Trying to keep it brief: It's an awesome enhancement to the game sharing. The old library sharing was annoying, as it basically meant if I was playing a multiplayer game on the deck, nobody could...
Trying to keep it brief: It's an awesome enhancement to the game sharing.
The old library sharing was annoying, as it basically meant if I was playing a multiplayer game on the deck, nobody could access the several hundred single player titles. This is no longer a problem, and it basically means we only need 1 copy of a game unless playing multiplayer with each other.
There is that level of trust wrt cheating being a mark across families and hopefully network effects of this will reduce cheaters.
The UI, especially on mobile and the Deck, is kinda terrible, but thats par for the course for Valve.
Adding an adult to family means full access to the libraries, no secret games (edit: have not tried the 'private' flag mentioned elsewhere) (frankly this is good; there should be no shame about game titles in a healthy relationship regardless of content). However, the management of kid accounts is great. I can block kiddo from store and community stuff entirely (including friends and chat), set playtime limits, hide based on high-level category, or whitelist/blacklist titles as appropriate.
There definitely needs to be refinement, but its this kind of value-add that makes me roll my eyes whenever people claim Valve has a monopoly... not one other store has made anything remotely close to this on any platform. Complete tangent continuing the monopoly stupidity: also several of the most popular PC titles aren't even available on Steam. Let me know when Minecraft and Fortnite become available through Steam.
There's two things in balance: Valve is a quasi-monopoly in PC gaming and Valve is not a publicly traded company. They are run by people who understand long-term customer satisfaction trumping...
There's two things in balance: Valve is a quasi-monopoly in PC gaming and Valve is not a publicly traded company. They are run by people who understand long-term customer satisfaction trumping short-term money-squeezing. I believe their shameless exploitation of loot box mechanics and charging for virtual item scarcity is despicable. But with regards to service, they actually are more generous than they have to be, which none of their competitors are (aside from "free" and "$1" bait-offers).
as a gamer: yes, they are mostly great as of now. Unless you're into some more niche kinds of games and drama in the background halts a release (Chaos;Head NoAH comes to mind as a recent-ish...
But with regards to service, they actually are more generous than they have to be, which none of their competitors are (aside from "free" and "$1" bait-offers).
as a gamer: yes, they are mostly great as of now. Unless you're into some more niche kinds of games and drama in the background halts a release (Chaos;Head NoAH comes to mind as a recent-ish example. Even Huniepop had some threats of retroactive removal some 2 years after release)
As a dev: you get on the wrong side of them with any little submission issue and they can be worse than old school Nintendo in terms of support.
Absolutely not defending this. I’m just talking about things like, well, steam family sharing and not making you jump through hoops once they know they got your attention.
Absolutely not defending this. I’m just talking about things like, well, steam family sharing and not making you jump through hoops once they know they got your attention.
What’s the UI like on the Deck? My one reservation with sharing with my husband/friends is that my huge library will just completely flood theirs and they won’t be able to keep the family stuff...
What’s the UI like on the Deck?
My one reservation with sharing with my husband/friends is that my huge library will just completely flood theirs and they won’t be able to keep the family stuff separate.
On desktop it looks like it’s just added to a collapsible category. Is it different for the Deck?
Unless it's changed my experience on the deck was a flood. If you use catagories to filter it's easier but still feels like wading through a lot when we've got three libraries of good stuff and...
Unless it's changed my experience on the deck was a flood. If you use catagories to filter it's easier but still feels like wading through a lot when we've got three libraries of good stuff and the chaff you pick up over years of bundles.
first, to nitpick, Microsoft and Sony has a form of this on their consoles. For Playstation, you can essentially register your account on 5 devices, and those devices can access your library. I...
this kind of value-add that makes me roll my eyes whenever people claim Valve has a monopoly... not one other store has made anything remotely close to this on any platform.
first, to nitpick, Microsoft and Sony has a form of this on their consoles. For Playstation, you can essentially register your account on 5 devices, and those devices can access your library. I have my account on my parents' PS5 across the country and they can download the Astro Bot game I bought yesterday.
in addition: places like GOG don't need this because DRM free software is as easy to share as any other file you download. That's the ideal "family share"
secondly, it should be noted that a Monopoly by itself isn't illegal. I think it's highly problematic, but you can have "good monopolies" and not be sued. It's just not a label any company wants to risk having painted on their back.
I did some testing. I think that a "child" account and an "adult" account have the same access to games if parental controls are turned off on the child account. When I marked a game as private, I...
I did some testing. I think that a "child" account and an "adult" account have the same access to games if parental controls are turned off on the child account. When I marked a game as private, I could not see it in a linked adult account either.
