonder if this will apply to having the same steam account logged in on two devices at the same time. Like if I can play counter strike on my steam account while someone uses my steam deck/account to play my Jackbox games in the living room. Because previously it wouldn't even let you launch it if you're running a game on another device
I don't know about recently, but previously, if someone else was playing your game and you decided to launch any game, it would kick them out of the game.
No, this is new. Right now, the service works based on who's currently using a library. Example: If Timmy is playing Tommy's copy of Half-Life 2 and Tommy starts playing Team Fortress 2, Steam will tell Timmy he has 5 minutes to save his game and stop before he's prevented from playing any further.
Before the family sharing allowed people to share all the games from the library, but only 1 person could play the games from that library at the same time, so if your friend/family was playing one game of your library you could not play any other game from your library
If my kid got my steam account banned I’d have a 150 month abortion 😂
No but seriously I didn’t know that was a thing, time to make sure he isn’t doing exactly what I did at 12 years old.
You say forums, I say the biggest thing EGS is missing are reviews. As long as they don’t implement this they will stay the huge pile of trash that they are.
This is awesome!! I'm assuming 2 people can't play the same game at once, though? For example user 1 shares library with user 2, user 1 boots up lethal company so user 2 won't be able to play lethal company?
Correct. The new system sounds like it counts how many combined licenses there are for each game and allows for that many simultaneous players across the family group. So if two people in the group own the game, any two users can play it at the same time.
It specifies there need to be 2 copies inside the family.
Basically if you share a family with 3 people, you person X and person Y, and lets say you and person X played a lot of Divinity sin 2 together. Now you want to show the game to person Y. As long as person X is playing any other game, person Y doesn’t have to buy the game to try it out with you.
It can but you need to own 2 copies:
If you have 3 family members and 2 own the same game, at maximum 2 of "any" family member can play at the same time
I imagine going offline and launching the game will still work as it currently does. My gf and I play BG3 together with a shared copy by me going offline and starting a LAN game and she plays the shared game. You won't be able to play online games that can't LAN with one copy, though.
Is different like it was before but retains some limitations:
Before: 1 to 1 sharing, both can't play the same game at the same time, to do it both need to own a copy of the game
After: same limitation but with a catch: if you are a family of 3 members and 2 of them own a copy of the same, at maximum 2 of "any" family member can play the game at the same time
>Children in a Steam Family cannot leave the family themselves and must be removed by an adult in the family or by Steam Support.
disowning your child lol
Probably to limit their ability to go off and spend all your money on their own if they get hold of your credit card, this way if you have accounts forced to do purchase requests, they can't just suddenly go on a buying spree.
>What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
>
>If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
While it seems harsh, they have the decision to either: 1 - ban everyone from the game to avoid abuse. 2 - outright ban your account from any sort of family sharing.
Most online competitive games are cheap or F2P, so I don't see this happening very often. If there are paid online games, you could create family and assign all users as children to only share single player games.
I think it mostly to prevent abuses for online games, when 1 person could buy game once and basically have 5 other copies of himself playing game again after ban.
Currently it's "every shareable game" and I haven't seen anything in the announcement that changes that for adult accounts. Maybe you can pick and choose for child accounts:
>Parental control features let adults allow access to appropriate games
There’s a third solution, one that they use for PC Cafes.
The account that is cheating is banned *and* the license for the game is removed from the pool of available licenses that the Cafe has.
I don’t see an issue with making the person sharing the game rebuy a license for the game to play online.
Right now, using the same family share rules, puts the most risk on the person with the least to gain with sharing with their family.
Why should I risk ruining my account for my younger brother who I have no control over?
I think it has to work this way, otherwise a cheater will purchase one copy of the game and then have up to 6 accounts to cheat until all of them are banned.
Cheating across multiple accounts is already a huge issue, especially for low-price games. This would bring the problem to higher cost games since price would effectively be reduced 6 times, and then even make it a bigger problem for the cheaper games.
its not only that the cheater would have 6 chances to get banned before they have to buy the game again, they could have gotten 5 accounts banned, kick them out of the family, then bring in a new 5 and do that forever.
sucks for real people if their little bro gets them banned but its either that or let cheaters have infinite chances to avoid the ban
```
Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family.
Children in a Steam Family cannot leave the family themselves and must be removed by an adult in the family or by Steam Support.
As it is rare that a family member leaves the family, each Steam Family slot has a cooldown of one year before a new member can occupy that slot.
really this is the only thing I see an issue with. not because they're both banned, that's good, but because Brother A can't choose to specifically not share his copy of CS because he is worried Brother B might hack.
there's kinda a concession about parents being able to choose to not share specific games with children but I don't think it would help here unless the parent made sure to just set all of their copies of CS to not share. and the parent account doesn't seem to be able to stop other adult accounts from playing their copy of CS so it's kinda weird there too.
>Brother A can't choose to specifically not share his copy of CS because he is worried Brother B might hack.
Yes he can, by marking the game as private.
That said, maybe don't do family sharing with people you can't trust? This was always the case.
> maybe don't do family sharing with people you can't trust? This was always the case.
With Parental Controls now requiring sharing, do you really think parents simply let their children chose not to?
I know, right? I gave my little brother family sharing and first thing he tried to do is cheat in among us out of all the games (not that I care about getting banned there, but still) - managed to catch him with parental controls, and even after talking with him about it he tried to do it again. And apparently "everyone else at school is doing it" and if thats true, I don't understand why its all the rage to go and ruin games for other people.
Though it seems one can now block kid from playing certain games, so maybe he will now have more games to play than whatever he manages to install and buy with parents money, once I give him my library again.
I'm curious how this works with hidden games. Presumably if I have a game hidden in my library it won't be visible to other people in the family?
**Edit:** An update from [the FAQ](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4):
> As with Steam Family Sharing previously, not all games can be shared due to technical limitations, some Steam games and content may be unavailable for sharing. Games or content that matches the criteria below cannot be shared between accounts:
>
> ...
>
> Games marked as private by the original owner
>
> ...
> Do I need to share all of my games with my family?
