Valve has finally done it! They've overhauled Steam Family Sharing with the new Steam Families set of features now available in Beta and it fixes the most annoying issue with it.
Currently, with Steam Family Sharing, if one person is playing a game your whole library is locked. You can either boot them off, or wait. Now, that's changed. As long as you're playing different games - it's all good. Obviously if other members in your Family Group have a copy, multiple people can play the same game at the same time.
This new Steam Families replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, putting everything under one banner and this introduces new features too. These new additions include new parental controls so you can set proper limits now including:
- 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.
Children can also request purchases for you to approve or deny!
Valve also clarified that if someone in your group got banned using your copy, you will also be banned.
See the full announcement on Steam.
It took a long time for Valve to do this, many features here people have been requesting for a long time. Glad to see it land, at least in Beta for now. It's quite likely the Steam Deck gave Valve a little extra push to do it, as it has been a source of complaints there too. But as we've seen time and time again, Valve do react to feedback and constantly improve.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
mZSq7Fq3qs 
Mar 19
So awesome change!
Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsDoes this allow me playing a game with my steam deck and another game with my pc?Not unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account. You could already play on both with the one account if one of the devices is in offline mode.
Thanks Gabe!
Quoting: CatKillerNot unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
Quoting: poiuzI'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.Quoting: CatKillerNot unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
We have 2 decks at home, so we both updated to beta and I created a family group to invite the other person.
Right after this, both decks became unusable since there was some kind of problem where trying to access any game would show us a black screen saying that Steam can't find the content and some long error code. No matter if we restarted or anything, gaming mode was unusable.
Fortunately, desktop mode works perfectly.
So, since we mostly play on gaming mode, we reverted back to stable branch and, to our surprise, the family group is still there (not accessible through the steam menu options) and we can play as if we were still in a group.
I guess we'll stay in stable for now, but at least we were able to start the group and share games without the limits from before family groups.
Quoting: CatKillerI'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.I meant whether they're still blocking the same account (my own games on my account, nothing shared) on two devices.
Quoting: poiuzI meant whether they're still blocking the same account (my own games on my account, nothing shared) on two devices.Yes, that's still blocked.
Quoting: CatKillerQuoting: poiuzI'm pretty sure that having an alt is against the TOS, so they're unlikely to recommend it in their FAQ.Quoting: CatKillerNot unless you Family Share with yourself as an alt account.Did you or someone test this with the beta client? I don't think I saw this scenario mentioned in the FAQ.
I don't think it's against Steam TOS, their support also invited me to create a new account when I got a VAC ban ~15 years ago.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me