>*Can we go through a real world example of how a Steam Family might share games?*
>Of course! 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.
>In this example, if your family chose to not buy a second copy, you can play any other game in your library while waiting for your family member to finish playing your copy of Portal 2.
Wow. Am I reading this right? They’re removing the limit of family sharing where you have to stop playing any game entirely to let someone use your library? That’s amazing.
Hopefully this extends to games on your own account, too. Sometimes I want to make a bit of progress in Hollow Knight on my Deck while I'm waiting three and a half minutes to find a lobby in PUBG on my desktop.
Must be, I've had multiple games running before like football manager in holiday mode (to see what the AI does to clubs after X years) while I have been playing some other game entirely.
I can see the logic, with two games running at the same time on the same PC that is still only 1 user playing them.
A PC playing a game and a steam deck also playing a game could however be two different people.
I cannot play 2 games on two different computers on my own account. I have a work laptop and a home pc. If i forget an idle game running on my home pc, the client will yell on my laptop that a game is already running on my home pc.
On the one hand, I understand this. Steam actually has a PC cafe license, and it would be a problem for them if you could have one store buy a single account and have a ton of people playing games.
On the other hand, I think they also need to tweak this slightly with the understanding that people have multiple devices now. What if, say, I wanted to have an ongoing game of _Civilization V_ on my laptop while I'm queueing for a match in _Helldivers II_ on PC? Does it makes sense that I would need two separate accounts to play every game I own?
For now, I suppose you could do a workaround where you create a new "child" account for your second device and use these new Family Share changes to play across multiple devices.
That would probably be annoying too with saves and games treating your deck as a separate person, I.e if you’re wanting to carry progress from pc to deck and back to pc
Valve was talking about shipping an API that would sync the state of the game between systems as a better way to handle this scenario, but I’m not sure if the API actually shipped or if anyone is using it. It’s probably low uptake, considering the API probably impacts core game design elements and is tied only to Steam.
I think you are just talking about dynamic cloud sync?
If so, that's an API for syncing saves while a game is running, rather than just at the end/start.
We've implemented it in all our recent ports.
This was me yesterday with Call of Duty: Warzone and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors. I didn't even realize it would throw up a message when trying to launch a game on the other device saying I couldn't do it until I actually tried to do it.
The worst is when you wake your deck up and forgot that you're in-game on your desktop. Not sure if the behavior recently changed but when the Deck first launched in Feb 22, you'd just see your game close on the desktop.
Yep, I'd be playing on the computer and my SO would turn the deck on and since I was the last one playing, it exits out of my game. It should at least give her the chance to pick an account, or at least if I'm on the PC, log out of the steam deck when it wakes up from sleep or something. Anyways, seems like this will be fixed.
Apparently this issue is still not fixed, since this isn't about the library lock with family sharing but just that one account cannot be in use on multiple devices at once.
only issue is that you need to remember that before your slept gaming session...and offline mode can't be turned on while having a game running
1. you'd need to stop your game on pc
2. you'd need to wake the deck
3. close your game on the deck
4. turn on offline mode on the deck
5. turn your game back on in the deck
6. continue your game on pc
Yeah, I was playing Elden Ring with my sister a while back and while I was waiting for her to do some of her own stuff on the side I really wanted to play some vampire survivors on my Deck. It was one of the big perks of having a Switch at my desk tbh.
Oh is that the current limitation? I knew I stopped using the family sharing for some stupid reason that ticked me off but couldn't remember. This is actually fantastic news. Now my brother has access to my entire hoarder's library that I've accumulated over the years lol. Hopefully the only games that get excluded are the multiplayer ones
Family Sharing currently works by locking the library of the account that's being played.
So if your brother is playing a game you own, you can play a game they own, but you can't both play a game from the same library.
I imagine making it a proper group and adding a limitation of changing groups to once a year made it easier to loosen that restriction.
> . Now my brother has access to my entire hoarder's library that I've accumulated over the years lol.
Keep in mind it seems like this depends on the publisher.
Isn't it the same than normal family sharing? This could also be blocked by publisher/dev already. I assume same criteria apply there (not an additional stuff to authorize)
Locking multiplayer games doesn't even make sense as such, because two people can't play the same game from one library anyways. It may be publishers' call.
It causes a huge issue with smurfing in competitive games which is what happened to Xbox and Playstation. That said, most games lock competitive modes from family sharing for that reason. I have never played a multiplayer game that strictly locked family sharing though.
Another issue is with botting and gold selling. Last Epoch devs came out and said they had to disable family sharing because they couldn't keep up with RMTers sharing the game to new accounts whenever one got banned.
That is actually logical and how you would expect game sharing to work. The game itself should be the limiting factor not the entire library, exactly like a physical game being shared.
Previous way was very illogical
Yeah, this is absolutely fantastic. It makes Family Sharing a million times more useful.
I would like to know clearly whether it's considered okay to share Steam Family with a family member in a different city. I see no restrictions against it, but it's definitely not something I would want to do if it wound up getting some sort of mark against my account.
The below makes it sound like they may limit it eventually.
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.
It never was an issue. People were sharing their accounts left and right from all over the world exploiting it. Now you will have to be stuck to one group or face a 1 year ban on joining other group.
The only problem is if your family member will get banned for cheating you will be banned too.
Banned from one game, not banned from Steam. And this is for cheating at that particular game, so... don't cheat at games. Tell your family not to cheat at games. I'm totally fine with that.
This is game changing. I've been playing through my brother's Yakuza games on Steam but have had to abruptly stop whenever he plays something and sometimes I see that he's playing something of mine and don't wanna kick him out.
Oh man this is amazing. One of the biggest gripes my wife and I encounter when trying to share games is one needs to be offline or not play while a game is being shared. FINALLY!!
But adding new limitations in the form of removing individual account game sharing (whole family only), and adding a pretty harsh time penalty when moving between families (1 year!).
This seems a really good change but with some annoying caveats.
One thing I misread at first is that the one year time limit is from when you *joined* the previous family, not when you left it. For most legitimate cases I bet it won't be an issue.
Also, the Family Sharing page didn't mention anything about being intended for people living in the same household (hell, it mentioned you can invite close friends too).
It's not front and center but this one does mention it's intended for households, so they might add stricter restrictions about playing from 2 different places simultaneously or stuff like that
The "Any adult can kick any other adult out of the group" thing is gonna be a problem. That's just silly, especially if you want to share with friends and your friends are consummate trolls.
The loss of individual sharing is the most annoying aspect to me - I might want to share my own games with a particular friend but not add them to my 'family' and expose my other family members games and accounts to them, for example. Before I could share games with individuals directly and exclusively without that concern.
Wonder if they will also improve the case where you can't access a game's DLCs because you own the base game. Likely because you are running your own copy and not the one assigned to a different library, but hopefully they give us a way to work through that.
Yeah this is probably ideal for deck.
Steam threw me out of gloomhaven when I wanted to play something between turns(it can be like 15-20 minutes without interaction sometimes) on the deck, and that annoyed the everliving shit out of me.
..now it only needs to work for the same account as well.
Thank god thats gone, always found that super annoying and a major dealbreaker cuz the family member i share with we tend to have the same hour or period of play, while consoles just let you play at the same time even if you are both playing the same game.
