Steam's family sharing feature, Steam Families, is now available to everyone on the platform, allowing up to six people to share games in a single library. Each person can access their own save games, achievements, and workshop files.
This means that, yes, when you all sit down together in the evening, you can enjoy a hearty family meal knowing that you technically own six copies of the Cities Skylines Big Butt Skinner Balloon.
Each person on the account will have one of two roles: adult or child. Adults can manage parental controls, set hourly or daily play time limits, approve purchase requests, and control store access. Valve seems very proud of simplifying the “time-consuming” task of buying games for their kids by making it easier for parents to spend money.
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Game sharing is the biggest improvement from the platform's previous family sharing feature, and it now works like this:
Let's say you're in a family of four and you have a copy of Portal 2 and a copy of Half-Life. At any given time, any member can play Portal 2 and the other can play Half-Life. If you both want 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, the family will have two copies of Portal 2 and any two members can play at the same time.
Wait a minute, Valve. They're both Valve games! I see what you're doing here. I guess they couldn't pick favorites.
However, whether a game is suitable for family sharing is entirely at the discretion of the developer:
The developer of a game controls whether the game is eligible to be shared with Steam Families. All developer settings for the previous Steam Family Sharing feature are being carried over to Steam Families. This means that if a game is currently eligible for Family Sharing, it will remain so in the new system unless the developer chooses to disable it later.
There are a few more details in the accompanying blog post, one of which caught my attention:
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of the game, you (the game owner) will also be banned from that game. Other family members will not be affected.
I like how they put “brother” here. We all know your dad angrily googling aimbots as soon as everyone leaves the room. If you want to swallow a time capsule (with bits and pieces) of moral awareness with a fresh glass, here's Nathan Grayson (RPS in Peace) tackling the previous incarnation of the feature from a decade ago.