The child vs. adult flag seems to do two things:
children cannot manage the family group, whereas adults can
a child account has the option of enabling parental controls
One thing I haven't tried is if a child account can mark something as private and have it not shared back with the parent account. Most of the games that my kids have on their accounts are either multiplayer so we play together, or copies of games that I had so that we could play at the same time before this feature was released.
I seem to remember that the last time I heard about this there was no way to hide items from the rest of the family. Anyone able to confirm if this can still happen?
I seem to remember that the last time I heard about this there was no way to hide items from the rest of the family. Anyone able to confirm if this can still happen?
I've been opted in for a while. I just tested this. I used my own account, and my son's account. I don't have any parental restriction's on my son's account (all his restrictions are manual, ie. I...
I've been opted in for a while. I just tested this. I used my own account, and my son's account. I don't have any parental restriction's on my son's account (all his restrictions are manual, ie. I use the hands-on approach of knowing what he's doing).
Method 1: I selected a game which was not installed on my son's computer. I checked to see if it was available to install on the computer and it was. I went to my own account and marked it as private. It no longer appeared as an option to install.
Method 2: I installed a game on my son's computer using sharing. I marked it as private from my steam account. I went back to my son's account and I could no longer play the game. It was still installed, but instead of "play" the only option was "purchase".
His account is set as a child, but parental controls for the user have been disabled. In my experience so far, this is almost exactly the same as an adult account, except the child account cannot...
His account is set as a child, but parental controls for the user have been disabled. In my experience so far, this is almost exactly the same as an adult account, except the child account cannot manage the family group. It doesn't change access to games or anything.
I'll throw up a top-post review soon, but to answer this directly: I family share with my wife and a kid account. On the kid account, I can selectively hide games. Can also just rely on the broad...
I'll throw up a top-post review soon, but to answer this directly:
I family share with my wife and a kid account. On the kid account, I can selectively hide games. Can also just rely on the broad checkboxes, or go full whitelist-only. Have not tried hiding games from other adult accounts.
Some old patch notes seem to confirm that games marked private won’t show up for others, but the release FAQ says nothing of this feature and even implies the opposite: So, inconclusive at...
Some old patch notes seem to confirm that games marked private won’t show up for others, but the release FAQ says nothing of this feature and even implies the opposite:
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.
So, inconclusive at present?
We’ll probably have to wait until someone confirms it directly. I’m setting up my Steam Family this weekend, so I can try it out if we don’t have an answer by then.
Haha, this just smacked me in the face with the reality that my own parents apparently did very little to monitor my computer use when I was younger. I definitely played Leisure Suit Larry in...
Haha, this just smacked me in the face with the reality that my own parents apparently did very little to monitor my computer use when I was younger. I definitely played Leisure Suit Larry in middle school on the family PC, and invited friends over to see the naughtier parts. 😂
One of the demo discs I got back in the 90s came with a preview of one of the Leisure Suit Larry games. My dad saw me playing it, got mad, told me I couldn’t play it anymore, and considered...
One of the demo discs I got back in the 90s came with a preview of one of the Leisure Suit Larry games.
My dad saw me playing it, got mad, told me I couldn’t play it anymore, and considered grounding me from the computer.
I had no idea why.
I was maybe nine or ten years old? Young enough that the game’s innuendo and suggestive scenes went completely over my head. I thought it was just another adventure game like King’s Quest or Monkey Island.
He didn’t ever explain why it was “wrong” to play — only that I shouldn’t have been doing that.
Fast forward years later: I find the game while browsing some abandonware site, and it’s then immediately clear to me why he had such an issue with it. I finally learned in my 20s why I had gotten in trouble a decade earlier!
My dad uses to show me select scenes from it that were funny then kick me out of the room. I always had this disjointed view of the game until I was able to play it when I was older. It's funny...
My dad uses to show me select scenes from it that were funny then kick me out of the room. I always had this disjointed view of the game until I was able to play it when I was older. It's funny though that it had the same mystery around it until I got older too.
My friend trolled my wife by sending her some inappropriate games. With family sharing, they now appear in my library too. So... evidence of case in point.
My friend trolled my wife by sending her some inappropriate games. With family sharing, they now appear in my library too. So... evidence of case in point.
I heard, though I have no way to confirm it, that if you mark a game as private, it won't show up in family's libraries. Not sure if the ability to mark a game as private is still only in Steam...
I heard, though I have no way to confirm it, that if you mark a game as private, it won't show up in family's libraries. Not sure if the ability to mark a game as private is still only in Steam Beta though.