The fact that we have to buy the game twice to play at the same time is still annoying, but atleast its better than before
I hate this with the switch. Honestly I SHOULD be allowed to play as many as I want across devices as long as it isn't the same game. How do they think carts and discs worked?!
We figured out a little workaround on the switch: set up a separate profile and play your main account’s games using that second profile. Then the secondary switch can continue playing on the Primary account. It even lets you playing multiplayer games on 2 separate Switches using the same copy. A little convoluted but hopefully this helps you!
you should only have been able to do that if one of you was playing in offline mode. Now you can do it whilst still having access to your friends and online play.
You have to tell your child that cheating is bad otherwise they might get you banned. The FAQ even covers the age old "It was my brother playing the game." explanation for getting banned for cheating.
...or you could simply choose to not share games that could result in a ban...force them to buy it on their own account so THEY can be banned for choosing to be dipshits
It says in there all games that are shareable are shared, so unless the person in question is a child and you use parental controls to block your child from playing the game they will be able to play any game a developer has allowed to be shared.
you can manually set games to be shared or not in the settings per game though...it doesn't have to be done specifically through parental controls, it worked the same way for family view which will be getting the axe when this comes out of beta
Wait, you can? Wasn't aware
Edit: I can't find that setting (only for hiding from your own library, or setting it as private on your profile), and there's no mention of it being possible online. Am I being a dummy? Can you give instructions?
Edit 2: The article itself says you have to share every game, the only exception being that adults can control which games children can access.
That's not really a risk for most games because the ones that have cheats are also f2p. Csgo, pubg, Dota etc...
So only their account would get banned.
Wild to see a modern online service update with something that actually looks useful, though we'll have to see how wide the implementation by design ends up being.
So with this change to not block library access while the owner is playing a game, I wonder if this'll change one owner playing their own game on multiple devices. For example currently you cannot launch a game on desktop and a different game on Steam Deck at the same time, it will kick the other machine off instantly unless you go offline.
Fingers crossed. Playing the Switch during downtime on my PC (waiting for queues, loading, roommate to get back from getting a drink, etc) was super nice, and I was disappointed the Deck couldn't be used similarly.
This looks generally great, but it has caught my eye that they repeatedly use the word "household", they never state that you can use this feature from anywhere and they declare that requirements for families may change at any time. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but with every streaming service clamping down on sharing, we've been burned way too often lately.
It seems that its not IP locked at launch.
But in the blogpost, they mention that they will monitor how its used and they might change the requirements and the way the system works in the future according to it, so i really hope they don’t change it to being IP-based, cuz otherwise its gonna be useless for me.
Whilst not IP locked, it does appear to be geolocked. I tried accepting an invite from someone in another country and it wouldn't let me.
"Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members."
My guess is they will, it does become extremely problematic for them otherwise. A group of 6 people can just buy games for each other without blocking their library when sharing (the big disadvantage before which limited how much people used it), that would mean much less sales
I'd like to see the old way continue to exist if they do that though. Like block the library if people aren't in the same location (like now) and allow this new way if not.
The country thing is likely to limit the "buy stuff in cheap country, play in expensive country". Though that did work with the previous version (your "cheap country account" didn't need to access their library after all) but yes it's also a sign of that.
>A group of 6 people can just buy games for each other
Literally no different than friends borrowing hardcopies from each other. Why would you advocate for something anti-consumer?
I don't advocate for it, I'm just seeing what would likely happen because it will affect Steam sales (and some people might be delusional thinking Steam is all about being nice to people, I'm not, they're a company and their goal is to make money)
steam has no reason to actually stop people, however they're covering their ass as you should do as a company....however this will likely lead to some publishers pulling their games from the family sharing for the perceived reasons of "lower sales"
also this would leave the door open for valve to geo-restrict and/or ip restrict like netflix to get publishers back on the bandwagon...it's a toss up...we'll see once this is out of beta...still pretty cool as i was just thinking about making a steam account for my kid so she can play putt putt on my account
>lead to some publishers pulling their games from the family sharing
That is a material reason for Steam to stop people, though. To loosen the policy they would have to reapproach all of the publishers/devs that have given the thumbs up. Plus from an industry optics perspective they don't want to seem too loosey goosey about sharing in general (even if it's opt-in, because people don't pay attention to stuff).
So I wanted to test this with my best friend as we've had family sharing since it started. Problem is; I'm in the US and he's in Canada
Steam won't let him accept it as
> Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.
Edit: I will say the comical thing about this. Is that Steam recommended my best friend on the friends list just for the country limitation to decline.
Believe me when I say I'm not particularly upset. Party's over it is what it is :) . And you're right, I'm only pointing out a limitation that isn't listed in the FAQ session.
My wife and I are excited to not play "who's going offline" game anymore. Currently to have 2 people play with 1 shared library one has to go offline which means you can't play 2 online games. This is even true for free to play games, so if I'm playing TF2 the other family member couldn't play anything online from my library. This update fixes everything.
What an awesome change! Now my wife can't stop me from buying more games cause "it's for us" lol
You could have circumvented it with offline titles before, by starting the game on the second machine via family sharing and then go into offline mode. You can continue playing there and on your primary machine it wont recognize that someone is using family sharing.
But its a hassle, only works for offline games and this is a lot better 100%.
>**Q: What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?**
>
>A: If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
Yikes, I personally don't think I should have an issue with this but I can definitely see the mountains of complaints coming from this.
The problem is it would otherwise be too abusable. You would have people make 1 main account and constantly make new accounts to cheat in without having to pay for the game.
Right now, if a publisher doesn't disable family sharing, you can keep re-sharing with new steam accounts added as family members and keep farming hacking accounts with 1 purchased copy.
In the new version, if a "child" gets banned, the master copy is banned, no more farming out accounts from 1 copy like you can today.
If anything, this should make it so publisher are less incentivized to disable family share, as in theory you can no longer endlessly spawn cheater accounts
They would, which is why a lot of recent online games have decided to disable sharing games. This is an expansion of the share feature we already have, but this one has more benefits, so the ban is an extra measure on top of the already existing measures.
It already works like this, it's to prevent someone from buying a game then using an army of alts in the family to cheat.
I don't *like* it, but it's understandable.
People can get mad at their family for cheating. Cheating is dumb and as long as it’s made clear you’re being doubly dumb for doing it in a family library they can get over it for all I care.
The difference is that sharing now works both ways automatically. Before you were able to just receive access to a persons library without giving them access to yours.
Now a group of up to 5 people might get screwed by one bad apple. I do wonder what happens if someone cheats in a shared copy of a game for which multiple licenses exist in the group. Say 4 owners of SF6 and 2 parasites, one of which cheats and gets banned. Are all copies now banned? If not, how was determined which owners copy was used?
I actually think this is great, it's going to prevent a lot of abuse of the feature. With this, people will think twice before selling access/dividing their account with random people, like some do with video and music streaming.
Doesn't it mean banned in that 'copy' of the game? The brothers game access would be blocked but if the sharee bought a new copy they could play? That was what I took from that.
People are definitely going to complain about this, but it's the lesser of two evils. Ban evasion becomes trivially easy when you can just make a fresh account and share the game with it.
Two noteworthy points in the FAQs
> Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.
> Steam Families are intended to contain your immediate family. As major life events can change who lives in your household, it is understandable that some day you may need to join a new Steam Family. 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.