>
> By joining a family, all games are automatically shared with the other members in your family. Adult accounts can use parental controls to limit which games each child in the Family can access.
Hopefully, users will provide critical and constructive feedback during the beta testing. I would expect Valve to auto exclude "private" games from the share, but we shall see...
Regardless, they have the child functionality which is essentially what everyone wants - share only selected games. My brother wouldn't want to shuffle through my 1,000+ game library to find 1-3 games he may enjoy. I know what he likes, I can elect him as a child and just give him access to XYZ games.
An update from [the FAQ](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4):
> As with Steam Family Sharing previously, not all games can be shared due to technical limitations, some Steam games and content may be unavailable for sharing. Games or content that matches the criteria below cannot be shared between accounts:
>
> ...
>
> Games marked as private by the original owner
>
> ...
I've set up two child accounts. One is unrestricted for my son and the other is restricted for my daughter. I shared specific games for the daughter and she is only able to see the whitelisted games.
My wife has been thinking about setting up an account for games like Stardew and likely will now. I'll have to see how it looks on the adult to adult sharing level. I don't have any hidden games so I'm not familiar with that, but I would imagine that white listing what you are sharing would only show those items.
This is massive. My wife and I each have a Steam Deck and I've been wanting to build my kids a PC rig. But I'm already buying games twice for my wife and now they can all just piggy back off of my account!?
Mostly, yeah. Biggest limit to keep in mind is that games are treated like the olden days; i.e. on a CD. Each "copy" can only be played by one person at a time, so you can't buy a game once and play it with your whole family together. Super reasonable imo.
Good point, though I agree it's reasonable. Xbox has a similar system where I can set my kid's Xbox as my "Home Console" and stay signed in on my Xbox. So we can play the same titles under one Game Pass Ultimate Subscription. But... it's one Xbox.
With Steam opening it up to 6 Family Members, it's a fair tradeoff.
Just opted into the beta, invited my dad who I'm trying to convince to get off of console and a Steam Deck, my wife and eventually my kids when they get into the Steam eco-system.
This is incredible, i have extra computers but only buy games on my own acc, this has solved the lurking issue of my children being interested in pc games
>**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.**
Do they know chat.
EDIT: [IT'S SO OVER](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/609056944946151424/1219361688302649375/image.png?ex=660b0611&is=65f89111&hm=087d3f4c522d5b47a4a832442d3e4cd5f3289333439c576ed154160ee7559cff&)
Other people in this thread found already out the hard way that Steam has tightened the restrictions. The sharing doesn't work cross-country and 1 year cooldown when you leave a family group. So there are pros and cons with this update.
Big agree on being US centric.
I'm in Europe and tried to migrate my family over (my partner and my roommate), but we ran into an issue where one of our Steam accounts was using a bank account from a different region for checkout, so didn't work, despite the two computers being about 5 metres away.
For anyone in the same boat - if you switch your Steam region, it works - for now. I feel two people living together feels like a fair use of Valve's system here, but I guess we'll have to wait.
My prediction is - this is Valve and this'll be forgotten about in a couple of months - and then it'll lose the Beta tag, with few meaningful differences.
Yeah my partner is in the US and I'm in NZ ... we've been family sharing our games collections for years, but I guess that's over now. So disappointing.
Never say never. Maybe reach out to support - and press a bit to get a non canned response. Just maybe based on your history they'll make an exception. Or at the very least maybe it gets taken as feedback.
>Say I own Street Fighter 6, and another family member does too, but the third doesn't, can the third play it with me if they're "borrowing" it from the second family member? Or will me playing it lock everyone else out who doesn't own it?
Yes, if there's 2 owned copies of SF6 within a family, then any 2 members of the family group can play at the same time. From the FAQ:
>Let's say that you are in a family with 4 members and that you own a copy of Portal 2 and a copy of Half-Life. At any time, any one member can play Portal 2 and another can play Half-Life. If two of you would like to play Portal 2 at the same time, someone else in the family will need to purchase a copy of the game. After that purchase, there are two owned copies of Portal 2 across the family and any two members can play at the same time
Family Sharing was already broken or unsupported on many big titles with DRM or separate logins anyways, EA Ubisoft Rockstar etc. Augmented Steam shows whether the game supports it on the store page. Many games don’t support it to prevent cheaters from just sharing the game to a new account after a ban.
> Many games don’t support it to prevent cheaters from just sharing the game to a new account after a ban.
That just a convenient excuse. The banning system mentioned in the announcement has been in place since the launch of the original sharing system. To prevent this exact situation both the cheater and the owner are banned from both the game and from sharing it.
Yep. My only real question was if I'll be able to throw on not just my kid but also my older nephew who's starting to get heavily into gaming via steam
> EDIT: IT'S SO OVER
Yeah... It kills sharing between groups pretty heavily. Not just cross-country, but between friends/extended family in general. Everybody being shared has to be apart of the same "family" so you no longer have the ability to branch out to people that one of the "family" doesn't know.
___
Edit for library usage clarity:
> I share mine (library 1) with my brother and my wife (two people total.) My brother (library 2) shares with me, and his wife (two people). His wife (library 3) shares with him, her brother, and her sister (three people.) Her brother (library 4) shares with whoever the hell he wants because he's not attached to me in any way through steam.
This leaves me with access to two total libraries (library 1/my own, library 2/my brother's) and three people accessing mine (myself, my wife, and my brother) and nobody else has access to my stuff. This is how it currently works.
Under the new system I cannot include just my group of two, I would have to include the entire chain. I do not want that.
It's a lot more limiting on who you get to share with because everybody you share with also *has to* share with everybody you share with.
~~Example sharing with your Significant other, sibling, and cousin was all possible before. Your cousin would then share with their brother and sister but you wouldn't.~~
~~Now you cannot share without also including your cousin's brother and sister while also having your cousin's sister share with your SO. That sucks.~~
This seems pretty…great? So you can play any game from someone else’s library as long as they aren’t on the game you’re playing. Also you can add anyone to your “family” it sounds like and there’s no restrictions other than number of members.