I joined the Beta for this on March 18. It has been a huge step up in terms of usability for my family. I should note that I do use it as "family sharing" - I have a computer room with three PCs...
I joined the Beta for this on March 18. It has been a huge step up in terms of usability for my family. I should note that I do use it as "family sharing" - I have a computer room with three PCs in it, and I share between the PCs.
The biggest "upgrade" is that you can use libraries at the same time as long as you are not playing the exact same game. This has been amazing for us - my daughter loves to look through the backlog of games I have, pick one, and give it a go, and loves to chat with me while I play whatever I'm playing (it's Slay the Spire, that's what I'm playing most of the time). And since StS doesn't really interest the kids, they have thousands of games to pick from!
Notable maybe for @kfwyre - this hasn't changed my game spending habits much, but it does mean that I'm more likely to add all the keys from a humble bundle to my steam account right away, which gives my daughter a chance to pick through them. I end up with fewer keys available to give away to people, and I'm a bit less discerning about what I add to my library; if it looks like anyone in the family might ever play it, it goes in the library.
I cannot overstate how much a quality of life improvement this has been over the previous system.
I'm curious to hear if anyone here has tried it. I have held off because I have a massive shared library with my family, and we have managed up until now with a single account owning all the...
I plan to watch the video a little later today, but to kick off the discussion I'm curious to hear if anyone here has tried it.
I have held off because I have a massive shared library with my family, and we have managed up until now with a single account owning all the games. This has gotten harder as the kids have grown up, with saves sometimes coming into conflict across devices. It's still better than the library sharing that existed previously though, as I understand that the old system locked your entire library each time someone was sharing a game.
IIRC, The new system sounded a lot more granular, which I like. But I still have the problem of not being able to transfer ownership of my kids' games to them when they eventually get their accounts. I'm wondering if that's a sore spot for anyone that has made the switch. Has Valve made any statements about potential ownership transfer? or even savefile transfer? Is it even a thing other families are going through? Maybe I'm in the minority having a single account to share with my kids.
EDIT: The video was short, so I just watched it anyway. :D
Another question that pops up is how well this system transitions children to adults. Seems like that might be a sticking point.
I personally like this system a lot more since we can have multiple copies of a coop game and any 2 people in the family can use them to play together regardless of who originally bought them. I'm...
I personally like this system a lot more since we can have multiple copies of a coop game and any 2 people in the family can use them to play together regardless of who originally bought them. I'm pretty sure Steams official stance on transfer of ownership is 'never going to happen' though. So if that's something you're worried about then maybe stick to one account.
In thinking about it, I'm probably realistically more concerned with the awkward time when my kids are transitioning to their own accounts and want to retain their save files for any games they...
In thinking about it, I'm probably realistically more concerned with the awkward time when my kids are transitioning to their own accounts and want to retain their save files for any games they aren't yet ready to leave behind. I think in that case it's fine if the original account retains ownership, provided there is some mechanism to transfer saves to my kids' new account. I'm not sure how that would work with cloud saves though. Is it as simple as copying the saves from the steam directory locally and then having the new account upload to the cloud?
Should be just that easy. Games can save their files anywhere they like on your system, but as long as you put them in the right place, Steam Cloud will slurp them right up when the game halts.
Should be just that easy. Games can save their files anywhere they like on your system, but as long as you put them in the right place, Steam Cloud will slurp them right up when the game halts.
I've been dealing with a similar issue with saves. Each game determines where it is saved and what goes to the cloud, so unfortunately you can't copy a single directory to another to transfer all...
I've been dealing with a similar issue with saves. Each game determines where it is saved and what goes to the cloud, so unfortunately you can't copy a single directory to another to transfer all saves and those saves may not be in your Steam folder. PCGamingWiki is a great resource for finding those save folders.
Forcing an upload to the cloud can be tricky. Even if you copy the files, open the game, load the file, and close it out, the saves don't necessarily get uploaded. For instance, in order to get my Divinity Original Sin 2 files uploaded, I had to load in the file and save again before it would upload the actual saves. This is game dependent, Kingdom Come Deliverance uploaded the files on simply opening and closing the game at the main menu. Games need to be opened and cleanly closed to trigger an upload.
Some games have their own servers cloud saves stay on/sync to rather than Steam. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 utilizes its own cloud for storage instead of Steam even without a connected Larian account. Steam will report no data in the cloud for such games and you may need a bit more song and dance to force those saves to the cloud.
These are chiefly concerns forcing an upload though. Copying an old save to the fresh location and playing as normal should work no problem.
