Steam Families is out of beta, letting you share games with up to five others

and you call them that despite the fact they are obviously grilled

Steam’s family sharing feature Steam Families is now available to everyone on the platform, letting up to six total people share games from a single library, with each individual having access to their own saved games, achievements, and workshop files.

This means that, yes, when you all sit down together in the evening, you can enjoy a hearty family meal in the knowledge that between you, you technically own six copies of the Cities Skylines Big Butt Skinner Balloon.

Each person on the account will have one of two roles: adult or child. Adults can manage parental controls, set hourly or daily playtime limits, approve purchase requests, and control store access. Valve appear very proud of making it easier for parents to spend money, streamlining the “time-consuming” task of buying games for their kids.

Game sharing itself is the main improvement from the platform’s previous family sharing feature, and now works like this:

Let's say that you are in a family with 4 members and that you own a copy of Portal 2 and a copy of Half-Life. At any time, any one member can play Portal 2 and another can play Half-Life. If two of you would like to play Portal 2 at the same time, someone else in the family will need to purchase a copy of the game. After that purchase, there are two owned copies of Portal 2 across the family and any two members can play at the same time.

Wait a second, Valve. Those are both Valve games! I see what you’ve done here. I suppose they couldn’t go picking favourites.

Whether a game is eligible for family sharing or not, however, is up to the developer:

A game's developer controls whether a game is eligible for sharing with Steam Families. All developer settings for the previous Steam Family Sharing feature are being brought forward to Steam Families. So, if a game is currently eligible for Family Sharing, it will remain so in the new system unless the developer chooses to opt-out later.

There are a few more details in the accompanying blog post. This one stood out to me:

What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?

If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.

I enjoy the fact that they specified “brother” here. We all know dad’s furiously googling aimbots as soon as everyone’s left the room. If you fancy swallowing a time capsule with a fresh glass of morality awareness (with bits in), here’s Nathan Grayson (RPS in Peace) covering the previous incarnation of the feature ten actual years ago.