Valve has announced its revised game-sharing system called Steam Families. Now, besides the sharing feature, you can buy games for other family members and control which games children can access.
After more than 10 years of service, Steam Family Sharing receives a much-needed update. Dubbed Steam Families, this improved version adds a couple of handy features; namely, Parental Controls and Child Purchase Requests. The former allows you to restrict access to some games on children’s accounts from the comfort of your machine, while the latter simplifies buying games for other family members as they can directly request them from their account.
Though these will be welcomed by parents, the one that most users will appreciate is the revised game-sharing system. Previously, only one person could play shared games at a time. For example, if an account launches a game, all remaining shared games get locked until you finish playing. Needless to say, this becomes greatly inconvenient for families with three or more PCs.
The new Families system is much more flexible, allowing up to six members to share games at the same time, as long as enough copies are owned. For example, if three accounts own Half-Life, three users can play the game at the same time – including those who don’t own it. This means you no longer need to wait for others to finish playing if you want to launch a different game. To put it simply, all family members combine their purchased games in a shared library, from which everyone can play.
In case you wonder, each member keeps their own separate saves, achievements, and Steam Workshop files/mods. In effect, it’s like owning the game. If all of this sounds enticing, Steam Families is already available to all users, so give it a shot. Just note that leaving a family comes with a 12-month waiting period, so think twice before joining or leaving.
Now with the nice things out of the way, there is one last potentially problematic point to keep in mind. If one of the family accounts is banned for some reason, the account that owns the game will also be banned. This is understandable as some could use game sharing to cheat using secondary accounts. If you want to learn more about each feature, check out Steam’s Q&A here.
For my part, I had the original Steam game sharing enabled, but I rarely used it since even with two accounts it became very annoying. There is nothing worse than being in the middle of a nice story and getting a notification prompting you to close the game in the next five minutes or you will be forced out. This revised system seems quite attractive; I may give it a shot.