BG3 does it so it have have cross saves between different platforms and consoles. The DOS2 saves were hefty, but it took the whole folder after the single save.
BG3 does it so it have have cross saves between different platforms and consoles. The DOS2 saves were hefty, but it took the whole folder after the single save.
My kid's account has seperate cloud saves from mine, at least so long the game is smart enough to use a seperate folder per steam user, which all titles I've tried are. The only missing bit is...
My kid's account has seperate cloud saves from mine, at least so long the game is smart enough to use a seperate folder per steam user, which all titles I've tried are.
The only missing bit is permanent license transfer between accounts. If that comes to pass it'll solve the need for multigenerational steam accounts nicely.
I set up accounts for my kids when they started playing computer games. We've been in a family setup for years at this point. The family sharing beta was great and I'm glad to see it come out of...
I set up accounts for my kids when they started playing computer games. We've been in a family setup for years at this point. The family sharing beta was great and I'm glad to see it come out of beta now. There was one point when a valve employee called out my underage kid having an account, but I explained that I controlled the account closely and managed all purchases myself and they were ok with what I was doing. YMMV
To add onto @Gummy, "never going to happen" includes dying. They've outright stated this, even death will not transfer ownership. Unless Valve miraculously 180s on the topic this is not going to...
To add onto @Gummy, "never going to happen" includes dying. They've outright stated this, even death will not transfer ownership. Unless Valve miraculously 180s on the topic this is not going to happen.
I’ve been excited about this ever since they announced it and have been waiting for it to leave beta before joining. I think it’s a huge improvement over their former family sharing system. I’ve...
I’ve been excited about this ever since they announced it and have been waiting for it to leave beta before joining.
I think it’s a huge improvement over their former family sharing system. I’ve got a four-figure game count in my Steam library, but under the previous rules, I’d be locked out of ALL of them if my husband played ANY of them from my library. It was so restrictive that we never even bothered setting up a share.
Now the value prospect of my library effectively doubles because he can play it too.
We also have two more friends that we regularly game with who we’re going to add. They don’t live in the same household as us, but we’re effectively a “gaming household” in that we’re constantly playing together online and meeting up to play in-person.
Also, this is honestly a great moment for someone like me, who has overbought games and bundles for years. I know there’s no way I’ll ever be able to play all the games in my library, and I’ve long since shifted my view of my library from “games I’ll play someday” to “a broad collection that’s fun to dig through.” Up until now, it’s just been me doing the digging. Now others can join me!
This genuinely might be terrible for my game-buying habit though. It was bad enough when I was getting games for myself, but now I can justify nearly any purchase as “my friends might want to play this!”
I don't think so. I share my library with my wife and a couple friends who are halfway across the country. We've done this since the beta started and haven't faced any issues from it yet.
I don't think so. I share my library with my wife and a couple friends who are halfway across the country. We've done this since the beta started and haven't faced any issues from it yet.
Right now their FAQ (linked from the youtube description) says that it's meant for actual families, but doesn't mention geographical restrictions. The one thing it said is that they would be...
Right now their FAQ (linked from the youtube description) says that it's meant for actual families, but doesn't mention geographical restrictions. The one thing it said is that they would be monitoring traffic to see if there is any abuse of the system.
I'm reading this as "not right now, but we may if we feel it's necessary"
It feels a little weirder for Steam to be restrictive here than Netflix. Like the case against Netflix sharing is basically that streaming services have shifted from a per movie copy billing...
It feels a little weirder for Steam to be restrictive here than Netflix. Like the case against Netflix sharing is basically that streaming services have shifted from a per movie copy billing method to a per user and that can't work if theoretically only one user had to pay one subscription for many people to have all the movies.
But if you had bought all those movies physically, then you could share your movies such that every one of your movies was being watched by a different person simultaneously just by distributing the disks. No reasonable person would agree that only one person/location can use your dvd collection as a whole as you paid for each item individually.
Steam is still in the business of selling you individual copies of games, so it feels more like the dvd collection situation than the netflix situation with regards to different games in my collection being used simultaneously.
It's a lot more convenient than the physical analog, though. The games just show up in your library like you owned them. I'm lowkey abusing steam family since the beta came out, and I've...
It's a lot more convenient than the physical analog, though. The games just show up in your library like you owned them. I'm lowkey abusing steam family since the beta came out, and I've definitely not bought games because of it, because I basically own them already - there's not much difference between owning a game and someone else in the "family" having it.
I imagine this will harm single player games more than multiplayer games. You would still need to buy 4 copies of something like left for dead to play together but only one copy of half life if...
