Valve Has Introduced a Beta For Steam Families Feature

Valve has just announced Steam Families, a brand-new sharing and moderation feature that’s going to be integrated with Steam soon. It’s available now for beta testers, and it’ll effectively replace both the Steam Family Sharing and the Steam Family View features. It’s an effort to centralise moderation and parental control mechanics while making sure your family has plenty of games to play across a controlled network.

In a blog post published by Valve, it was revealed that up to five members can join the same ‘Steam Family’. They’ll be able to take advantage of crossover mechanics that fuse their respective game libraries, but the chief users in the family can control how, when, and where these games are accessed. There are some innovative features wrapped up in Steam Families that will make it easy for parents to monitor and control the online and gaming activities of their children wherever they are.

Better Control, Tighter Family

Valve’s Steam Families feature will allow parents to monitor how long their children are playing games. It’ll also empower them to control access, restrict access to features like chat and online gaming, and block them from playing games with a certain age rating. There’s a request mechanic that’s coming with Steam Families that’ll allow younger users to send ‘an ask’ to their parents for a certain purchase, which the parents can then approve or deny at the touch of a button.

The main function of Steam Families is to facilitate the sharing of game libraries among members. Through Steam Families, members can play games from the libraries of other members, even if that other member is playing a game themselves at the same time. They just can’t play the same game at the same time – they’ll need to purchase another copy for that.

Here’s the full list of parental control mechanics, taken from Valve’s blog post:

• Allow access to appropriate games
• Restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
• Set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
• View playtime reports
• Approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
• Recover a child’s account if they lost their password

Steam Families is available now exclusively to users who can access the Steam Beta platform. It’s not yet known when it’ll be rolled out globally, but users are already reporting good things.

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