Steam Finally Lets Families Share One Big Games Library

thegamer.com:

For a long time, Steam's family features have been a little lackluster, forcing parents to jump through numerous hoops to buy their children games, monitor what they're playing, and generally keep an eye on their online behavior. One big issue was the inability to share an account, as a family account would only allow one person access at a time, even if they're playing different titles.

Thankfully, that's not going to be the case for much longer, as Valve has announced a new program called Steam Families, which will eventually replace Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View and combine them into one big convenient package. This will essentially give you one big account which will let you control what games people can access and for how long, and can be accessed by up to five different family members.

One of the best features this new Steam Families feature will introduce is Family Sharing, which will create a massive library of titles that everyone who takes part in your Steam Family account can access. If you purchase a game, it means that everyone in the Steam Family account can also play that title, and vice versa, but only one person at a time. Each person will also get to create their own saved games, have their own achievement progress, and so on.

Unlike the previous system that would only allow one person to access an account at a time, all six members of a Steam Family account can access the library and play games in it, as long as they're playing different titles. The only exception is that if more than one person in your Steam Family account owns the same title, then multiple people will be allowed to play that game at the same time.

It's worth mentioning that developers can opt in and out of this program whenever they please, so not all titles may be accessible via this method. For example, we discovered that Red Dead Redemption 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order currently can't be shared.

Along with a variety of different features to restrict access