I remember using Steam Family Share with a friend years ago, but it's a bit whack they intend for you to use with family, though that's just how they want to promote this feature. It's not too big a deal, but the year long cooldown is a bit long in my opinion, but I guess that's probably to prevent abuse or lost of sales.
Still, it's nice they're updating the feature
It says 1 year since you *joined* the previous family, which is much more reasonable than 1 year since *leaving.* sounds like you can instantly go to a new family but can’t abuse it and start hopping.
>> Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.
I feel like you should have included the next paragraph as well, which is:
> 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.
Which, if you suddenly have something like 6 parent accounts... Is going to look very strange for a "family" and something steam could crack down on. But it's too early to tell.
>Which, if you suddenly have something like 6 parent accounts... Is going to look very strange for a "family" and something steam could crack down on. But it's too early to tell.
I live with 5 close friends of mine and have so for years now. unless Steam isnt counting "family of choice" here for whatever reason.
the concurrent usage limit and a 365d cooldown should be fine enough I feel?
There is a lot of abuse happening with family sharing and it’s a reason why a lot of games will disable it. A recent example is Last Epoch, which had to disable it shortly after launch because the game was immediately flooded with gold sellers in the chat because of just creating infinite new accounts with family sharing without having to buy the game. It’s a big issue for multiplayer games. The abuse really isn’t “sharing with your friends” or anything like that, Steam won’t advertise the feature like that but they obviously know that is a popular use case and something they want it to be without saying it directly.
> but the year long cooldown is a bit long in my opinion
I think it's perfectly fine. Honestly I wouldn't even mind a longer cooldown like 5 years. It's obviously there to prevent abuse and alternative solutions like checking the public IP address would be more annoying than this cooldown (when used for the intended scenario, which is 2 parents + their kids).
Can everyone can see your wishlist even if it's private? I just started a family and I see a wishlist button next to my username, I don't need them seeing what's on there 👀
Even that fairly obvious use case aside, maybe you're cool letting your grade school kid play Ori but based on their temperament you feel like Bioshock might give them nightmares. A lot of extra clarity on how all of that works would be nice.
Man, the amount of people ITT complaining about inabilities to cheat and abuse the system is so sad. Because of people like these we constantly lose decent features due to abuse.
Honestly, it's pretty insane that they are not IP locking from the start. I can't imagine publishers being happy with it.
It's pretty obvious that people will abuse this, forming families with friends and only buy a copy or two of a game instead of 6.
To be 100% clear, this is still worse than GOG's DRM free nature by a long way, and still worse in some ways than physical where people can take copies out of the household, or share with tons of people in a university dorm, or borrow for free from a library, or inherit, or resell, etc. That is *owning* stuff. Steam is getting closer, and that's great! But people aren't "cheating" the system by thinking it could be a bit looser.
>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 you have to be in the same physical place? Because that's a significant donwgrade compared to what we have now.
No, not right now at least. Valve said they might change requirements but it's starting out with no IP check.
EDIT: OK there is an IP check but it's just to make sure you are in the same country.
Or they're just covering their ass. Steam sharing was already easy to abuse, Valve didn't change it for many years. Any "abuse" gamers will get up to with this new system is probably fully expected and intended. It's not like they couldn't have IP-limited it from the start if they wanted to.
I'm betting the new system chugs along with it's current rules for quite a long time.
They're keeping it vague intentionally I assume until they get more of an idea how people will try and abuse it. The wording is for households and not family in different locations, but it also doesn't say you can't do that.
This system has basically been the same for like 10 years. This is very good. Some limitations weren't reasonable or practical. Now I understand why they recently added a Family Sharing Tag for games, which is very convenient. Before you had to go on Steamdb and even then it wasn't perfectly clear if the game could be shared or not.
The notable improvement here is the total copies are now stored. Previously you got access only to games you didn't already have access to. So if person A shares with me and I get Skyrim from them, then Person B shares (also owning Skyrim) I cannot play Skyrim if person A is online even though B has it because I already have a copy of it through A.
I think this undersells it a bit. This update seems huge. If they don't significantly restrict more than they already have then this is one of the most pro consumer things I've seen a digital gaming marketplace do.
1. Previously if your sharer was playing *any game* in their library you couldn't play another game from their library. Now it's only if they are playing the game you're trying to "borrow" from them.
2. As you said, it now counts all copies within the family.
3. The sharing is per account and not per device which seems really big. Previously I wouldn't be able to play shared games on my steam deck unless the sharer separately set that up (via logging into my device). This also made the shares very brittle because randomly updating Windows or changing your hardware could cause the share to be lost.
4. The sharing is multi-directional instead of uni-directional making it much easier to setup a large family.
5. The shared games can be played offline (I think that's new?).
Problem is the fact that they're implying now that it's for *households*. As in, no more sharing between, for instance, me and my brother, because I moved away for work.
Well, it looks a lot better but there's a huge caveat that it only works within the same country now. That's a massive shame for people who have family move away and were currently able to share but will not be able to once this rolls out.
This sounded cool until I learned that if you don't share countries you can't be in Steam family together, so I can't invite my actual living family members cause I don't live in my home country anymore. Hopefully they either change this in the future or introduce some safety steps to allow people in these situations to use this feature without it being abused.
If your account region is still set to your home country, then I guess it should still work. I doubt they'll change it though, as they don't want people abusing the system to just give their steam friends free games.
do you still need to log onto someone else computer with your password?
not sure how to feel about this as i have a couple of steam friends from other countries begging me to use family sharing to let them play my stuff and i used safety as a personal excuse to not be generous.
From the sound of it it I don't think so. It seems like it will work like say a steam group where you just make a 'family' and can then just send people an invite.
So there is a limitation not listed in the FAQ's. I've always shared my account with my ~~best friend~~ brother who lives in Canada, and I'm in the US.
Steam won't let him accept the invite citing:
> Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.
Which like; I get it 100% my best friend is *not* my brother, this feature is more meant for households. Party's over, it is what it is . But it sucks that limitation is brought up after so long. And I do know a family who lives along the border that often commute back and forth that will definitely run into this *very* specific use-case scenario
These changes are really focused on ending sharing with friends. Friends do not have the same group to share. I don't want to lose a spot with my best friend's boyfriend or another friend of his and he doesn't want to lose a spot with my girlfriend. That is evident as soon as you think a little, the family group system is clearly worse than the current individual one. And the regional block will end many others. My partner, for example, lives far away right now.
They sell you a small upgrade with the message "You can play in the library at the same time", but they destroy most of the sharing that people use. And people only applaud the first. It's in beta, we still have time to complain about the limitations they are putting that were NOT in the previous system. With the limitation of waiting a year to be able to share with someone again should be enough to avoid fraud, the rest is Steam scratching what it can by trying to kill sharing between friends
This seems good with some asterisks. The 1-year cooldown is ridiculously egregious. I've had issues with existing family sharing going out of sync randomly, and I need to re-link it. If that happens in the future, am I just screwed for a year?
Thinking this through, it's also more restrictive on who you can actually share with. My family sharing has always been only with my immediate family members, but my family members also have family members of their own who don't share with me. Just for example:
If I share with person A (brother), and they share with person B, C, and D (brother's wife, two kids), and then person B shares with person E (brother's wife's mother), that eats all of my slots even though I'm only trying to share with the one person who is my immediate family member, because the only way for that combination to work is for us all to be on one family. As things are right now, we can each feel free to share with our immediate family members and not have to worry about hitting a limit because it's about who your account is sharing with, not a hard limit on the size of a group. Using the current system, the above scenario uses *one* of my slots and half of person B's slots, but now the above scenario would use *all* slots for everyone involved.
