Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families is now available for all users. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play. Create a Steam Family To get started, you can create a Steam Family and then invite up to 5 family members.
This was previously available as a opt in beta, but is now available for everyone.
Previously a family member could only play your shared library if you weren’t playing any game.
With this new steam families, they can play any game except the game you’re actively playing (unless the family collectively owns multiple copies). So if me and my son want to play Lethal Company together we need two copies.
It just basically combines your libraries now. So if the license is in use, nobody else can use it unless there are multiple licenses. Offline will still work for your own games and you can choose the best version to play.
E.g. I have Isaac but only 1 dlc while my gf has all of the dlc so I can just play her version when she’s not playing it.
Have they solved the issue that multiple people can’t be playing at the same time, or the same game at the same time?
I don’t even do families. One of us just goes into offline mode for the time. Slightly obnoxious.
Previously a family member could only play your shared library if you weren’t playing any game.
With this new steam families, they can play any game except the game you’re actively playing (unless the family collectively owns multiple copies). So if me and my son want to play Lethal Company together we need two copies.
Cool. Well that is certainly a step forward. Thanks.
It just basically combines your libraries now. So if the license is in use, nobody else can use it unless there are multiple licenses. Offline will still work for your own games and you can choose the best version to play. E.g. I have Isaac but only 1 dlc while my gf has all of the dlc so I can just play her version when she’s not playing it.