I imagine this will harm single player games more than multiplayer games. You would still need to buy 4 copies of something like left for dead to play together but only one copy of half life if you took turns.
I would be interested to see some data on this once time goes by. Because at first thought, it absolutely does seem like it would cut single player game sales by quite a bit, maybe even 20% if you...
I would be interested to see some data on this once time goes by. Because at first thought, it absolutely does seem like it would cut single player game sales by quite a bit, maybe even 20% if you average out people part of full families vs those not in any family.
However, I had a discussion with partner (in my steam family) the other day about her wanting a game, and I said that she should go for it because I might want to play it later too.
If enough family members view single player games as now being 50% off or more since they can be shared, that may actually increase sales, while the game is still the same price to the dev.
It's worth noting that Steam already had family library sharing, and while this is more open in many ways, it's actually significantly more restrictive in others. You have to be in the same...
It's worth noting that Steam already had family library sharing, and while this is more open in many ways, it's actually significantly more restrictive in others. You have to be in the same location when you join a Steam family, and you can't join a Steam family with someone who's got their Steam store set to a different region (this is annoying for me and my wife, who are from different countries and still pay in our home currencies because the country we currently live in together, Germany, has extremely stupid censorship laws). So while it could impact single-player game sales, it's also cracking down on a lot of the non-household steam "family" sharing that was already impacting them.
I've not had the location restriction for joining families. Was that added recently? The region thing does sound frustrating but makes a lot of sense from the intended purpose.
I've not had the location restriction for joining families. Was that added recently? The region thing does sound frustrating but makes a lot of sense from the intended purpose.
It's only within this new type of Steam families afaik -- though I haven't tried myself, due to my other issue, so maybe it was just a thing in the beta and thus is still mentioned on the forums...
It's only within this new type of Steam families afaik -- though I haven't tried myself, due to my other issue, so maybe it was just a thing in the beta and thus is still mentioned on the forums because of that.
I've been using it for a while and it's great. The only thing that I'm not super happy about is the fact that you can't leave reviews for shared games. It's not a big deal and the experience has...
I've been using it for a while and it's great. The only thing that I'm not super happy about is the fact that you can't leave reviews for shared games. It's not a big deal and the experience has been positive as a whole.
You may not be a part of multiple families, and there's a cooldown on leaving and entering families, so you can't just hop from family to family for games.
You may not be a part of multiple families, and there's a cooldown on leaving and entering families, so you can't just hop from family to family for games.
I liked the way they implemented the cooldown based not on when you leave but instead as waiting one year after you last joined a family. It feels like it more represents how families can change.
I liked the way they implemented the cooldown based not on when you leave but instead as waiting one year after you last joined a family. It feels like it more represents how families can change.
Trying to keep it brief: It's an awesome enhancement to the game sharing.
The old library sharing was annoying, as it basically meant if I was playing a multiplayer game on the deck, nobody could access the several hundred single player titles. This is no longer a problem, and it basically means we only need 1 copy of a game unless playing multiplayer with each other.
There is that level of trust wrt cheating being a mark across families and hopefully network effects of this will reduce cheaters.
The UI, especially on mobile and the Deck, is kinda terrible, but thats par for the course for Valve.
Adding an adult to family means full access to the libraries, no secret games (edit: have not tried the 'private' flag mentioned elsewhere) (frankly this is good; there should be no shame about game titles in a healthy relationship regardless of content). However, the management of kid accounts is great. I can block kiddo from store and community stuff entirely (including friends and chat), set playtime limits, hide based on high-level category, or whitelist/blacklist titles as appropriate.
There definitely needs to be refinement, but its this kind of value-add that makes me roll my eyes whenever people claim Valve has a monopoly... not one other store has made anything remotely close to this on any platform. Complete tangent continuing the monopoly stupidity: also several of the most popular PC titles aren't even available on Steam. Let me know when Minecraft and Fortnite become available through Steam.
There's two things in balance: Valve is a quasi-monopoly in PC gaming and Valve is not a publicly traded company. They are run by people who understand long-term customer satisfaction trumping short-term money-squeezing. I believe their shameless exploitation of loot box mechanics and charging for virtual item scarcity is despicable. But with regards to service, they actually are more generous than they have to be, which none of their competitors are (aside from "free" and "$1" bait-offers).
as a gamer: yes, they are mostly great as of now. Unless you're into some more niche kinds of games and drama in the background halts a release (Chaos;Head NoAH comes to mind as a recent-ish example. Even Huniepop had some threats of retroactive removal some 2 years after release)
As a dev: you get on the wrong side of them with any little submission issue and they can be worse than old school Nintendo in terms of support.
