Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families, available today in the Steam Beta Client. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can acce...
Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
up to 5 members
game sharing
parental controls
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
Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.
Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.
For REAL!! Not playing same game with one copy makes sense. But the one instance per library was harsh. This is tremendous, and honestly, I'll probably buy even more games knowing my kids can play them and I can stick to my same old same old if I don't like it.
No kidding. This solves a major issue with the Steam Deck as well, because now someone else can be playing on the Deck while you use your main PC for another game.
I have issues with this even with 3rd party applications. Wanna play PokeMMO, an emulator that doesn't even exist on Steam, on your Steam Deck while you're waiting to respawn in Trouble in Terrorist Town? Fuck you, you're disconnected from that server now.