Introducing Steam Families

Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
This is huge! Previously it was annoying to share games become if someone was playing my game and I opened something up they would be kicked out.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
- It does but it also makes sense. This way people can’t have “family” member alt accounts for cheating with the primary as a parachute.
  But… I’d like to see something like “if a family member gets banned then their access to sharing is blocked and you will get a temp ban”
  This way I can rain down hell on whoever screwed up and the penalty for trusting them isn’t permanent
  
  I'm pretty sure this was already the case in some games before, depending on the netcode of the game.
  The old FAQ said:
  What if a borrower is caught cheating or committing fraud while playing my shared games? Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, not all VAC protected games are shareable. We recommend you only authorize familiar Steam Accounts and familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.
  If it's a game with VAC it probably always worked as described above, but for example: People in Fall Guys did use this trick to avoid getting banned for cheating until they turned off Family Share for Fall Guys shortly after release.
- If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
  This sucks.
  Yeah, but I an see why as it would be easy to abuse. Only need one copy of the game and you could cycle accounts that never owned the game out of the family sharing when they get banned.
  Might be other ways to limit that, but would also likely need more restrictions on the feature that might be more annoying.
  
  Maybe they could allow me to set a game as not shareable.
  
  Do bans typically only affect the multiplayer portion of a game? I could see my nephew fucking around and finding out with one of my games. I never play competitive multiplayer, but if I got locked out of the game completely, I'd be pretty cross with him.
- I think it's fair. You should know if your family cheats if you share your games with them
  
  Nah its impossible to always know if they will cheat. It could be their first time.
- If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
  This sucks.
  On the other hand, Rust had a cheater issue at some point because they only checked the account ID when banning in EAC. Cheaters leveraged this by purchasing the game in a master account, and using secondary accounts tied with Steam Family Sharing to play.
  Secondary account banned? No problem. Log out, share with another account, rinse and repeat. From what I can see they disabled Family sharing altogether.
- I don't think it's horrible. First, it prevents abuse, and second it adds extra social pressure to not cheat if you're using this since you know if you get caught all your family comes with you. Sure, maybe some parent sharing with a stupid child it sucks, but I use this with my brother and we're both adults and know it isn't an issue for either of us. I don't really care if this prevents more cheaters from existing. The harm will be very minimal, with pretty good upsides for the vast majority of people.

It's stuff like this that makes me not even think about pirating games. Imagine a company that literally just improves features and makes it easier for me and my family to enjoy the media they sell. Why the fuck wouldn't I buy from their store?
Why streaming services don't understand this, I'll never know. Seems like the games industry is riding purely on Steam's usability while the film/TV industry is speedrunning enshittification.
- Every company os speedrunning enshittification except steam. Like. Look at the other game launchers. They are all shit.
  
  Epic didn't need any catching up tho 😎
- DRM-free is even better for this, but comparing to storefronts that require logging in: absolutely.
  GOG is pretty amazing, too, is what I'm saying.
- Why the fuck wouldn't I buy from their store?
  bc it's functionally always-on DRM? i mean feel free to spend money how you will but there are tons of good reasons to avoid steam
  
  I have a large library of games I've never played on stream. a couple months back I wanted to play a game I had installed a while ago and guess what, forced always online. not from steam, but from the shitty team behind doom (don't remember which version it was), which just happened to be at the time I had a multi hour internet outage.
  afterwards I figured out I had to explicitly block some network traffic to stop it from trying to force me to sign up for an account with the developer.
  while steam certainly has DRM options, they are configurable by developers and afaik can't enforce an always online requirement with just steam, only though custom logic in the game or third party DRM. developers are also free to not use steam DRM.
  DRM, as usual, harms the legitimate buyers.
  that being said, steam still does bring a lot of value, such as their hardware developments, their work on better Linux gaming support, the update distribution through a trusted source, and various others.
  
  Not necessarily. There are games on Steam that don't have DRM.
- The only games I've ever pirated are Sims 4 (I ain't paying 1000 bucks worth of dlc) and Starfield (I still feel robbed) because Steam just makes buying games at reasonable prices so easy.
  The other day I bought RDR2, player it for an hour, didn't enjoy it and returned it no questions asked
  
  The only thing stopping me playing that game through again is the first part of it being unskippable.
  Fuck that prologue.
- It doesn't make games free, so I'll continue to think about pirating games.

So the main takeaway is that you no longer need to be offline if 2 family members want to play at the same time as long as they’re playing different games.
That’s fair and it should alleviate a bunch of headaches.
- Absolutely amazing! I'm so glad they're finally doing this. The restriction was such a pain.

Awesome! That would mean that family sharing finally works like I thought it would work. No more tears because I started a game while the kid was playing another one.

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 a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
That kinda sucks.
- That's necessary, "it was my brother who cheated" is the oldest lie.
  
  It would be great to blanket disallow games that you can get banned in. Especially VAC bans.
  
  Is it though? If they are not banning the whole family, what prevents me from adding a new little brother?
  
  Except that lie is often used when sharing an account.
  Under this system, there is no ambiguity in terms of if it was you or your brother.
- I kinda hope they grant the ability to block some games from being shared. I trust my kids not to use cheats, but I can understand being a bit paranoid from being banned from a game you really enjoy and not wanting to take a chance.
  
  Yes, especially if you can be banned for your little brother borrowing your game and swearing.
  
  The current family sharing can block certain games, so maybe they'll keep that going.
- Well, it never changed for years
- Mqybe don't share with someone who would use cheats?

If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
Oh man that's gonna cause so much drama lmao

Hmmm, that's a lot to go over in there. I have family sharing setup with, let's say, my found family. There are a lot of improvements listed, but also many things I'm worried about.
The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive. I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc's, It's really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.
I understand why they're doing the ban sharing, but it's still funny.
- The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive.
  It's slightly better than that for the person who leaves. It's a one year period starting the moment they joined the previous one. So if you've been part of a family for 1+ years you can join/create a new one right away.
  The slot you occupied however does stay locked for an additional year.
  I also have my current setup with found family and as I live close to a country border I cannot switch over properly as I have members on both sides of the border. I understand their intent is "same household", so I do understand why this is the case, still sucks for me though.
  I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc’s, It’s really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.
  After toying around in the beta, this seems to not be an issue anymore as they seem to actually go off accounts now and not hardware anymore. It was quite frustrating in the old system though.

So this is great except for the cheating thing. Why am I being punished as the games owner because someone else in my family was banned for cheating? Ban the cheater not the owner.
- So people don’t have 5 accounts they can cheat under for a single game purchase.
  
  Do it on a 3 strikes basis. They don't ban an account in a single offense. And therefore shouldn't do that to account groups either. It's not perfect. But it's much more forgiving and fair.
- Honestly I think it's a good thing. It strongly decentivizes cheating by there being a possibility of real-world consequences for cheating.
- Don't harbor cheaters 4head

Ffs.....I mean, w.e, I'm sure it's fine. Just I literally only set up my brother to family share my library last month.....
- Then you're set up for this already, silly.
- Family Charing:
  We're good, but we can be better!
  Steam Families.
  They're the same thing, lol.