Absolutely not defending this. I’m just talking about things like, well, steam family sharing and not making you jump through hoops once they know they got your attention.
What’s the UI like on the Deck?
My one reservation with sharing with my husband/friends is that my huge library will just completely flood theirs and they won’t be able to keep the family stuff separate.
On desktop it looks like it’s just added to a collapsible category. Is it different for the Deck?
Unless it's changed my experience on the deck was a flood. If you use catagories to filter it's easier but still feels like wading through a lot when we've got three libraries of good stuff and the chaff you pick up over years of bundles.
first, to nitpick, Microsoft and Sony has a form of this on their consoles. For Playstation, you can essentially register your account on 5 devices, and those devices can access your library. I have my account on my parents' PS5 across the country and they can download the Astro Bot game I bought yesterday.
in addition: places like GOG don't need this because DRM free software is as easy to share as any other file you download. That's the ideal "family share"
secondly, it should be noted that a Monopoly by itself isn't illegal. I think it's highly problematic, but you can have "good monopolies" and not be sued. It's just not a label any company wants to risk having painted on their back.
I did some testing. I think that a "child" account and an "adult" account have the same access to games if parental controls are turned off on the child account. When I marked a game as private, I could not see it in a linked adult account either.
The child vs. adult flag seems to do two things:
children cannot manage the family group, whereas adults can
a child account has the option of enabling parental controls
One thing I haven't tried is if a child account can mark something as private and have it not shared back with the parent account. Most of the games that my kids have on their accounts are either multiplayer so we play together, or copies of games that I had so that we could play at the same time before this feature was released.
I seem to remember that the last time I heard about this there was no way to hide items from the rest of the family. Anyone able to confirm if this can still happen?
I've been opted in for a while. I just tested this. I used my own account, and my son's account. I don't have any parental restriction's on my son's account (all his restrictions are manual, ie. I use the hands-on approach of knowing what he's doing).
Method 1: I selected a game which was not installed on my son's computer. I checked to see if it was available to install on the computer and it was. I went to my own account and marked it as private. It no longer appeared as an option to install.
Method 2: I installed a game on my son's computer using sharing. I marked it as private from my steam account. I went back to my son's account and I could no longer play the game. It was still installed, but instead of "play" the only option was "purchase".
cc: @kfwyre @vord
No parental restrictions, but is your son's account in the family group as an adult or child?
His account is set as a child, but parental controls for the user have been disabled. In my experience so far, this is almost exactly the same as an adult account, except the child account cannot manage the family group. It doesn't change access to games or anything.
I'll throw up a top-post review soon, but to answer this directly:
I family share with my wife and a kid account. On the kid account, I can selectively hide games. Can also just rely on the broad checkboxes, or go full whitelist-only. Have not tried hiding games from other adult accounts.
Some old patch notes seem to confirm that games marked private won’t show up for others, but the release FAQ says nothing of this feature and even implies the opposite:
So, inconclusive at present?
We’ll probably have to wait until someone confirms it directly. I’m setting up my Steam Family this weekend, so I can try it out if we don’t have an answer by then.
Gotta keep the Leisure Suite Larry collection to yourself.
Lewd games? Nah, they’re fine.
But one should ever know how many Ubisoft games I own.
(so shameful)
Ha, well I think those games have slightly more social cachet than the stuff I'm trying to hide. 😅
Haha, this just smacked me in the face with the reality that my own parents apparently did very little to monitor my computer use when I was younger. I definitely played Leisure Suit Larry in middle school on the family PC, and invited friends over to see the naughtier parts. 😂
One of the demo discs I got back in the 90s came with a preview of one of the Leisure Suit Larry games.
My dad saw me playing it, got mad, told me I couldn’t play it anymore, and considered grounding me from the computer.
I had no idea why.
I was maybe nine or ten years old? Young enough that the game’s innuendo and suggestive scenes went completely over my head. I thought it was just another adventure game like King’s Quest or Monkey Island.
He didn’t ever explain why it was “wrong” to play — only that I shouldn’t have been doing that.
Fast forward years later: I find the game while browsing some abandonware site, and it’s then immediately clear to me why he had such an issue with it. I finally learned in my 20s why I had gotten in trouble a decade earlier!
My dad uses to show me select scenes from it that were funny then kick me out of the room. I always had this disjointed view of the game until I was able to play it when I was older. It's funny though that it had the same mystery around it until I got older too.
My friend trolled my wife by sending her some inappropriate games. With family sharing, they now appear in my library too. So... evidence of case in point.
