Valve brings major upgrades to Steam family sharing

Valve is making Steam Families available for everyone on the platform. For those who don't know, Steam Families is a set of family-focused features that replace Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View. This new platform offers a centralised system for managing access to games within a family, providing a more convenient experience for users than its predecessors.

To kick off the Steam Families experience, users can establish their own family group and invite up to five members, granting them access to various features. The new Family Sharing feature works pretty much like the old one, allowing family members to access each other's game libraries, enabling them to play titles from one another's collections. Additionally, individuals retain ownership of their existing games and can continue to expand their libraries without restrictions.

Within a Steam Family, members are designated as either adults or children, with adults having the authority to manage invitations and set account restrictions. One thing coming with Steam Families is the introduction of child purchase requests, which further simplifies the process of buying games for children, allowing kids to request game purchases. These requests can then be accepted or declined by the adult.

To simplify this procedure, Steam Families has included a new payment option in which a kid account may request that an in-family adult pay for their shopping cart. The parent may authorise and pay for the transaction using their mobile device or an email. Once accepted, all games in the shopping basket will be added to the child's account.

Parents can also use other parental control features within Steam Families to monitor and regulate their children's gaming activities. These include limiting access to games, the Steam Store, Community and Friends chat, setting playtime limits (hourly/daily), and viewing playtime reports. In addition, adults can approve/deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent) and recover a child's account if they lose their password.

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KitGuru says: Do you find the new Steam Families feature set helpful for your use case?

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