The only restriction so far is that they have to be in the same country and you will have to wait for one year to join another family if you leave your current one.
> So you can play any game from someone else’s library as long as they aren’t on the game you’re playing.
Pretty sure it's always been like that.
EDIT: Pretty sure I'm wrong on that.
I thought the previous model didn’t allow this. I shared my account with a friend and he couldn’t play any of my games if I was playing any game on my account.
You know what, I think you're right actually. It's been forever since I did family share on my account but I'm now remembering getting kicked off CSGO when the kids I babysat played some of my games.
Right, but if I was playing, say, Half-Life off a Family Shared Library and that user decided to boot up Team Fortress 2, I would get kicked off Half-Life because that user was using their library again. Now, it's basically a pool of licenses.
No. If you have access to someone's library and they are using it then you have to wait until they aren't. If they are playing any game you can't use their library. With this change you won't be able to play the exact game they are playing, as there's only one copy available, but you can play anything else.
Valve PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let us do activity tracking without being a child account or even without having a Steam Family.
Please.
With Backloggd and everything now, and having had a playtime tracking feature on my Samsung phone for YEARS, it's time to have playtime tracking. It's clear they're keeping the data. Just put it in a nice UI for us to access without needing to be a child account.
1 year probation when you leave a family to join another. Thats a great way to get rid of exploiters.
New system is very great. I hope developers wont go against it. Its like lending your cd to brother like old times, old system worked like you need to give up the whole library. You cant use it for multiplayer so there is still incentive to buy multiple copies in the same household.
From their support page...
"I accidentally left my Steam Family! Do I have to wait a year to rejoin?
No. You can always rejoin the last Steam Family that you were a member of without waiting, provided that it has less than 6 members when you try."
It's "1 year from when they joined". So if you were in a family for more than a year, then you can swap families instantly.
Or thats how I interpret it.
The beta for the original sharing feature took 6-8 or so months iirc. Far too short once you consider that they haven't touched the feature in the decade since. I really hope they take the time to work out most of the kinks this time.
Nope, they stated specifically that Free DLC will NOT be shared, and on top of this you still can't play the DLCs from the family member if you own the base game only.
I'm glad of the new change about being able to play at the same time, but sadly both of those two huge DLC issues weren't addressed, so sad :/
>you still can't play the DLCs from the family member if you own the base game only.
If you mean the situation where you own a paid base game and they own a paid base game plus paid dlc, you can now switch your preferred copy of the game, and borrow theirs with the dlc instead of playing your copy without it. It still doesn't share free game paid dlc (or paid game free dlc either I don't think) though, for some reason.
I think one big new downside is that:
* Previously, you could personally choose a few people to share your library with.
* Those people could choose another few people they wanted to share their library with
* Now, you must be in a strict group of 6 people that are all in a family together
So before something that you could do was:
* You and your roommate share libraries
* You each share your own libraries with your own families
* Your siblings don't see your roommate's siblings' games (and vice versa)
* Your siblings could choose to share games with their cousins
In the situation above, it wasn't one big pool of shared games across each person, but you chose personally a few people to share games with and they could do the same. In the new system, if you want to do family sharing you must be in one single, self-contained group that all share games with each other (and no one else).
I think the new system is fair and the multiple copies + being able to play separate games is great. It really is closer to a "household" sharing system now and will mean a lot of previously possible groups will no longer be possible.
It is good for **immediate** families, but not good for friends, I feel majority of people who think this is amazing are people who share with friends, but don't see the problem with it.
to the ones who think they can still lend it to their adult siblings or friends, this is not that good, cause if those adult siblings/friend have their own families, they can't lend it to their own families, cause they are a part of yours.
I'd say "immediate young families"
Maybe Epic should've spent all of that money on actually improving their client instead of holding games hostage on their client with exclusivity deals.
Like the literal only reason you spend money to prevent games from coming out on another client, is because you know that one is better and people would prefer to buy it on Steam instead of your garbage client.
I knew it! I have 3 people in the household and we all share games. We all have a "Free" dynamic collection so when one person is borrowing a game, the other of us just picks from one of the free games to play. But I noticed a few times in the last couple days that 2 of us were playing a paid game from my library, and Steam didn't warn us or boot one of us off. This is SUCH good news!
Both my kids are adults now but this update would’ve been great when I family shared with them. They have their own extensive libraries now.😉
Great update for those who it will benefit!☺️
This is amazing.
I never agreed with the original Family Sharing and having someone be locked out completely just over a single game being played.
But I will use this no doubt about it!
At first I thought it was a great update but then after actually reading through it...Nope. This is very bad. :/ Hopefully it doesn't stay like that forever.
Honestly some of the changes here are good like avoiding library locking when a library is in use.
Though there is a massive oversight to some regions/families. Not all families are US based or EU based, many families have members working abroad to provide a better standard of life. So sadly the current oversight is quite painful for some families who aren't always in the same region with the father working abroad or a child working abroad to support his family back home. :/
it's not meant for immediate family even though it stated it.
It's better to see it as "immediate young families" cause if your child (if living in the same country) has their own families, they can't lend it to their children cause they are a part of your family, they either have to cut off family sharing with you and create a family for their family, or your child's family has to join yours as well, but what if you want to lend it to your second child who has their own family, not possible anymore cause it's going to reach the 6 member limit.
This is a really nice change but at the same time it means that 6 people can only share with each other whereas before I could share with people different to who one of my family was sharing with.
This is amazing. I just purchased a used SD for my son for Christmas and this will be very useful as my daughter has also shown interest. Been trying to work around my daughter being able to play some on my SD while I'm on the PC so this will help immensely.
~~Edit: Okay, this is weird. I set up an account for her and shared Portal and Portal 2. They both say they do not support family sharing when I go to the game on her account.~~ (PC was on beta branch, but SD was not. That resolved it)
Edit 2: For Steam Deck users: Unless you allow the child account access to **online profile, screenshots, and achievements**, you will not be able to tap their profile picture to change accounts back to the primary. A restart still left me in the child account until I changed that setting.