I heard, though I have no way to confirm it, that if you mark a game as private, it won't show up in family's libraries. Not sure if the ability to mark a game as private is still only in Steam Beta though.
Sort of related to this... I wonder if Family View is going to be phased out as part of the Steam Families rollout.
I joined the Beta for this on March 18. It has been a huge step up in terms of usability for my family. I should note that I do use it as "family sharing" - I have a computer room with three PCs in it, and I share between the PCs.
The biggest "upgrade" is that you can use libraries at the same time as long as you are not playing the exact same game. This has been amazing for us - my daughter loves to look through the backlog of games I have, pick one, and give it a go, and loves to chat with me while I play whatever I'm playing (it's Slay the Spire, that's what I'm playing most of the time). And since StS doesn't really interest the kids, they have thousands of games to pick from!
Notable maybe for @kfwyre - this hasn't changed my game spending habits much, but it does mean that I'm more likely to add all the keys from a humble bundle to my steam account right away, which gives my daughter a chance to pick through them. I end up with fewer keys available to give away to people, and I'm a bit less discerning about what I add to my library; if it looks like anyone in the family might ever play it, it goes in the library.
I cannot overstate how much a quality of life improvement this has been over the previous system.
I plan to watch the video a little later today, but to kick off the discussionI'm curious to hear if anyone here has tried it.I have held off because I have a massive shared library with my family, and we have managed up until now with a single account owning all the games. This has gotten harder as the kids have grown up, with saves sometimes coming into conflict across devices. It's still better than the library sharing that existed previously though, as I understand that the old system locked your entire library each time someone was sharing a game.
IIRC, The new system sounded a lot more granular, which I like. But I still have the problem of not being able to transfer ownership of my kids' games to them when they eventually get their accounts. I'm wondering if that's a sore spot for anyone that has made the switch. Has Valve made any statements about potential ownership transfer? or even savefile transfer? Is it even a thing other families are going through? Maybe I'm in the minority having a single account to share with my kids.
EDIT: The video was short, so I just watched it anyway. :D
Another question that pops up is how well this system transitions children to adults. Seems like that might be a sticking point.
I personally like this system a lot more since we can have multiple copies of a coop game and any 2 people in the family can use them to play together regardless of who originally bought them. I'm pretty sure Steams official stance on transfer of ownership is 'never going to happen' though. So if that's something you're worried about then maybe stick to one account.
In thinking about it, I'm probably realistically more concerned with the awkward time when my kids are transitioning to their own accounts and want to retain their save files for any games they aren't yet ready to leave behind. I think in that case it's fine if the original account retains ownership, provided there is some mechanism to transfer saves to my kids' new account. I'm not sure how that would work with cloud saves though. Is it as simple as copying the saves from the steam directory locally and then having the new account upload to the cloud?
Should be just that easy. Games can save their files anywhere they like on your system, but as long as you put them in the right place, Steam Cloud will slurp them right up when the game halts.
I've been dealing with a similar issue with saves. Each game determines where it is saved and what goes to the cloud, so unfortunately you can't copy a single directory to another to transfer all saves and those saves may not be in your Steam folder. PCGamingWiki is a great resource for finding those save folders.
Forcing an upload to the cloud can be tricky. Even if you copy the files, open the game, load the file, and close it out, the saves don't necessarily get uploaded. For instance, in order to get my Divinity Original Sin 2 files uploaded, I had to load in the file and save again before it would upload the actual saves. This is game dependent, Kingdom Come Deliverance uploaded the files on simply opening and closing the game at the main menu. Games need to be opened and cleanly closed to trigger an upload.
Some games have their own servers cloud saves stay on/sync to rather than Steam. For example, Baldur's Gate 3 utilizes its own cloud for storage instead of Steam even without a connected Larian account. Steam will report no data in the cloud for such games and you may need a bit more song and dance to force those saves to the cloud.
These are chiefly concerns forcing an upload though. Copying an old save to the fresh location and playing as normal should work no problem.
I think the Larian issue is because their save files were clogging peoples limits for Steam up.
BG3 does it so it have have cross saves between different platforms and consoles. The DOS2 saves were hefty, but it took the whole folder after the single save.
My kid's account has seperate cloud saves from mine, at least so long the game is smart enough to use a seperate folder per steam user, which all titles I've tried are.
The only missing bit is permanent license transfer between accounts. If that comes to pass it'll solve the need for multigenerational steam accounts nicely.