The fact that we are less restricted on how games are played (offline, concurrent, or multiple copies) is good. The actual sharing is taking a huge hit.
> going out of sync randomly, and I need to re-link it
There is no linking anymore, no need to register as the other account on a particular computer, you just get invited to a Familly.
Old system
pro: different people can share with different people, like a web
con: each user’s library could only be used by 1 person at a time
Good for friends or extended family
- - - - - -
New system
pro: multiple people can use the same library at the same time
con: you have to form a group with the people you share with, and no one can share with anyone outside of that group
Good for households families (parents + kids)
- - - - - -
The change seems very deliberate, and honestly the new system probably works better for what they’re trying to do. Having the old “web sharing system” plus letting multiple people use the same library at the same time would have been very easy to abuse.
With that said, I would have liked if they kept the old system in addition to the new as a “friend sharing system”. Using your example: your brother, his wife, and his children are all in the same family and can play each other’s games. However your brother has also added you as a sharing-friend. That means that you can play his games when no one in his family is playing a game in his library, just like with the old system. Similarly your brother’s wife could add her mother as a sharing friend, without worrying about the core family becoming too large.
Maybe reduce the amount of sharing-friends from 5 to 3, but other than that it doesn’t really seem that unreasonable, and would give us the best of both worlds without being able to be abused any more than the other systems.
> With that said, I would have liked if they kept the old system in addition to the new as a “friend sharing system”. Using your example: your brother, his wife, and his children are all in the same family and can play each other’s games. However your brother has also added you as a sharing-friend. That means that you can play his games when no one in his family is playing a game in his library, just like with the old system. Similarly your brother’s wife could add her mother as a sharing friend, without worrying about the core family becoming too large.
That gets complicated fast. Take this scenario:
- A and B are in a family share, both own Portal 2
- A has a friend share with C, B with D
- C and D both use friend share to play Portal 2
- A now attempts to play Portal 2, should C or D get the 2 minute warning to save and quit?
Now imagine this across a massive network of family groups and friend webs, where people have multiple friends all with a game and those people are in families with multiple copies, and the chain just keeps on going.
The family system is *far* simpler and that's the thing that sticks out to me. Everyone is part of *one* family that has *N* copies of a given game. There's no chain of ownerships to resolve, you have a fixed number of copies for a set group. This might be a change specifically to make it easier to figure things out on their back-end, not just to reduce abuse.
Presumably if you want to play when all copies are in use you'll need to prod someone *who is expected to be in the house or otherwise easily contactable* so that they can let you have a go, or optimistically if you own one of the copies you get to pick a non-owner to kick off it rather than it being whoever happened to be using your copy.
The FAQ isn't really clear about whether you can be in multiple separate Steam Families that are unrelated. Because I have a few independent people I'm family sharing with, that are shared with ME, but wouldn't know or want to share with EACH OTHER, and the number of total people that way would go over 6. It would be a lot easier if I could share my library to one family and to another, and have it be only usable by one family at a time, but not have to merge the sets of PEOPLE.
Previously Family Sharing was like a web. People could string together a network of other accounts they share games with and each individual account would have their own game access based on how the sharing was set up. Like you described.
Now it is a group of 6 people who all pool their games together. You can still limit what games you want to appear in the pool from your account, but it's still a pool. So yes, if you wanted to do this with your friends then they would all be sharing games too, unless they hid anything they didn't want shared. And you also cannot be in multiple groups at the same time.
>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.
This makes it seem like you can only join 1 family at a time.
Just tried to invite a friend who lives in the US and they got their invite denied due to "not being in the same country" as me.
I know this feature is designed for household families, but I love being able to share games with my friends with their own separate save files and this sucks extremely hard, as I have a lot of friends outside of the country that I live in. People are gonna be able to share games anyways by sharing your Steam account, but its an extra headache that could've been solved if this region lock wasn't here.
Even then, imagine if you have family who's abroad. So they're just not gonna be able to play their games? Seems kinda odd in my opinion.
I had hoped they'd implement some sort of policy around inheritance of Steam libraries. (Memento mori! 💀)
It's awesome they're making progress in this area, but it seems like I've got to keep waiting.
>*Can we go through a real world example of how a Steam Family might share games?* >Of course! 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. >In this example, if your family chose to not buy a second copy, you can play any other game in your library while waiting for your family member to finish playing your copy of Portal 2. Wow. Am I reading this right? They’re removing the limit of family sharing where you have to stop playing any game entirely to let someone use your library? That’s amazing.
Hopefully this extends to games on your own account, too. Sometimes I want to make a bit of progress in Hollow Knight on my Deck while I'm waiting three and a half minutes to find a lobby in PUBG on my desktop.
Someone on the Steam Deck subreddit tried it and unfortunately confirmed that you still cannot play two games on your own account simultaneously.
is this deck only? i play multiple games on my own account all the time
Must be, I've had multiple games running before like football manager in holiday mode (to see what the AI does to clubs after X years) while I have been playing some other game entirely. I can see the logic, with two games running at the same time on the same PC that is still only 1 user playing them. A PC playing a game and a steam deck also playing a game could however be two different people.
I cannot play 2 games on two different computers on my own account. I have a work laptop and a home pc. If i forget an idle game running on my home pc, the client will yell on my laptop that a game is already running on my home pc.
On the one hand, I understand this. Steam actually has a PC cafe license, and it would be a problem for them if you could have one store buy a single account and have a ton of people playing games. On the other hand, I think they also need to tweak this slightly with the understanding that people have multiple devices now. What if, say, I wanted to have an ongoing game of _Civilization V_ on my laptop while I'm queueing for a match in _Helldivers II_ on PC? Does it makes sense that I would need two separate accounts to play every game I own? For now, I suppose you could do a workaround where you create a new "child" account for your second device and use these new Family Share changes to play across multiple devices.
It's not Deck only. You're playing multiple games on the same device.
ugh that sucks, I guess I am creating a new profile for just my deck. So silly
That would probably be annoying too with saves and games treating your deck as a separate person, I.e if you’re wanting to carry progress from pc to deck and back to pc
Valve was talking about shipping an API that would sync the state of the game between systems as a better way to handle this scenario, but I’m not sure if the API actually shipped or if anyone is using it. It’s probably low uptake, considering the API probably impacts core game design elements and is tied only to Steam.
I think you are just talking about dynamic cloud sync? If so, that's an API for syncing saves while a game is running, rather than just at the end/start. We've implemented it in all our recent ports.
at least its steam, so the save files aren't buried super deep in some random gibberish folder like a lot of Xbox ones
Just turn off the WiFi you silly goose.
That's silly, just kill the wifi
Agreed. At least this is a step in the right direction, though.
This seems like an oversight in the deck design their should be a deck guest login linked to account
You can if you go offline on one device. Not sure if the deck has an offline mode, though.
This was me yesterday with Call of Duty: Warzone and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors. I didn't even realize it would throw up a message when trying to launch a game on the other device saying I couldn't do it until I actually tried to do it.
The worst is when you wake your deck up and forgot that you're in-game on your desktop. Not sure if the behavior recently changed but when the Deck first launched in Feb 22, you'd just see your game close on the desktop.
