After a stint in beta, Valve has opened up Steam Families to the wider public.
Steam Families replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving users a one stop shop to manage who can access what and when.
Up to five family members can be added to a user’s Steam Family account, making for a total group of six maximum. These members can be managed from the Steam Client, mobile device or browser. Alas, it can’t help you manage your children enough to get them to brush their teeth before bed, though.
Once a family group has been set up, members will then get access to the following features:
- Family Sharing
- Parental Controls
- Child Purchase Requests
“When you join a Steam Family, you automatically gain access to the shareable games that your family members own and they will also be able to access the shareable titles in your library,” Valve explained. “The next time you log in to Steam, this new ‘family library’ will appear in the left column as a subsection of your games list. You maintain ownership of your current titles and when you purchase a new game it will still show up in your collection.”
Users can still play games from the shared library even if another member is online playing another game. If there are multiple copies of the same game in the library, more than one member can play that game at one time.
The parental controls, meanwhile, will allow adults (Steam Family members are categorised as either an ‘adult’ or a ‘child’) to set limits for their small ones, such as what games they can play and when they can play them. Adults will also be able to monitor their children’s activity (see image below).
These new parental control features let adults:
- Allow access to appropriate games
- Restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
- Set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
- View playtime reports
- Approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
- Recover a child’s account if they lost their password
The last main feature arriving with Steam Families is a new payment option.
This option allows a child account within the family group to request an adult pays for their shopping basket of games. Once the adult approves their request, the purchase will be added to the child’s account.
As a general point, if an adult leaves a Steam Family, they will need to wait for at least one year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family. Adults can, however, “kick any family member out of the Steam Family”.
More details can be found on Valve’s blog.