As the saying goes, it only took them twenty years — and Steam’s creators have finally realized what a monstrosity their Library Sharing was. Originally, it was meant as a way to let your family (or friends) play your games. But it was implemented in the most ass-backwards way imaginable. Sure, you could make your games available to your family, but the moment you started playing anything yourself, your entire library became unavailable to everyone else. So let’s say you’ve got 400 games in your personal library and you let your kids play them. Your son launches Game A and is happily playing, and then you come home from work and decide to play too — Game B. And suddenly your son gets kicked out of Game A because “the owner is back.” Even though you’re playing a different game. Why on earth can’t he just keep playing the first one?
Nobody ever understood why this feature was introduced in such a dumb way, because its value was extremely low. Mobile platforms introduced the idea of a family. Streaming services like Netflix let an entire household watch content under one family subscription. But game platforms held out until the bitter end.
And finally, on March 18, 2024, Steam launched proper Family Groups in beta. What does that mean? You can now create a family group and add up to five family members (six total: the creator plus five members). Everyone’s personal libraries are merged into a single shared family game library: no matter which family member owns a game, it becomes available to all members of the family group. Steam explained this feature in detail in an announcement and in answers to frequently asked questions. I’ll focus here on the most interesting points.
What changes in gameplay with the introduction of these groups?
- You can play any game from the shared library as long as no one else in your family group is playing that particular game at the same time. So now I can play Game B from my library while my son plays Game A — also from my library — and no one gets kicked out.
- If a particular game has been purchased by multiple family members, that is taken into account in the usage limits. For example, if Game A is owned by two members of the family, then any two members can play it simultaneously. Let’s say both my son and I bought that game. The system counts that as two copies available to the family, meaning that at any given time, any two people in our family group can be playing it — whether that’s me and my son, or my daughters instead. But no more than two at once.
When adding a new member to the group, you can choose their status — adult or child. Adults can manage the entire group, and for those marked as “child,” you can use the new parental control features. For example, you can monitor the amount of time spent in games (there are more details about the available features in the official guide).
In addition, group members with “Child” status can now purchase games using the adults’ payment methods. In that case, a request is sent to the adult’s profile, and the adult can either approve or decline it.
I haven’t tested this feature yet, since I assigned all my kids “Adult” status — they were already able to buy games in the store anyway. But while writing this post, I realized it’s not entirely clear how payments will work if multiple adults have different payment methods linked. I’ll have to experiment later to see whose card gets charged when a “child” makes a purchase.
All available games simply appear in your Library list. If you’d like to see the games you don’t personally own but can play thanks to this new feature, you can enable the “Group by Library” option. In that case, a new category called “Steam Family” will appear in your game list, showing all the games from other accounts in your family group that are now available to you:
In addition, if you open the Family Management section in your profile, you can view the full library of games available to the group:
And as you can see in the screenshot, some games will still remain unavailable to the family. That decision is made by the publisher, and here you can check which titles your family members won’t be able to play. From what I can tell from the list, almost all Ubisoft games are unavailable (most likely because they require linking to a Uplay account), but not only those. Even Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is unavailable.
At the moment, the feature is in beta, so to use it you need to switch your client to the Family Groups beta version — anyone can do that (see the main instructions for how).
I was able to create a group, but when adding family members I ran into the first limitation: all members must be tied to the same regional store. In other words, my account is linked to Cyprus, and if a family member’s account is linked to, say, Armenia, we can’t both be in the same family group. I can guess what Steam is trying to protect itself from, but in this age of open borders it feels both silly and frustrating: my daughter is currently studying in another country, but she’s still my daughter — so why can’t we share our games?
In any case, this is a massive breakthrough in Steam’s policy. We’ll keep testing it and see what changes after the beta period ends.