I set up accounts for my kids when they started playing computer games. We've been in a family setup for years at this point. The family sharing beta was great and I'm glad to see it come out of beta now. There was one point when a valve employee called out my underage kid having an account, but I explained that I controlled the account closely and managed all purchases myself and they were ok with what I was doing. YMMV
To add onto @Gummy, "never going to happen" includes dying. They've outright stated this, even death will not transfer ownership. Unless Valve miraculously 180s on the topic this is not going to happen.
I’ve been excited about this ever since they announced it and have been waiting for it to leave beta before joining.
I think it’s a huge improvement over their former family sharing system. I’ve got a four-figure game count in my Steam library, but under the previous rules, I’d be locked out of ALL of them if my husband played ANY of them from my library. It was so restrictive that we never even bothered setting up a share.
Now the value prospect of my library effectively doubles because he can play it too.
We also have two more friends that we regularly game with who we’re going to add. They don’t live in the same household as us, but we’re effectively a “gaming household” in that we’re constantly playing together online and meeting up to play in-person.
Also, this is honestly a great moment for someone like me, who has overbought games and bundles for years. I know there’s no way I’ll ever be able to play all the games in my library, and I’ve long since shifted my view of my library from “games I’ll play someday” to “a broad collection that’s fun to dig through.” Up until now, it’s just been me doing the digging. Now others can join me!
This genuinely might be terrible for my game-buying habit though. It was bad enough when I was getting games for myself, but now I can justify nearly any purchase as “my friends might want to play this!”
Are Steam Families locked to sharing one physical location tied by IP like Netflix and the like have done recently?
I don't think so. I share my library with my wife and a couple friends who are halfway across the country. We've done this since the beta started and haven't faced any issues from it yet.
Conflicting reports right now, according to some commenters on reddit it looks like that might have changed, will need other people to confirm though
Right now their FAQ (linked from the youtube description) says that it's meant for actual families, but doesn't mention geographical restrictions. The one thing it said is that they would be monitoring traffic to see if there is any abuse of the system.
I'm reading this as "not right now, but we may if we feel it's necessary"
It feels a little weirder for Steam to be restrictive here than Netflix. Like the case against Netflix sharing is basically that streaming services have shifted from a per movie copy billing method to a per user and that can't work if theoretically only one user had to pay one subscription for many people to have all the movies.
But if you had bought all those movies physically, then you could share your movies such that every one of your movies was being watched by a different person simultaneously just by distributing the disks. No reasonable person would agree that only one person/location can use your dvd collection as a whole as you paid for each item individually.
Steam is still in the business of selling you individual copies of games, so it feels more like the dvd collection situation than the netflix situation with regards to different games in my collection being used simultaneously.
It's a lot more convenient than the physical analog, though. The games just show up in your library like you owned them. I'm lowkey abusing steam family since the beta came out, and I've definitely not bought games because of it, because I basically own them already - there's not much difference between owning a game and someone else in the "family" having it.
I imagine this will harm single player games more than multiplayer games. You would still need to buy 4 copies of something like left for dead to play together but only one copy of half life if you took turns.
I would be interested to see some data on this once time goes by. Because at first thought, it absolutely does seem like it would cut single player game sales by quite a bit, maybe even 20% if you average out people part of full families vs those not in any family.
However, I had a discussion with partner (in my steam family) the other day about her wanting a game, and I said that she should go for it because I might want to play it later too.
If enough family members view single player games as now being 50% off or more since they can be shared, that may actually increase sales, while the game is still the same price to the dev.
It's worth noting that Steam already had family library sharing, and while this is more open in many ways, it's actually significantly more restrictive in others. You have to be in the same location when you join a Steam family, and you can't join a Steam family with someone who's got their Steam store set to a different region (this is annoying for me and my wife, who are from different countries and still pay in our home currencies because the country we currently live in together, Germany, has extremely stupid censorship laws). So while it could impact single-player game sales, it's also cracking down on a lot of the non-household steam "family" sharing that was already impacting them.
I've not had the location restriction for joining families. Was that added recently? The region thing does sound frustrating but makes a lot of sense from the intended purpose.
It's only within this new type of Steam families afaik -- though I haven't tried myself, due to my other issue, so maybe it was just a thing in the beta and thus is still mentioned on the forums because of that.
I've been using it for a while and it's great. The only thing that I'm not super happy about is the fact that you can't leave reviews for shared games. It's not a big deal and the experience has been positive as a whole.
Can one user be a part of multiple steam families?
You may not be a part of multiple families, and there's a cooldown on leaving and entering families, so you can't just hop from family to family for games.
I liked the way they implemented the cooldown based not on when you leave but instead as waiting one year after you last joined a family. It feels like it more represents how families can change.
Previous discussion here on tildes