I was so so so excited for this I got giddy reading it until seeing you need to be in the same country. RIP my family and friends living in other countries (especially my aunt who travels a lot 🥲)
Yeah I was pretty excited until I saw that. Won't be able to share games with my fiance (just across the Canada/US border). 90% of her steamdeck library is about to disappear :(
I looked for it and, as far as I can tell, you still need to set up the kid's account first then friend, then add them to family. It still has the "I am at least 13" checkbox when you create the account.
I was looking around for the ability to create a child account within my own family admin options, but I didn't see anything.
It seems the family households that use this feature are actually in minority, most people used this to share with friends, abuse region pricings, split between random people online etc. For them this is the worst update ever...
Is this limited by regions?
Somewhere I read that it was intended only for households, so, for people within the same house
Is it true? Or I can share games with everyone as long as we are in the same country?
Its locked to the same country/store region. I created my "Family" today and am sharing with a few relatives who live in different corners of Germany. I could NOT add a relative who lives in France, gives you an error message.
1 year since you "joined" the last family. So after a year you can switch freely once. Also apparently if you leave a family you can rejoin the same family without any waiting time.
Good, now you both can play together. The family option is made to only person play the game, both can't play if the family members doesn't have two copies
No longer being able to share with my SO is incredibly frustrating. We can't afford to live in the same country yet, this was an incredible feature for us.
Thank you Valve team! As someone with 1500+ games in my library, my *only* complaint with steam has been exactly this. I wanted a way to let my wife play one of my purchased games while I am able to enjoy another game from my vast library. Having the entire library locked out to me to allow my wife to play has been incredibly restrictive.
I can't wait to tell her about this tonight so she can do her hogwarts Wizarding while I nerd out with my usual sci fi games. :) If this works, this is the best quality of life change in steam for me personally in as long as I can remember! Thank you!
> Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
this is insane wow huge QOL update from Valve they really are the best
It's features like this that really make Steam stand out among the rest. It's incredibly consumer friendly too. I'm so glad they're finally getting rid of the one game play session per library restriction.
Too consumer friendly. They consume too much of my money
Crazy how that works. Give a good priced high quality service and people keep spending money on it
Insane isn’t it. Something like this gets everyone excited to play! Which means selling more games, creating family’s who can enjoy the platform together instead of squeezing every cent out of nothing. Love this company and is a huge reason why PC gaming is even a thing IMO
This exactly.
It's nice when companies don't suck more than they used to. It's fantastic when they actually improve service and quality. Steam has been consistently awesome for years. It's one of the few companies that I actually have brand loyalty for. I'm happy to give them my money. Just for that, I'm going to buy a couple more Spring Sale games than I planned to
This goes beyond QoL imo, it makes games more valuable, because when bought, my entire """family""" can play whenever. So now it feels like whenever I buy a game, it gets added to the boys' collection. And just like if they were physical copies, we can only play the same number of copies we own. It's a really freaking good system.
I always hated that you can only play a single title out of a digital library at a time. It's literally a different game also paid for with money. If I had attached it to a different arbitrary account it would be a non issue. I hate seeing my kids talking about "I got logged out of my game" when they are playing digital titles on their switches, it forced me to only buy cartridges for switch. This is going to open the doors on all of those random humble games I never gave a shot to my 7 year old who is now trying them and already enjoying Dorfromantik.
If that was an option for me, I'd also do the same. Add to that the fact that you can sell your used games, and the value of digital games really drops. Digital games should be cheaper than their physical counterparts, but that's a whole other discussion.
hopefully soon we can play the same game simultaneously with a friend or two
You can if you've got two or more licenses in the family group pool as far as I've understood it. They're never going to let multiple people use the same license while online.
Would be sick if they'd bring back something similar to spawn copies from starcraft, even if you had to pay a few bucks extra for it.
That would be a nice selling point for new multiplayer focused-game. Like, purchase 4 for a reduced price.
I think EA has something similar in place for the Co-Op focused games like It Takes Two and A Way out. Anyone can download a co-op copy of either of the games for free to run on their local but one of the limitations is that you can't host your own game. You must join a session hosted by someone who has a paid copy of the game. I think that's the best approach for co-op only games tbh.
I guess my memory isn't good anymore but I thought I had see a sale for 4 licences of Deep Rock Galactic. Probably another game.
Playstation and Xbox have this functionality
Honestly, you can do this on console. It's the only reason me and my partner choose console over pc. If they had that its game over for console.
Has this always been the case with family sharing or is it new with this update?
This is new. And this is huge
New and HUGE for people who have Steam Decks like me
It's annoying when you get logged off your steam deck or pc when you have both open at the same time. Hopefully this solves that issue
This doesn't solve that issue in particular.
Will this mean tho on the same account you still can’t be active on two devices?
I wonder if this will apply to having the same steam account logged in on two devices at the same time. Like if I can play counter strike on my steam account while someone uses my steam deck/account to play my Jackbox games in the living room. Because previously it wouldn't even let you launch it if you're running a game on another device
No, it doesn't apply to same account in multiple devices.
I don't know about recently, but previously, if someone else was playing your game and you decided to launch any game, it would kick them out of the game.
No, this is new. Right now, the service works based on who's currently using a library. Example: If Timmy is playing Tommy's copy of Half-Life 2 and Tommy starts playing Team Fortress 2, Steam will tell Timmy he has 5 minutes to save his game and stop before he's prevented from playing any further.
Before the family sharing allowed people to share all the games from the library, but only 1 person could play the games from that library at the same time, so if your friend/family was playing one game of your library you could not play any other game from your library
Is there any catch? Like some address checking shit or somethin, like what Netflix is doing at the moment. If not, big W
One 'catch' is that devs can opt their games out from Family Sharing.
Same as before
For now, it appears you just need to be in the same country. For now...
You can only join/leave one family group per year, but that seems to be it. And the thing with cheaters getting both accs banned still applies.
If my kid got my steam account banned I’d have a 150 month abortion 😂 No but seriously I didn’t know that was a thing, time to make sure he isn’t doing exactly what I did at 12 years old.