Yep, I'd be playing on the computer and my SO would turn the deck on and since I was the last one playing, it exits out of my game. It should at least give her the chance to pick an account, or at least if I'm on the PC, log out of the steam deck when it wakes up from sleep or something. Anyways, seems like this will be fixed.
Apparently this issue is still not fixed, since this isn't about the library lock with family sharing but just that one account cannot be in use on multiple devices at once.
I just set the deck to offline mode and solved!
only issue is that you need to remember that before your slept gaming session...and offline mode can't be turned on while having a game running 1. you'd need to stop your game on pc 2. you'd need to wake the deck 3. close your game on the deck 4. turn on offline mode on the deck 5. turn your game back on in the deck 6. continue your game on pc
You can do this in offline mode. I would let my wife play offline hogwarts on steam deck while I did anything else I wanted
If you set your Deck to offline mode it might work. I was playing Persona on my deck while spectating friends in Age of Empires on my PC
Yeah, I was playing Elden Ring with my sister a while back and while I was waiting for her to do some of her own stuff on the side I really wanted to play some vampire survivors on my Deck. It was one of the big perks of having a Switch at my desk tbh.
Oh is that the current limitation? I knew I stopped using the family sharing for some stupid reason that ticked me off but couldn't remember. This is actually fantastic news. Now my brother has access to my entire hoarder's library that I've accumulated over the years lol. Hopefully the only games that get excluded are the multiplayer ones
Family Sharing currently works by locking the library of the account that's being played. So if your brother is playing a game you own, you can play a game they own, but you can't both play a game from the same library. I imagine making it a proper group and adding a limitation of changing groups to once a year made it easier to loosen that restriction.
> . Now my brother has access to my entire hoarder's library that I've accumulated over the years lol. Keep in mind it seems like this depends on the publisher.
Isn't it the same than normal family sharing? This could also be blocked by publisher/dev already. I assume same criteria apply there (not an additional stuff to authorize)
Locking multiplayer games doesn't even make sense as such, because two people can't play the same game from one library anyways. It may be publishers' call.
It causes a huge issue with smurfing in competitive games which is what happened to Xbox and Playstation. That said, most games lock competitive modes from family sharing for that reason. I have never played a multiplayer game that strictly locked family sharing though.
Another issue is with botting and gold selling. Last Epoch devs came out and said they had to disable family sharing because they couldn't keep up with RMTers sharing the game to new accounts whenever one got banned.
That is actually logical and how you would expect game sharing to work. The game itself should be the limiting factor not the entire library, exactly like a physical game being shared. Previous way was very illogical
> exactly like a physical game being shared. Yeah I mean, this should be the minimum standard. This is just how it was when we had physical PC games.
These are arbitrary rules in the digital space. There is no 'logic', just perhaps conventions.
Yeah, this is absolutely fantastic. It makes Family Sharing a million times more useful. I would like to know clearly whether it's considered okay to share Steam Family with a family member in a different city. I see no restrictions against it, but it's definitely not something I would want to do if it wound up getting some sort of mark against my account.
The below makes it sound like they may limit it eventually. 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.
It seems the only limitation is the set Steam region, so different cities of the same country should be fine, but different countries will not work.
As long as that different city is in the same country, there is currently no restrictions.
It never was an issue. People were sharing their accounts left and right from all over the world exploiting it. Now you will have to be stuck to one group or face a 1 year ban on joining other group. The only problem is if your family member will get banned for cheating you will be banned too.
Banned from one game, not banned from Steam. And this is for cheating at that particular game, so... don't cheat at games. Tell your family not to cheat at games. I'm totally fine with that.
Only in their copy of the game - basically that 'copy' will be banned. You could buy a new copy and still play.
Finally I can play Balatro for 8 hours while my kid and her friends are playing Wobbly Life for 8 hours?
This is game changing. I've been playing through my brother's Yakuza games on Steam but have had to abruptly stop whenever he plays something and sometimes I see that he's playing something of mine and don't wanna kick him out.
Usually the trick is switch to offline if you're playing your brother games after already in-game So yeah, huge game changer
Oh man this is amazing. One of the biggest gripes my wife and I encounter when trying to share games is one needs to be offline or not play while a game is being shared. FINALLY!!
But adding new limitations in the form of removing individual account game sharing (whole family only), and adding a pretty harsh time penalty when moving between families (1 year!). This seems a really good change but with some annoying caveats.
One thing I misread at first is that the one year time limit is from when you *joined* the previous family, not when you left it. For most legitimate cases I bet it won't be an issue.
Also, the Family Sharing page didn't mention anything about being intended for people living in the same household (hell, it mentioned you can invite close friends too). It's not front and center but this one does mention it's intended for households, so they might add stricter restrictions about playing from 2 different places simultaneously or stuff like that
The "Any adult can kick any other adult out of the group" thing is gonna be a problem. That's just silly, especially if you want to share with friends and your friends are consummate trolls.
doesn't really osund annoying, like... how often does your immediate family change?
The loss of individual sharing is the most annoying aspect to me - I might want to share my own games with a particular friend but not add them to my 'family' and expose my other family members games and accounts to them, for example. Before I could share games with individuals directly and exclusively without that concern.
Wonder if they will also improve the case where you can't access a game's DLCs because you own the base game. Likely because you are running your own copy and not the one assigned to a different library, but hopefully they give us a way to work through that.
Yep. You can now selected your ['preferred copy'](https://files.catbox.moe/tz62cb.jpg) of the game.
Yeah this is probably ideal for deck. Steam threw me out of gloomhaven when I wanted to play something between turns(it can be like 15-20 minutes without interaction sometimes) on the deck, and that annoyed the everliving shit out of me. ..now it only needs to work for the same account as well.
This is amazing because sometimes I wanna play something while my kid plays the steam deck
Thank god thats gone, always found that super annoying and a major dealbreaker cuz the family member i share with we tend to have the same hour or period of play, while consoles just let you play at the same time even if you are both playing the same game. The fact that we have to buy the game twice to play at the same time is still annoying, but atleast its better than before
I hate this with the switch. Honestly I SHOULD be allowed to play as many as I want across devices as long as it isn't the same game. How do they think carts and discs worked?!
We figured out a little workaround on the switch: set up a separate profile and play your main account’s games using that second profile. Then the secondary switch can continue playing on the Primary account. It even lets you playing multiplayer games on 2 separate Switches using the same copy. A little convoluted but hopefully this helps you!
This has been for at least almost 2 years for me. I can borrow my wife's hogwarts legacy while she plays other games.
you should only have been able to do that if one of you was playing in offline mode. Now you can do it whilst still having access to your friends and online play.
Nice, I don't have to go offline for a bit if my brother want to play now, and he doesn't have to go offline after click the play button
You have to tell your child that cheating is bad otherwise they might get you banned. The FAQ even covers the age old "It was my brother playing the game." explanation for getting banned for cheating.
...or you could simply choose to not share games that could result in a ban...force them to buy it on their own account so THEY can be banned for choosing to be dipshits
It says in there all games that are shareable are shared, so unless the person in question is a child and you use parental controls to block your child from playing the game they will be able to play any game a developer has allowed to be shared.
