SoftwarePlatformsValve politely asks that you only use Steam’s family sharing for ‘close family members’ in a ‘household,’ but let’s be real: everyone shares their games with Discord friendsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
SoftwarePlatformsValve politely asks that you only use Steam’s family sharing for ‘close family members’ in a ‘household,’ but let’s be real: everyone shares their games with Discord friendsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Valve Software)
Steam’s latest family sharing system, justcalled Steam Families, comes with lots of rules designed to keep it from turning into a game lending free-for-all. Year-long cooldown periods prevent us from joining and leaving Steam Family groups as often as we want, for example.
I get it: Valve has to walk a line between making users happy and keeping game developers from worrying that they’re losing sales to a bunch of little lending libraries, which would lead them to opt out en masse and make the feature useless. But there’s one stipulation about how we’re meant to use Steam Families that it seems like Valve knows is a futile ask.
“While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to six close family members,” Valvewrote. “To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.”
And of course they are. It makes no difference to Steam users whether they’re sharing libraries with a sibling or with a Discord friend from Minnesota, except in that their Discord friend from Minnesota might have better games to throw on the pile.
One change Valve made for the new Families system, which to my knowledge wasn’t present in the previous system, is that there are region restrictions: A PC Gamer writer in the UK wasn’t able to share his library with a relative in Spain. Otherwise, the “household” thing is a soft rule, at least for now.
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I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that Valve’s non-committal language here—it refers to the “intended” use and not the required use—means that it isn’t likely to really crack down on sharing games with friends, although the region restriction does complicate things for the multinational friend groups common in gaming. You can read more about how Steam Families work on theSteam support page.
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