A few days ago, when I talked about Steam’s new concurrent user record, I talked about Valve’s continued efforts to both remain the most used digital store for PC games and as a key part of achieving this goal, to offer a service that pleases its users as much as possible. Of course, sometimes they made mistakes, but generally the positive points outweigh the negatives.

Now we are faced with a new example of these principles, and this is particularly remarkable because it responds to the demand of many users of the store, a demand that has already been partially satisfied in the past, but with this newness improves.substantially. I mean of course the ability to share games in a convenient and simple way between family memberssomething we’ve seen so far with the Family Loan feature and Family Mode, but which improves in many ways with the new Steam Family Groups.

To create this new mode, Valve took two of the most requested elements of this type of feature, share games and parental control tools, which combines the two features I mentioned above that are replaced by this new mode. Next, we’ll see what it has to offer, but before that you should know that the Steam Family Groups feature is now available and that you’ll only need to make a few configuration adjustments (which we’ll also tell you about later) .

With the new family groups, by default all catalogs of all group members are shared with the family, although Valve clarifies that Not all games support this feature (you can see the list of compatible games at this link), with the only and understandable limitation that only as many instances of the game as people have it on their account can be played at the same time. This means that if, for example, two people in a family group have copies of Stardew Valley, any two members of the group will be able to play Eric Barone’s creation at the same time.

In addition, even if different members of the family group play the same title, each of them will retain, associated with their own account, your save games, your achievements, assets you’ve downloaded from the Workshop, etc.. However, the “ownership” of each game will always remain associated with the account from which it was purchased, and not with the rest of the participants in the group.

Another very important aspect, as I already mentioned, is related to parental control. In this context, Steam family group accounts can be configured as adult or minor accountsand the former will be able to have control over the latter by controlling which titles they can access, adjusting the allowed hours of play, restricting access to different types of content, and more. Parents and guardians will thus be able to check what their children are doing with the peace of mind that comes with it.

There are of course some limitations, although they are understandable, as they are certainly determined more by the interest of developers and distributors in trying to avoid abuse than by reducing the usefulness of groups. They are the following:

• Membership: Family groups on Steam are limited to a maximum of six people, with at least one responsible adult. However, Valve anticipates that this number may change over time depending on the usage of this new feature.
• Family group: Although it is easy to imagine that many groups of friends will already consider using these groups to share games with each other, Steam emphasizes that the groups were created only for a family context, and in this respect imposes a limitation that we all find the most familiar, namely , that all members must live in the same house.
• Entrances and exits: By focusing on the fact that these are family groups and not friends, Steam considers that changes may happen from time to time, but not often. It is therefore clear that it will be possible for a member to leave the family group, but in this case a waiting period of one year has been established before the vacancy is filled by another member. In addition, at least one year must elapse from the time a user joins a group until they can join another group.
• Watch out for traps: A very interesting aspect, and it’s not hard to imagine why Valve set it up this way, is that if a user has a game and a family member is using it and is banned from it for cheating, the member who owns it will also be locked out of the game. In other words, Steam family groups cannot be used to have a B account to try to cheat with in Counter Strike (I’ll give just one example).
• Compatible games: As I mentioned before, not all games are compatible with family groups, and in fact Valve reminds us that developers can include and remove their titles from this list whenever they want. It is understood that there will be in-depth monitoring of the use of this new mode and whether the restrictions set by Valve prevent abuse.

How to activate Steam Family Group?

The process is actually extremely simple as you will see below. Of course, before you start using it, you need to keep in mind that at the moment It’s in beta, so it is possible that malfunctions will occur. In this respect, however, Valve already offers it universally to all interested parties, so we understand that it must already be well polished and that we can therefore expect fairly reliable operation.

The first thing you should do is change the version of the Steam client you have installed on your computer to one that matches this new feature. To do this, open the Store app for PC, click the “Steam” menu in the upper left corner of the window, then click “Settings”.

A new configuration window will appear, in which you need to go to the “Interface” section, then find “Participation in Client Beta” and select “Steam Families beta” from the drop-down list. After making this change, you will need to restart the Steam client for the new version to install.

Once you have it and the client opens again (the process takes less than a minute), go to the application parameters management window again, but this time click on “Family”. When you first enter this section, you can choose between creating a group or joining an existing group. Select the appropriate option and follow the instructions that will be provided.

Repeat the same operation on the computers of the people who will use the family group, from It is imperative that everyone use the beta version of the clientconfigure group roles and voila, you can start trying out all these new features.

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