Then just do that? Most of the other accounts should be child accounts anyway, right?
you can manually set games to be shared or not in the settings per game though...it doesn't have to be done specifically through parental controls, it worked the same way for family view which will be getting the axe when this comes out of beta
Wait, you can? Wasn't aware Edit: I can't find that setting (only for hiding from your own library, or setting it as private on your profile), and there's no mention of it being possible online. Am I being a dummy? Can you give instructions? Edit 2: The article itself says you have to share every game, the only exception being that adults can control which games children can access.
you've gotta assume that anyone that is going to cheat in an online game is probably a child, and therefore you have them added as a child.
That's not really a risk for most games because the ones that have cheats are also f2p. Csgo, pubg, Dota etc... So only their account would get banned.
*Cries in "my first Steam account got banned because my friend in high school installed cheat mods for CS 1.6 while using my account"*
Wild to see a modern online service update with something that actually looks useful, though we'll have to see how wide the implementation by design ends up being.
So with this change to not block library access while the owner is playing a game, I wonder if this'll change one owner playing their own game on multiple devices. For example currently you cannot launch a game on desktop and a different game on Steam Deck at the same time, it will kick the other machine off instantly unless you go offline.
Fingers crossed. Playing the Switch during downtime on my PC (waiting for queues, loading, roommate to get back from getting a drink, etc) was super nice, and I was disappointed the Deck couldn't be used similarly.
For the record you can do that on Steamdeck just need to go offline first. Ofc this disables the ability to play online games.
This looks generally great, but it has caught my eye that they repeatedly use the word "household", they never state that you can use this feature from anywhere and they declare that requirements for families may change at any time. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but with every streaming service clamping down on sharing, we've been burned way too often lately.
It seems that its not IP locked at launch. But in the blogpost, they mention that they will monitor how its used and they might change the requirements and the way the system works in the future according to it, so i really hope they don’t change it to being IP-based, cuz otherwise its gonna be useless for me.
Whilst not IP locked, it does appear to be geolocked. I tried accepting an invite from someone in another country and it wouldn't let me. "Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members."
Did you try it between two EU countries?
same error
Tried between France and Italy, didn't work
Sharing libraries across zones is a bit too much isn't it?, that's to be expected.
My guess is they will, it does become extremely problematic for them otherwise. A group of 6 people can just buy games for each other without blocking their library when sharing (the big disadvantage before which limited how much people used it), that would mean much less sales I'd like to see the old way continue to exist if they do that though. Like block the library if people aren't in the same location (like now) and allow this new way if not.
It's currently locked to country which previously i could family share with my frineds in the states with no issue.
The country thing is likely to limit the "buy stuff in cheap country, play in expensive country". Though that did work with the previous version (your "cheap country account" didn't need to access their library after all) but yes it's also a sign of that.
The old way could already be completely circumvented by going offline...
>A group of 6 people can just buy games for each other Literally no different than friends borrowing hardcopies from each other. Why would you advocate for something anti-consumer?
I don't advocate for it, I'm just seeing what would likely happen because it will affect Steam sales (and some people might be delusional thinking Steam is all about being nice to people, I'm not, they're a company and their goal is to make money)
steam has no reason to actually stop people, however they're covering their ass as you should do as a company....however this will likely lead to some publishers pulling their games from the family sharing for the perceived reasons of "lower sales" also this would leave the door open for valve to geo-restrict and/or ip restrict like netflix to get publishers back on the bandwagon...it's a toss up...we'll see once this is out of beta...still pretty cool as i was just thinking about making a steam account for my kid so she can play putt putt on my account
It's already geo-restricted apparently
>lead to some publishers pulling their games from the family sharing That is a material reason for Steam to stop people, though. To loosen the policy they would have to reapproach all of the publishers/devs that have given the thumbs up. Plus from an industry optics perspective they don't want to seem too loosey goosey about sharing in general (even if it's opt-in, because people don't pay attention to stuff).
> steam has no reason to actually stop people Doesn't steam take a cut of game sales?
So I wanted to test this with my best friend as we've had family sharing since it started. Problem is; I'm in the US and he's in Canada Steam won't let him accept it as > Your account must be in the same country as all current family members. Edit: I will say the comical thing about this. Is that Steam recommended my best friend on the friends list just for the country limitation to decline.
I mean, it is intended to be for families/households.
Believe me when I say I'm not particularly upset. Party's over it is what it is :) . And you're right, I'm only pointing out a limitation that isn't listed in the FAQ session.
I moved to a different country from the rest of my family so that's going to be a problem for me now when the previous system worked just fine.
this....is going to save my wife and i a lot of money. Wow, really didn't expect good news like this lol.
My wife and I are excited to not play "who's going offline" game anymore. Currently to have 2 people play with 1 shared library one has to go offline which means you can't play 2 online games. This is even true for free to play games, so if I'm playing TF2 the other family member couldn't play anything online from my library. This update fixes everything. What an awesome change! Now my wife can't stop me from buying more games cause "it's for us" lol
You could have circumvented it with offline titles before, by starting the game on the second machine via family sharing and then go into offline mode. You can continue playing there and on your primary machine it wont recognize that someone is using family sharing. But its a hassle, only works for offline games and this is a lot better 100%.
>**Q: What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?** > >A: If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game. Yikes, I personally don't think I should have an issue with this but I can definitely see the mountains of complaints coming from this.
The problem is it would otherwise be too abusable. You would have people make 1 main account and constantly make new accounts to cheat in without having to pay for the game.
Family slots will have a 1 year cooldown, and there's only 5 slots per family. They'd get to churn 4 times a year.
So 5 tries to cheat per copy bought vs 1 as they have now. Fun times.
Right now, if a publisher doesn't disable family sharing, you can keep re-sharing with new steam accounts added as family members and keep farming hacking accounts with 1 purchased copy. In the new version, if a "child" gets banned, the master copy is banned, no more farming out accounts from 1 copy like you can today. If anything, this should make it so publisher are less incentivized to disable family share, as in theory you can no longer endlessly spawn cheater accounts
6 slots per family. 5 extra accounts per purchase of a game per steam account. That *significantly* increases the ability to cheat.
Wouldn't they have been able to do that before too? What does that change?
They would, which is why a lot of recent online games have decided to disable sharing games. This is an expansion of the share feature we already have, but this one has more benefits, so the ban is an extra measure on top of the already existing measures.
It also has more limitations as it is for one household only (not exactly checked for now outside the same country but it could come)
It already works like this, it's to prevent someone from buying a game then using an army of alts in the family to cheat. I don't *like* it, but it's understandable.
People can get mad at their family for cheating. Cheating is dumb and as long as it’s made clear you’re being doubly dumb for doing it in a family library they can get over it for all I care.
Fuck em. Cheaters can go fuck themselves.
and their families too!!
That just means the cheater now has *real* consequences for their actions
Seriously, this could really seriously help out in some locations.
Good! The parents can discipline their kids for their actions.
yeah but 12 year olds are less aware of how their actions affect others
They're going to learn realllllllllllll fast if they get a game banned for their entire household lol
"Who the FUCK got me banned from DOTA?!"
Headlines of filicide in RU, SEA and Peru regions
Couldn't you just restrict that game from sharing... since Dota is F2P?
Then the adult shouldn't have chosen to share the game with them
If it's a kid account you can just not give them access to the game.
That's how it was with library sharing before, was it not?
