On the evening of March 18, Valve released an update to the Steam beta, which introduced Family Groups with shared access to games.
What's new
Family Groups are a replacement for the Steam family library (Steam Family Sharing) and the Steam family mode (Family View) at the same time. In fact, the developers have refined already well-known functions and combined them in one place for convenience.
Steam Family Groups are for households with a maximum of six immediate family members (accounts must be in the same region). Family Library appears on Steam in the left column as a new subsection in the games list, and can be managed in the desktop client, on a mobile device, or in the browser.
Each participant will automatically have access to all games of other users in the group that are allowed by the developers for sharing. As for restrictions, at the moment each copy of the game is available only to one member of the group, so two participants will be able to play the same game at the same time only if both have a copy. Otherwise, you will have to play those games from the shared library that are “free” at the moment.
Each member of a Steam family group has one of two roles: adult or child. Adults can freely manage a family group and apply parental controls to children's accounts, such as limiting access to the Steam store (community/chat with friends) and play time, granting access to appropriate games, approving and denying requests from children's accounts for additional play time, purchases and access to features (temporarily or permanently).
If a member of a family group is banned for cheating in a game from the shared library, its owner will also receive a ban. Adults can leave a family group at any time (children can only be removed by an adult or Steam support), but they will be able to join another or create a new one only a year after joining the previous one. At the same time, a new person will not be able to immediately take a vacant place in a family group – the Steam developers have provided a waiting period of 1 year.
How to Test Steam Family Groups
Now family groups are available in the beta version of Steam – to install it, you need to go to the upper left corner of the program, click the “Steam” menu and go to “Settings”. Then, on the “Interface” tab, click the drop-down menu next to the “Participate in Steam Client Beta” option, select “Steam Family Beta” and restart the Steam client. Once you've joined, click your username in the top right corner of the Steam client window, select Account Information, and go to the Manage Family Group tab.
Chap
Valve has created a separate manual page for Steam family groups – comprehensive instructions in Ukrainian, which describe in as much detail as possible everything related to the creation, configuration, management and principles of operation of a family library. There are also FAQs (answers to frequently asked questions).
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