Steam Families brings shared libraries and parental controls together

As more people get Steam Decks and other handheld PC consoles, which are much easier to share among households than a PC, it was integral for Valve to make its generally barebones family-sharing settings more robust. On Monday, the company announced that Steam Families is now available in beta, adding more features for people who want to share games or control access on 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’ll automatically gain access to games the members own — barring titles where the developers didn’t opt into the program. You can also play games from another person’s library even if they’re online playing something else. So, if you’re playing Helldivers 2, a family member can hop into Balatro at the same time.

Image: Valve Software

Steam currently has two family features. They are Family Sharing, which lets you share games with your family members, and Family View, which grants parental controls. Family View, however, lacks many features other parental control systems have. It allowed users to choose whether they shared all games or only games they chose, and limited access to features like the store and friends lists. These can all be changed with a PIN. The new Steam Families will combine these two existing family features so users can not only share games but also control how those games are accessed more easily.

Valve has added some more capabilities here. Besides the aforementioned features, adults can now limit access to inappropriate games and set playtime limits for children. Steam also now offers playtime reports that show how many minutes a user has played. A child can send a request to increase those limits or buy a title from the store, which the parent can accept or dismiss.

Steam Families is currently only available in the Steam Beta Client. There’s no word on when it’ll be available to the general public, but once it is Steam will automatically recommend people who can join your family.