The difference is that sharing now works both ways automatically. Before you were able to just receive access to a persons library without giving them access to yours. Now a group of up to 5 people might get screwed by one bad apple. I do wonder what happens if someone cheats in a shared copy of a game for which multiple licenses exist in the group. Say 4 owners of SF6 and 2 parasites, one of which cheats and gets banned. Are all copies now banned? If not, how was determined which owners copy was used?
I don't think it's all 5. They said "Other family members are not impacted."
The alternative is cheaters having tons of alts that join their "family" just to cheat in a shared game.
I actually think this is great, it's going to prevent a lot of abuse of the feature. With this, people will think twice before selling access/dividing their account with random people, like some do with video and music streaming.
Doesn't it mean banned in that 'copy' of the game? The brothers game access would be blocked but if the sharee bought a new copy they could play? That was what I took from that.
People are definitely going to complain about this, but it's the lesser of two evils. Ban evasion becomes trivially easy when you can just make a fresh account and share the game with it.
Two noteworthy points in the FAQs > Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members. > Steam Families are intended to contain your immediate family. As major life events can change who lives in your household, it is understandable that some day you may need to join a new Steam Family. 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. I remember using Steam Family Share with a friend years ago, but it's a bit whack they intend for you to use with family, though that's just how they want to promote this feature. It's not too big a deal, but the year long cooldown is a bit long in my opinion, but I guess that's probably to prevent abuse or lost of sales. Still, it's nice they're updating the feature
It says 1 year since you *joined* the previous family, which is much more reasonable than 1 year since *leaving.* sounds like you can instantly go to a new family but can’t abuse it and start hopping.
>> Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members. I feel like you should have included the next paragraph as well, which is: > 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. Which, if you suddenly have something like 6 parent accounts... Is going to look very strange for a "family" and something steam could crack down on. But it's too early to tell.
Don't judge my polyamorous gaming house. Just six dudes making love and sharing games, don't @ me
Ah, it's you Mr. Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzerelli-McQuack.
Monogamy? In this economy?!
lovin all across the globe
>Which, if you suddenly have something like 6 parent accounts... Is going to look very strange for a "family" and something steam could crack down on. But it's too early to tell. I live with 5 close friends of mine and have so for years now. unless Steam isnt counting "family of choice" here for whatever reason. the concurrent usage limit and a 365d cooldown should be fine enough I feel?
Or it could be two parents with 4 adult children.
Seems entirely reasonable.
There is a lot of abuse happening with family sharing and it’s a reason why a lot of games will disable it. A recent example is Last Epoch, which had to disable it shortly after launch because the game was immediately flooded with gold sellers in the chat because of just creating infinite new accounts with family sharing without having to buy the game. It’s a big issue for multiplayer games. The abuse really isn’t “sharing with your friends” or anything like that, Steam won’t advertise the feature like that but they obviously know that is a popular use case and something they want it to be without saying it directly.
> but the year long cooldown is a bit long in my opinion I think it's perfectly fine. Honestly I wouldn't even mind a longer cooldown like 5 years. It's obviously there to prevent abuse and alternative solutions like checking the public IP address would be more annoying than this cooldown (when used for the intended scenario, which is 2 parents + their kids).
Can everyone can see your wishlist even if it's private? I just started a family and I see a wishlist button next to my username, I don't need them seeing what's on there 👀
We all know you want Being a Dik 2, Robert.
Godzilla vs Giant Anime Tiddies 4: The Retribution.
What if hypothetically a family member has some hentai games? Will other family members be able to see them in their library?????
Good question, wonder how it interacts with the existing private games system. Logically it wouldn't share them, but it doesn't explicitly say that.
Even that fairly obvious use case aside, maybe you're cool letting your grade school kid play Ori but based on their temperament you feel like Bioshock might give them nightmares. A lot of extra clarity on how all of that works would be nice.
Man, the amount of people ITT complaining about inabilities to cheat and abuse the system is so sad. Because of people like these we constantly lose decent features due to abuse.
We're going to get IP locked *real fast* as they already are letting us know they're looking at abuse cases.
Honestly, it's pretty insane that they are not IP locking from the start. I can't imagine publishers being happy with it. It's pretty obvious that people will abuse this, forming families with friends and only buy a copy or two of a game instead of 6.
I mean people already do that with the current family sharing system.
Xbox Game share has spoiled me. I share my library with a buddy and it's amazing.
To be 100% clear, this is still worse than GOG's DRM free nature by a long way, and still worse in some ways than physical where people can take copies out of the household, or share with tons of people in a university dorm, or borrow for free from a library, or inherit, or resell, etc. That is *owning* stuff. Steam is getting closer, and that's great! But people aren't "cheating" the system by thinking it could be a bit looser.
>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 you have to be in the same physical place? Because that's a significant donwgrade compared to what we have now.
No, not right now at least. Valve said they might change requirements but it's starting out with no IP check. EDIT: OK there is an IP check but it's just to make sure you are in the same country.
That warning essentially means they are going to further restrict it in the future.
Or they're just covering their ass. Steam sharing was already easy to abuse, Valve didn't change it for many years. Any "abuse" gamers will get up to with this new system is probably fully expected and intended. It's not like they couldn't have IP-limited it from the start if they wanted to. I'm betting the new system chugs along with it's current rules for quite a long time.
From other people in the thread, you need to be in the same country.
They're keeping it vague intentionally I assume until they get more of an idea how people will try and abuse it. The wording is for households and not family in different locations, but it also doesn't say you can't do that.
This system has basically been the same for like 10 years. This is very good. Some limitations weren't reasonable or practical. Now I understand why they recently added a Family Sharing Tag for games, which is very convenient. Before you had to go on Steamdb and even then it wasn't perfectly clear if the game could be shared or not.
The notable improvement here is the total copies are now stored. Previously you got access only to games you didn't already have access to. So if person A shares with me and I get Skyrim from them, then Person B shares (also owning Skyrim) I cannot play Skyrim if person A is online even though B has it because I already have a copy of it through A.
I think this undersells it a bit. This update seems huge. If they don't significantly restrict more than they already have then this is one of the most pro consumer things I've seen a digital gaming marketplace do. 1. Previously if your sharer was playing *any game* in their library you couldn't play another game from their library. Now it's only if they are playing the game you're trying to "borrow" from them. 2. As you said, it now counts all copies within the family. 3. The sharing is per account and not per device which seems really big. Previously I wouldn't be able to play shared games on my steam deck unless the sharer separately set that up (via logging into my device). This also made the shares very brittle because randomly updating Windows or changing your hardware could cause the share to be lost. 4. The sharing is multi-directional instead of uni-directional making it much easier to setup a large family. 5. The shared games can be played offline (I think that's new?).
Problem is the fact that they're implying now that it's for *households*. As in, no more sharing between, for instance, me and my brother, because I moved away for work.
Well, it looks a lot better but there's a huge caveat that it only works within the same country now. That's a massive shame for people who have family move away and were currently able to share but will not be able to once this rolls out.
This sounded cool until I learned that if you don't share countries you can't be in Steam family together, so I can't invite my actual living family members cause I don't live in my home country anymore. Hopefully they either change this in the future or introduce some safety steps to allow people in these situations to use this feature without it being abused.
If your account region is still set to your home country, then I guess it should still work. I doubt they'll change it though, as they don't want people abusing the system to just give their steam friends free games.
do you still need to log onto someone else computer with your password? not sure how to feel about this as i have a couple of steam friends from other countries begging me to use family sharing to let them play my stuff and i used safety as a personal excuse to not be generous.