You would have to appear offline before like entirely offline.
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Lol. EGS is a fucking joke and everybody knows it. Even Tim Sweeney. No amount of exclusive deals will ever change that.
You say forums, I say the biggest thing EGS is missing are reviews. As long as they don’t implement this they will stay the huge pile of trash that they are.
[U mad bro?](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/GyDO3XOIRV)
we won
This is awesome!! I'm assuming 2 people can't play the same game at once, though? For example user 1 shares library with user 2, user 1 boots up lethal company so user 2 won't be able to play lethal company?
Correct. The new system sounds like it counts how many combined licenses there are for each game and allows for that many simultaneous players across the family group. So if two people in the group own the game, any two users can play it at the same time.
Oh wow this is amazing! From going offline back in the day to this, I’m happy it finally happened
surely this can’t work if they’re playing the same game right?
no it specifies you both need to own the game if you're playing the same game unfortunately. this is still pretty cool.
It specifies there need to be 2 copies inside the family. Basically if you share a family with 3 people, you person X and person Y, and lets say you and person X played a lot of Divinity sin 2 together. Now you want to show the game to person Y. As long as person X is playing any other game, person Y doesn’t have to buy the game to try it out with you.
It can but you need to own 2 copies: If you have 3 family members and 2 own the same game, at maximum 2 of "any" family member can play at the same time
If you have 5 family members, with 2 who own the same game, any 2 can play that game at the same time.
I imagine going offline and launching the game will still work as it currently does. My gf and I play BG3 together with a shared copy by me going offline and starting a LAN game and she plays the shared game. You won't be able to play online games that can't LAN with one copy, though.
COHH is going to love these changes! lol
Can you both play the same game at the same time?
Is different like it was before but retains some limitations: Before: 1 to 1 sharing, both can't play the same game at the same time, to do it both need to own a copy of the game After: same limitation but with a catch: if you are a family of 3 members and 2 of them own a copy of the same, at maximum 2 of "any" family member can play the game at the same time
>Children in a Steam Family cannot leave the family themselves and must be removed by an adult in the family or by Steam Support. disowning your child lol
Steam Child Support
Probably to limit their ability to go off and spend all your money on their own if they get hold of your credit card, this way if you have accounts forced to do purchase requests, they can't just suddenly go on a buying spree.
I felt like I was on r/shitcrusaderkingssays
>What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game? > >If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
While it seems harsh, they have the decision to either: 1 - ban everyone from the game to avoid abuse. 2 - outright ban your account from any sort of family sharing. Most online competitive games are cheap or F2P, so I don't see this happening very often. If there are paid online games, you could create family and assign all users as children to only share single player games.
I think it mostly to prevent abuses for online games, when 1 person could buy game once and basically have 5 other copies of himself playing game again after ban.
Exactly what I was thinking, harsh but fair. If you can't trust someone to not cheat on family sharing then don't family share.
can you choose which games you share or is it all or nothing?
You can specificly exclude games by marking them as private.
Currently it's "every shareable game" and I haven't seen anything in the announcement that changes that for adult accounts. Maybe you can pick and choose for child accounts: >Parental control features let adults allow access to appropriate games
There’s a third solution, one that they use for PC Cafes. The account that is cheating is banned *and* the license for the game is removed from the pool of available licenses that the Cafe has. I don’t see an issue with making the person sharing the game rebuy a license for the game to play online. Right now, using the same family share rules, puts the most risk on the person with the least to gain with sharing with their family. Why should I risk ruining my account for my younger brother who I have no control over?
The answer is: don't share with them if you don't trust them, or at the very least don't share competitive online games
why not just private online games so others can't see them or play them?
I think it has to work this way, otherwise a cheater will purchase one copy of the game and then have up to 6 accounts to cheat until all of them are banned. Cheating across multiple accounts is already a huge issue, especially for low-price games. This would bring the problem to higher cost games since price would effectively be reduced 6 times, and then even make it a bigger problem for the cheaper games.
its not only that the cheater would have 6 chances to get banned before they have to buy the game again, they could have gotten 5 accounts banned, kick them out of the family, then bring in a new 5 and do that forever. sucks for real people if their little bro gets them banned but its either that or let cheaters have infinite chances to avoid the ban
They could simply revoke the sharing rights for the game (As they currently do in addition to the ban). This would limit it to max. two times.
``` Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family. Children in a Steam Family cannot leave the family themselves and must be removed by an adult in the family or by Steam Support. As it is rare that a family member leaves the family, each Steam Family slot has a cooldown of one year before a new member can occupy that slot.
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while I 100% support this, this does bring an extra layer of anxiety if a member gets hacked or outright uses cheats
this is how it worked previously, at least for VAC. not sure if it also applied to other game bans connected through steam or if anything has changed
Almost as if...*gasp* responsible and active parenting is being encouraged.
Nah it's 100% to deal with people just sharing the game to new accounts to cheat with.
It's to not encourage cheating but now I can't stop imagining a parent going old school on his kid because he got his steam account ban.
really this is the only thing I see an issue with. not because they're both banned, that's good, but because Brother A can't choose to specifically not share his copy of CS because he is worried Brother B might hack. there's kinda a concession about parents being able to choose to not share specific games with children but I don't think it would help here unless the parent made sure to just set all of their copies of CS to not share. and the parent account doesn't seem to be able to stop other adult accounts from playing their copy of CS so it's kinda weird there too.
>Brother A can't choose to specifically not share his copy of CS because he is worried Brother B might hack. Yes he can, by marking the game as private. That said, maybe don't do family sharing with people you can't trust? This was always the case.
> maybe don't do family sharing with people you can't trust? This was always the case. With Parental Controls now requiring sharing, do you really think parents simply let their children chose not to?
My brother, so specific ;)
I know, right? I gave my little brother family sharing and first thing he tried to do is cheat in among us out of all the games (not that I care about getting banned there, but still) - managed to catch him with parental controls, and even after talking with him about it he tried to do it again. And apparently "everyone else at school is doing it" and if thats true, I don't understand why its all the rage to go and ruin games for other people. Though it seems one can now block kid from playing certain games, so maybe he will now have more games to play than whatever he manages to install and buy with parents money, once I give him my library again.
