Introducing Steam Families
Introducing Steam Families
Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families, available today in the Steam Beta Client. 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 acce...
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Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
This is huge! Previously it was annoying to share games become if someone was playing my game and I opened something up they would be kicked out.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
It does but it also makes sense. This way people can’t have “family” member alt accounts for cheating with the primary as a parachute.
But… I’d like to see something like “if a family member gets banned then their access to sharing is blocked and you will get a temp ban”
This way I can rain down hell on whoever screwed up and the penalty for trusting them isn’t permanent
I'm pretty sure this was already the case in some games before, depending on the netcode of the game.
The old FAQ said:
What if a borrower is caught cheating or committing fraud while playing my shared games? Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, not all VAC protected games are shareable. We recommend you only authorize familiar Steam Accounts and familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.
If it's a game with VAC it probably always worked as described above, but for example: People in Fall Guys did use this trick to avoid getting banned for cheating until they turned off Family Share for Fall Guys shortly after release.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
Yeah, but I an see why as it would be easy to abuse. Only need one copy of the game and you could cycle accounts that never owned the game out of the family sharing when they get banned.
Might be other ways to limit that, but would also likely need more restrictions on the feature that might be more annoying.
Maybe they could allow me to set a game as not shareable.
Family view does this.
Oh cool I guess they thought of everything then
Do bans typically only affect the multiplayer portion of a game? I could see my nephew fucking around and finding out with one of my games. I never play competitive multiplayer, but if I got locked out of the game completely, I'd be pretty cross with him.
Even worse, a VAC ban in your game will probably transfer to your account in general. You won't only be affected in that game, but in any games that check your VAC status.
I guess don't share it with them, or have a conversation about the consequences of their actions if they happen to cheat if you can trust them. Allowing for the loophole is worse than it possibly hurting a few people though. Cheaters ruin games for everyone else, and they don't have any control over it at all.
I think it's fair. You should know if your family cheats if you share your games with them
Nah its impossible to always know if they will cheat. It could be their first time.
That's why you have that conversation with your family.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
On the other hand, Rust had a cheater issue at some point because they only checked the account ID when banning in EAC. Cheaters leveraged this by purchasing the game in a master account, and using secondary accounts tied with Steam Family Sharing to play.
Secondary account banned? No problem. Log out, share with another account, rinse and repeat. From what I can see they disabled Family sharing altogether.
I don't think it's horrible. First, it prevents abuse, and second it adds extra social pressure to not cheat if you're using this since you know if you get caught all your family comes with you. Sure, maybe some parent sharing with a stupid child it sucks, but I use this with my brother and we're both adults and know it isn't an issue for either of us. I don't really care if this prevents more cheaters from existing. The harm will be very minimal, with pretty good upsides for the vast majority of people.