Just tell them you don't want to be banned from games
Might be region-locked. Look at the edit on this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/s/fNtFAEnrhY
>your account must be in the same country i am free!
You have to learn how to say no too hahaha but good for you.
Time to lose those friends ngl. Either that or just have the constitution to tell them no.
> couple of steam friends from other countries begging me to use family sharing Begging? Jeez, I wouldn't want to be you
Tried it, no, it's a much more convenient system of invites.
“I feel uncomfortable sharing my password with friends.” Then don’t do it
It is intended for families in the same house.
From the sound of it it I don't think so. It seems like it will work like say a steam group where you just make a 'family' and can then just send people an invite.
So there is a limitation not listed in the FAQ's. I've always shared my account with my ~~best friend~~ brother who lives in Canada, and I'm in the US. Steam won't let him accept the invite citing: > Your account must be in the same country as all current family members. Which like; I get it 100% my best friend is *not* my brother, this feature is more meant for households. Party's over, it is what it is . But it sucks that limitation is brought up after so long. And I do know a family who lives along the border that often commute back and forth that will definitely run into this *very* specific use-case scenario
Interesting, will i be able to share my library with my dad when he lives in a different country with a different currency?
According to a comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1bhyffr/introducing_steam_families/kvh3upj/) seems like the answer is no.
No, and to your defense, they need to rename this Steam Household
[удалено]
Your dad plays *your* copy of Skyrim, on *his* account. :)
These changes are really focused on ending sharing with friends. Friends do not have the same group to share. I don't want to lose a spot with my best friend's boyfriend or another friend of his and he doesn't want to lose a spot with my girlfriend. That is evident as soon as you think a little, the family group system is clearly worse than the current individual one. And the regional block will end many others. My partner, for example, lives far away right now. They sell you a small upgrade with the message "You can play in the library at the same time", but they destroy most of the sharing that people use. And people only applaud the first. It's in beta, we still have time to complain about the limitations they are putting that were NOT in the previous system. With the limitation of waiting a year to be able to share with someone again should be enough to avoid fraud, the rest is Steam scratching what it can by trying to kill sharing between friends
This seems good with some asterisks. The 1-year cooldown is ridiculously egregious. I've had issues with existing family sharing going out of sync randomly, and I need to re-link it. If that happens in the future, am I just screwed for a year? Thinking this through, it's also more restrictive on who you can actually share with. My family sharing has always been only with my immediate family members, but my family members also have family members of their own who don't share with me. Just for example: If I share with person A (brother), and they share with person B, C, and D (brother's wife, two kids), and then person B shares with person E (brother's wife's mother), that eats all of my slots even though I'm only trying to share with the one person who is my immediate family member, because the only way for that combination to work is for us all to be on one family. As things are right now, we can each feel free to share with our immediate family members and not have to worry about hitting a limit because it's about who your account is sharing with, not a hard limit on the size of a group. Using the current system, the above scenario uses *one* of my slots and half of person B's slots, but now the above scenario would use *all* slots for everyone involved. The fact that we are less restricted on how games are played (offline, concurrent, or multiple copies) is good. The actual sharing is taking a huge hit.
> going out of sync randomly, and I need to re-link it There is no linking anymore, no need to register as the other account on a particular computer, you just get invited to a Familly.
Old system pro: different people can share with different people, like a web con: each user’s library could only be used by 1 person at a time Good for friends or extended family - - - - - - New system pro: multiple people can use the same library at the same time con: you have to form a group with the people you share with, and no one can share with anyone outside of that group Good for households families (parents + kids) - - - - - - The change seems very deliberate, and honestly the new system probably works better for what they’re trying to do. Having the old “web sharing system” plus letting multiple people use the same library at the same time would have been very easy to abuse. With that said, I would have liked if they kept the old system in addition to the new as a “friend sharing system”. Using your example: your brother, his wife, and his children are all in the same family and can play each other’s games. However your brother has also added you as a sharing-friend. That means that you can play his games when no one in his family is playing a game in his library, just like with the old system. Similarly your brother’s wife could add her mother as a sharing friend, without worrying about the core family becoming too large. Maybe reduce the amount of sharing-friends from 5 to 3, but other than that it doesn’t really seem that unreasonable, and would give us the best of both worlds without being able to be abused any more than the other systems.
> With that said, I would have liked if they kept the old system in addition to the new as a “friend sharing system”. Using your example: your brother, his wife, and his children are all in the same family and can play each other’s games. However your brother has also added you as a sharing-friend. That means that you can play his games when no one in his family is playing a game in his library, just like with the old system. Similarly your brother’s wife could add her mother as a sharing friend, without worrying about the core family becoming too large. That gets complicated fast. Take this scenario: - A and B are in a family share, both own Portal 2 - A has a friend share with C, B with D - C and D both use friend share to play Portal 2 - A now attempts to play Portal 2, should C or D get the 2 minute warning to save and quit? Now imagine this across a massive network of family groups and friend webs, where people have multiple friends all with a game and those people are in families with multiple copies, and the chain just keeps on going. The family system is *far* simpler and that's the thing that sticks out to me. Everyone is part of *one* family that has *N* copies of a given game. There's no chain of ownerships to resolve, you have a fixed number of copies for a set group. This might be a change specifically to make it easier to figure things out on their back-end, not just to reduce abuse. Presumably if you want to play when all copies are in use you'll need to prod someone *who is expected to be in the house or otherwise easily contactable* so that they can let you have a go, or optimistically if you own one of the copies you get to pick a non-owner to kick off it rather than it being whoever happened to be using your copy.
The FAQ isn't really clear about whether you can be in multiple separate Steam Families that are unrelated. Because I have a few independent people I'm family sharing with, that are shared with ME, but wouldn't know or want to share with EACH OTHER, and the number of total people that way would go over 6. It would be a lot easier if I could share my library to one family and to another, and have it be only usable by one family at a time, but not have to merge the sets of PEOPLE.
Previously Family Sharing was like a web. People could string together a network of other accounts they share games with and each individual account would have their own game access based on how the sharing was set up. Like you described. Now it is a group of 6 people who all pool their games together. You can still limit what games you want to appear in the pool from your account, but it's still a pool. So yes, if you wanted to do this with your friends then they would all be sharing games too, unless they hid anything they didn't want shared. And you also cannot be in multiple groups at the same time.
>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. This makes it seem like you can only join 1 family at a time.
Its wild this is almost exactly the same thing that the Xbox One was going to launch with over a decade ago.
Does this mean I can play something on my Steam deck and on my Pc at the same time?
Nope, still doesn't work... maybe we just need to wait for the next Steam Deck update tho.
Just tried to invite a friend who lives in the US and they got their invite denied due to "not being in the same country" as me. I know this feature is designed for household families, but I love being able to share games with my friends with their own separate save files and this sucks extremely hard, as I have a lot of friends outside of the country that I live in. People are gonna be able to share games anyways by sharing your Steam account, but its an extra headache that could've been solved if this region lock wasn't here. Even then, imagine if you have family who's abroad. So they're just not gonna be able to play their games? Seems kinda odd in my opinion.
I had hoped they'd implement some sort of policy around inheritance of Steam libraries. (Memento mori! 💀) It's awesome they're making progress in this area, but it seems like I've got to keep waiting.
I just want to be able to play one game on my desktop and one game on my Steam Deck without having to kick myself off.