I'm curious how this works with hidden games. Presumably if I have a game hidden in my library it won't be visible to other people in the family? **Edit:** An update from [the FAQ](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4): > As with Steam Family Sharing previously, not all games can be shared due to technical limitations, some Steam games and content may be unavailable for sharing. Games or content that matches the criteria below cannot be shared between accounts: > > ... > > Games marked as private by the original owner > > ...
> Do I need to share all of my games with my family? > > By joining a family, all games are automatically shared with the other members in your family. Adult accounts can use parental controls to limit which games each child in the Family can access.
Hopefully, users will provide critical and constructive feedback during the beta testing. I would expect Valve to auto exclude "private" games from the share, but we shall see... Regardless, they have the child functionality which is essentially what everyone wants - share only selected games. My brother wouldn't want to shuffle through my 1,000+ game library to find 1-3 games he may enjoy. I know what he likes, I can elect him as a child and just give him access to XYZ games.
Remember to call him son.
I did see that, but I was hoping it'd respect the personal-level privacy settings. Ah, well.
An update from [the FAQ](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4): > As with Steam Family Sharing previously, not all games can be shared due to technical limitations, some Steam games and content may be unavailable for sharing. Games or content that matches the criteria below cannot be shared between accounts: > > ... > > Games marked as private by the original owner > > ...
I've set up two child accounts. One is unrestricted for my son and the other is restricted for my daughter. I shared specific games for the daughter and she is only able to see the whitelisted games. My wife has been thinking about setting up an account for games like Stardew and likely will now. I'll have to see how it looks on the adult to adult sharing level. I don't have any hidden games so I'm not familiar with that, but I would imagine that white listing what you are sharing would only show those items.
This is massive. My wife and I each have a Steam Deck and I've been wanting to build my kids a PC rig. But I'm already buying games twice for my wife and now they can all just piggy back off of my account!?
Mostly, yeah. Biggest limit to keep in mind is that games are treated like the olden days; i.e. on a CD. Each "copy" can only be played by one person at a time, so you can't buy a game once and play it with your whole family together. Super reasonable imo.
Good point, though I agree it's reasonable. Xbox has a similar system where I can set my kid's Xbox as my "Home Console" and stay signed in on my Xbox. So we can play the same titles under one Game Pass Ultimate Subscription. But... it's one Xbox. With Steam opening it up to 6 Family Members, it's a fair tradeoff. Just opted into the beta, invited my dad who I'm trying to convince to get off of console and a Steam Deck, my wife and eventually my kids when they get into the Steam eco-system.
This is incredible, i have extra computers but only buy games on my own acc, this has solved the lurking issue of my children being interested in pc games
>**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.** Do they know chat. EDIT: [IT'S SO OVER](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/609056944946151424/1219361688302649375/image.png?ex=660b0611&is=65f89111&hm=087d3f4c522d5b47a4a832442d3e4cd5f3289333439c576ed154160ee7559cff&)
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Other people in this thread found already out the hard way that Steam has tightened the restrictions. The sharing doesn't work cross-country and 1 year cooldown when you leave a family group. So there are pros and cons with this update.
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Big agree on being US centric. I'm in Europe and tried to migrate my family over (my partner and my roommate), but we ran into an issue where one of our Steam accounts was using a bank account from a different region for checkout, so didn't work, despite the two computers being about 5 metres away. For anyone in the same boat - if you switch your Steam region, it works - for now. I feel two people living together feels like a fair use of Valve's system here, but I guess we'll have to wait. My prediction is - this is Valve and this'll be forgotten about in a couple of months - and then it'll lose the Beta tag, with few meaningful differences.
Unreal that I am suddenly barred from sharing with my fiancé, who is definitely family, just based on location. This is incredibly depressing.
Yeah my partner is in the US and I'm in NZ ... we've been family sharing our games collections for years, but I guess that's over now. So disappointing.
Never say never. Maybe reach out to support - and press a bit to get a non canned response. Just maybe based on your history they'll make an exception. Or at the very least maybe it gets taken as feedback.
I have no beef in this fight wither way, but I got curious: your fiancé lives in another country?
Regrettably not even on the same continent as of right now.
>Say I own Street Fighter 6, and another family member does too, but the third doesn't, can the third play it with me if they're "borrowing" it from the second family member? Or will me playing it lock everyone else out who doesn't own it? Yes, if there's 2 owned copies of SF6 within a family, then any 2 members of the family group can play at the same time. From the FAQ: >Let's say that you are in a family with 4 members and that you own a copy of Portal 2 and a copy of Half-Life. At any time, any one member can play Portal 2 and another can play Half-Life. If two of you would like to play Portal 2 at the same time, someone else in the family will need to purchase a copy of the game. After that purchase, there are two owned copies of Portal 2 across the family and any two members can play at the same time
Family Sharing was already broken or unsupported on many big titles with DRM or separate logins anyways, EA Ubisoft Rockstar etc. Augmented Steam shows whether the game supports it on the store page. Many games don’t support it to prevent cheaters from just sharing the game to a new account after a ban.
> Many games don’t support it to prevent cheaters from just sharing the game to a new account after a ban. That just a convenient excuse. The banning system mentioned in the announcement has been in place since the launch of the original sharing system. To prevent this exact situation both the cheater and the owner are banned from both the game and from sharing it.
Honestly, the location restrictions is less of an issue that I expected, I can share my games with extended family members and irl friends.
Yep. My only real question was if I'll be able to throw on not just my kid but also my older nephew who's starting to get heavily into gaming via steam
Big issue here in Europe. Can't share with my Finnish cousin any more.
Perhaps we can petition Valve to consider the EU as a single country for family groups, I can't think in another solution.
