Steam Families combines shared libraries and parental controls

As more people pick up Steam Decks and other handheld PC consoles that can be shared between households much more easily than a PC, it was crucial for Valve to make its generally simple family sharing settings more robust. The company announced this on Monday Steam Families is now available The beta will add more features for people who want to share games or control access to the platform.

Steam Families allows a user to share their library with up to five other “family members” (or whoever you share your PC or Steam Deck with). Once you join a family, you automatically gain access to games owned by the members – except for titles where the developers have not opted in to the program. You can also play games from someone else’s library, even if they’re playing something else online. So when you play Helldivers 2, A family member can jump in Balatro at the same time.

Image: Valve software

Steam currently has two family features. These are “Family Sharing”, which allows you to share games with your family members, and “Family View”, which enables parental controls. However, Family View doesn’t have many of the features that other parental control systems offer. Users could choose to share all games or just the games they selected, and had limited access to features such as the store and friend lists. These can all be changed with a PIN. The new Steam Families will combine these two existing family features, allowing users to not only share games, but also more easily control how those games are accessed.

Valve has added some more features here. In addition to the above features, adults can now restrict access to inappropriate games and set playtime limits for children. Steam now also offers game time reports, which show how many minutes a user has played. A child can submit a request to increase these limits or purchase a title in the store, which parents can accept or decline.

Steam Families is currently only available in the Steam Beta Client. It’s not yet known when it will be available to the general public, but once it is available, Steam will automatically recommend people to join your family.