Steam Family Groups. Valve announced the next major update [What’s new and how to test it]

On the evening of March 18, Valve released an update to the Steam beta, which introduced Family Groups with shared access to games.

What’s new

Family groups — replacement Steam Family Sharing (Steam Family Library) and Steam family mode (Family View) at the same time. In fact, the developers have finalized the already familiar functions and combined them in one place for convenience.

Steam Family Groups are designed for households with a maximum of 5 close relatives (the region in the accounts must match). The Family Library appears in the left column on Steam as a new subdivision in the list of games, and can be managed in the desktop client, on a mobile device, or in a browser.

Each participant will automatically get access to all games of other users of the group that are authorized by the developers for sharing. As for restrictions, each copy of the game is currently available to only one member of the group, so two participants can play the same game at the same time only if they both have a copy. Otherwise, you will have to play those games from the shared library that are «free» at that moment.

Each member of a Steam family group has one of two roles: adult or child. Adults are able to freely manage the family group and apply parental controls to children’s accounts, including limiting access to the Steam Store (community/chat with friends) and play time, providing access to inappropriate games, and approving and denying requests from children’s accounts for additional play time, purchases, and access to features (temporarily or permanently).

If a member of a family group is banned for cheating in a game from the shared library, the owner of the library will also be banned. Adults can leave a family group at any time (children can only be removed by an adult or Steam support), but they can join another or create a new one only after a year from the date of joining the previous one. In this case, the new person will not be able to immediately take a vacant place in the family group — Steam developers have provided a waiting period of 1 year.

How to test Steam family groups

Family Groups are currently available in the Steam beta — to install it, go to the top left corner of the program, click on the menu «Steam» and go to «Settings». Then, on the «Interface» tab, click the drop-down menu next to «Participate in the Steam client beta», select «Steam Family Beta» and restart the Steam client. Once you’ve joined, click your username in the upper right corner of the Steam client window, select «Account Information», and then click the «Manage Family Group» tab.

FAQ

Valve has created a separate guide page for Steam family groups — a comprehensive manual in Ukrainian, which describes in as much detail as possible everything related to the creation, setup, management, and principles of the family library. It also contains FAQs (answers to frequently asked questions).