Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families is now available for all users. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when...
I know it's to make sure cheaters get punished. But that destroys the whole purpose of sharing your gaming library with your kids. They are prone to making mistakes. Should a parent be punished for that? I think the kid should.
15+ years ago I used an aimbot on the first Call of Duty that I got as a gift and got a PunkBuster ban. I was 13 years old and found something new and wanted to try it out. I got punished, in a single game, all by myself. My parents did not get punished, but I was crying.
I can't even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games. That would be absolute horror. Not only for little kid me then, but also for my parent. If I would share my cureent Steam account with my kid and they'd get a VAC ban, I would lose €700 in CS skins alone.
I can't even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games.
Well it'd be just the one game that they cheated in. That's where you can sit the kid down and tell him that cheating has consequences. Ideally this talk would've happened before you share access though - I'm thinking of it as making sure the kid knows how to drive before you let them borrow the keys to your car.
Parents just have to make sure the kid understands to not cheat before sharing the account. It might sound new to us because we never grew up with this scenario, but it seems reasonable to me.
Again, it's just making sure the kid is a safe driver before letting them borrow keys to the family van.
If the ban worries you, you can just not share the games - this is strictly an upside and there's no penalty for maintaining the status quo and not using this feature.
The problem with that statement is that there's a pretty common example that I already brought up that easily disproves it - letting the kid borrow keys to the car after they've shown they can drive safely.
There's a lot more parental liability there than some skins in a game.
And the penalty is losing access to a fucking game, not the death of other people.
Teenage driving proves that they can learn to be responsible enough to be trusted with the lives of others. You're saying they can't learn to be responsible enough with your CS skins?
Yeah I hope you lose a ton of shit because you put trust in your kid, tell them to not cheat, and they cheat regardless.
This feature is meant for family sharing, but they take away the stupidness of a teenager. A kid can even be tricked into running funny.exe that randomly injects itself into memory spaces of programs, causing almost any anticheat to detect it.
Keep your stupid perfectionism out of the equitation. Kids aren't perfect.
Yeah I hope you lose a ton of shit because you put trust in your kid, tell them to not cheat, and they cheat regardless.
And I hope your child is trusted enough to drive at some point, because you invested the time and effort to trust them behind the wheel.
I've had my steam account forever, so I might be overlooking something I did early on and forgot about, But I think the problem with anything along the lines of what you're proposing is that they don't have the time or ability to confirm that each steam account does belong to a different individual. This would either result in super intrusive amounts of data collecting, or risk someone saying "oops, look at that, my 15th child just got banned for hacking!" And then adding yet another "family member"?
Where do you draw the line in the above scenario? At least the current policy is clear.