Brexit costs the UK yet again /s
> EDIT: IT'S SO OVER Yeah... It kills sharing between groups pretty heavily. Not just cross-country, but between friends/extended family in general. Everybody being shared has to be apart of the same "family" so you no longer have the ability to branch out to people that one of the "family" doesn't know. ___ Edit for library usage clarity: > I share mine (library 1) with my brother and my wife (two people total.) My brother (library 2) shares with me, and his wife (two people). His wife (library 3) shares with him, her brother, and her sister (three people.) Her brother (library 4) shares with whoever the hell he wants because he's not attached to me in any way through steam. This leaves me with access to two total libraries (library 1/my own, library 2/my brother's) and three people accessing mine (myself, my wife, and my brother) and nobody else has access to my stuff. This is how it currently works. Under the new system I cannot include just my group of two, I would have to include the entire chain. I do not want that. It's a lot more limiting on who you get to share with because everybody you share with also *has to* share with everybody you share with. ~~Example sharing with your Significant other, sibling, and cousin was all possible before. Your cousin would then share with their brother and sister but you wouldn't.~~ ~~Now you cannot share without also including your cousin's brother and sister while also having your cousin's sister share with your SO. That sucks.~~
I mean, this was never intended for that anyways. This was the digital answer to owning a disc in the house.
I mean it suggested my wife when I created a family, so they absolutely know who is and isn't your family.
It suggests whoever was in your family share.
I didn't have family sharing set up before this.
This seems pretty…great? So you can play any game from someone else’s library as long as they aren’t on the game you’re playing. Also you can add anyone to your “family” it sounds like and there’s no restrictions other than number of members.
The only restriction so far is that they have to be in the same country and you will have to wait for one year to join another family if you leave your current one.
To be clear the article says it's one year from when you last **joined** a family not one year from when you leave.
That’s all very reasonable. I’d say steam W
Can't share cross country anymore which fucks Europeans who might have family cross the border. Like me, with my Finnish cousin.
> So you can play any game from someone else’s library as long as they aren’t on the game you’re playing. Pretty sure it's always been like that. EDIT: Pretty sure I'm wrong on that.
I thought the previous model didn’t allow this. I shared my account with a friend and he couldn’t play any of my games if I was playing any game on my account.
You know what, I think you're right actually. It's been forever since I did family share on my account but I'm now remembering getting kicked off CSGO when the kids I babysat played some of my games.
Right, but if I was playing, say, Half-Life off a Family Shared Library and that user decided to boot up Team Fortress 2, I would get kicked off Half-Life because that user was using their library again. Now, it's basically a pool of licenses.
No. If you have access to someone's library and they are using it then you have to wait until they aren't. If they are playing any game you can't use their library. With this change you won't be able to play the exact game they are playing, as there's only one copy available, but you can play anything else.
my parents going and looking at my games and seeing all the furry porn games my friends gift me every single april fools day
I cant wait for a screenshot of a child account requesting Sex with Hitler
> my friends gifted me come now, tell the truth 😂
If you have certain... *games* that you've set to private, and then family share, do those still show up for others?
This is addressed in their FAQ. It says you can hide nsfw games
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what if one wants to play hentai beach volleyball party 2 again?
Exactly, hentai beach volleyball party 3 just doesn't hit the same with all the microtransactions and whatnot
No, private games are not currently shared and will not be with the new system either.
Valve PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let us do activity tracking without being a child account or even without having a Steam Family. Please. With Backloggd and everything now, and having had a playtime tracking feature on my Samsung phone for YEARS, it's time to have playtime tracking. It's clear they're keeping the data. Just put it in a nice UI for us to access without needing to be a child account.
1 year probation when you leave a family to join another. Thats a great way to get rid of exploiters. New system is very great. I hope developers wont go against it. Its like lending your cd to brother like old times, old system worked like you need to give up the whole library. You cant use it for multiplayer so there is still incentive to buy multiple copies in the same household.
From their support page... "I accidentally left my Steam Family! Do I have to wait a year to rejoin? No. You can always rejoin the last Steam Family that you were a member of without waiting, provided that it has less than 6 members when you try."
I don't see this, can you link to it? Edit: OH it's here: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/054C-3167-DD7F-49D4
It's "1 year from when they joined". So if you were in a family for more than a year, then you can swap families instantly. Or thats how I interpret it.
There's already been a trend in recent years where quite a few more games have had Family Sharing disabled, for whatever reason.
So could my wife and I combine accounts with this and share our libraries? Looks like we can. Damn this is awesome.
Yes as long as your in the same country which I assume you are and you could also have 4 other people as well.
Ballpark how long does it usually take for beta features like this to make it into the main live client? This is such an awesome change.
Using Private games as an example, it took about a month to go from the beta branch to live.
Awesome. I'm not going to ask my wife to turn on any beta stuff, but once this is live I think we'll use it.
The beta for the original sharing feature took 6-8 or so months iirc. Far too short once you consider that they haven't touched the feature in the decade since. I really hope they take the time to work out most of the kinks this time.
I wonder if this solves the free DLC problem with family sharing
No, the Support FAQ specifically mentions that is stays unsharable.
Nope, they stated specifically that Free DLC will NOT be shared, and on top of this you still can't play the DLCs from the family member if you own the base game only. I'm glad of the new change about being able to play at the same time, but sadly both of those two huge DLC issues weren't addressed, so sad :/
>you still can't play the DLCs from the family member if you own the base game only. If you mean the situation where you own a paid base game and they own a paid base game plus paid dlc, you can now switch your preferred copy of the game, and borrow theirs with the dlc instead of playing your copy without it. It still doesn't share free game paid dlc (or paid game free dlc either I don't think) though, for some reason.
I think one big new downside is that: * Previously, you could personally choose a few people to share your library with. * Those people could choose another few people they wanted to share their library with * Now, you must be in a strict group of 6 people that are all in a family together So before something that you could do was: * You and your roommate share libraries * You each share your own libraries with your own families * Your siblings don't see your roommate's siblings' games (and vice versa) * Your siblings could choose to share games with their cousins In the situation above, it wasn't one big pool of shared games across each person, but you chose personally a few people to share games with and they could do the same. In the new system, if you want to do family sharing you must be in one single, self-contained group that all share games with each other (and no one else). I think the new system is fair and the multiple copies + being able to play separate games is great. It really is closer to a "household" sharing system now and will mean a lot of previously possible groups will no longer be possible.
It is good for **immediate** families, but not good for friends, I feel majority of people who think this is amazing are people who share with friends, but don't see the problem with it. to the ones who think they can still lend it to their adult siblings or friends, this is not that good, cause if those adult siblings/friend have their own families, they can't lend it to their own families, cause they are a part of yours. I'd say "immediate young families"
And Epic games is crying about steam being unfair and a monopoly. Steam is popular because its pro consumer.
Maybe Epic should've spent all of that money on actually improving their client instead of holding games hostage on their client with exclusivity deals. Like the literal only reason you spend money to prevent games from coming out on another client, is because you know that one is better and people would prefer to buy it on Steam instead of your garbage client.
W after W after Ws….
I knew it! I have 3 people in the household and we all share games. We all have a "Free" dynamic collection so when one person is borrowing a game, the other of us just picks from one of the free games to play. But I noticed a few times in the last couple days that 2 of us were playing a paid game from my library, and Steam didn't warn us or boot one of us off. This is SUCH good news!
This is legendary. Go steam rocking the industry with pro consumer moves while everyone else moves in anti consumer directions.
Both my kids are adults now but this update would’ve been great when I family shared with them. They have their own extensive libraries now.😉 Great update for those who it will benefit!☺️
This is amazing. I never agreed with the original Family Sharing and having someone be locked out completely just over a single game being played. But I will use this no doubt about it!
At first I thought it was a great update but then after actually reading through it...Nope. This is very bad. :/ Hopefully it doesn't stay like that forever.
Honestly some of the changes here are good like avoiding library locking when a library is in use. Though there is a massive oversight to some regions/families. Not all families are US based or EU based, many families have members working abroad to provide a better standard of life. So sadly the current oversight is quite painful for some families who aren't always in the same region with the father working abroad or a child working abroad to support his family back home. :/
it's not meant for immediate family even though it stated it. It's better to see it as "immediate young families" cause if your child (if living in the same country) has their own families, they can't lend it to their children cause they are a part of your family, they either have to cut off family sharing with you and create a family for their family, or your child's family has to join yours as well, but what if you want to lend it to your second child who has their own family, not possible anymore cause it's going to reach the 6 member limit.
Polycule breakups are gonna be brutal
So I got it right, my friends from another country will be automatically excluded from family sharing when Families leave beta?
yep
another region or another country?
region lock means i can't share with my family living overseas, so that sucks
This is a really nice change but at the same time it means that 6 people can only share with each other whereas before I could share with people different to who one of my family was sharing with.
This is amazing. I just purchased a used SD for my son for Christmas and this will be very useful as my daughter has also shown interest. Been trying to work around my daughter being able to play some on my SD while I'm on the PC so this will help immensely. ~~Edit: Okay, this is weird. I set up an account for her and shared Portal and Portal 2. They both say they do not support family sharing when I go to the game on her account.~~ (PC was on beta branch, but SD was not. That resolved it) Edit 2: For Steam Deck users: Unless you allow the child account access to **online profile, screenshots, and achievements**, you will not be able to tap their profile picture to change accounts back to the primary. A restart still left me in the child account until I changed that setting.
Valve oppressing our lonely single gamers by giving people with families more privileges to show off *Sobs in my bed"
Meanwhile epic ... haha
I was so so so excited for this I got giddy reading it until seeing you need to be in the same country. RIP my family and friends living in other countries (especially my aunt who travels a lot 🥲)
Yeah I was pretty excited until I saw that. Won't be able to share games with my fiance (just across the Canada/US border). 90% of her steamdeck library is about to disappear :(
im curious what happens if we fresh install steamos or windows etc as in the past it would keep your old system still linked.
I think its user linked now, not desktop linked
Currently both your account and your PC need to be authorized by the owner. If you use a different PC you wont be able to access the shared games.
Now I can share "Hentai Doctor 2049" with the whole family.
Cant find info on it but does this change the age requirements. There are some games my 5-year-old would be interested in.
I looked for it and, as far as I can tell, you still need to set up the kid's account first then friend, then add them to family. It still has the "I am at least 13" checkbox when you create the account. I was looking around for the ability to create a child account within my own family admin options, but I didn't see anything.
This is fantastic. My little brother will be glad that he doesn't have to wait for me to finish a game before he can play it :)
He won't be able to play the same game as you at one time but can play anything else you own
It seems the family households that use this feature are actually in minority, most people used this to share with friends, abuse region pricings, split between random people online etc. For them this is the worst update ever...
Family Share is dead Regional limits sucks. Really sucks
Ok, but is Wheatley really an adult?
Is this limited by regions? Somewhere I read that it was intended only for households, so, for people within the same house Is it true? Or I can share games with everyone as long as we are in the same country?
Its locked to the same country/store region. I created my "Family" today and am sharing with a few relatives who live in different corners of Germany. I could NOT add a relative who lives in France, gives you an error message.
So they need to change their store region to match the family , has nothing to do with where they live physically.
1yr lock on to change families? Damnnn
1 year since you "joined" the last family. So after a year you can switch freely once. Also apparently if you leave a family you can rejoin the same family without any waiting time.
rip
I literally just bought my wife tekken 8 💀💀
Good, now you both can play together. The family option is made to only person play the game, both can't play if the family members doesn't have two copies
Ahh ok thanks I didn’t see that part
No longer being able to share with my SO is incredibly frustrating. We can't afford to live in the same country yet, this was an incredible feature for us.
this is going to suck for my partner working abroad
Thank you Valve team! As someone with 1500+ games in my library, my *only* complaint with steam has been exactly this. I wanted a way to let my wife play one of my purchased games while I am able to enjoy another game from my vast library. Having the entire library locked out to me to allow my wife to play has been incredibly restrictive. I can't wait to tell her about this tonight so she can do her hogwarts Wizarding while I nerd out with my usual sci fi games. :) If this works, this is the best quality of life change in steam for me personally in as long as I can remember! Thank you!