Steam Families is no longer in Beta, and you should give it a shot

After its surprise beta upgrade in March, Valve’s excellent Steam Family Sharing feature is finally getting released to the wider public as the new and reformed Steam Families. The new system replaces Family Sharing in its entirety, and it’s an almost entirely superior feature in all the ways that matter.

The gist of Steam Families is that it’s a comprehensive replacement for both Family Sharing and Family View. These two legacy features allowed you to share your game licenses and dictate which features of Steam your family members have access to, respectively.

Both of them are now rolled up into Families, giving administrator-level accounts a quick and easy way to manage their entire family unit from one spot. The most important upgrade that came with Families’ beta release, though, was certainly the fact that using a game license no longer locked the owner of the license entirely out of their account. It gets better, though.

Steam Families is a superb game sharing feature, as long as you contend with its new rules

Up to six members of a household/family can now pool their game licenses together into one Steam Family, thanks to the new feature. If there are multiple copies of a given game – like Helldivers 2, for example – available in a family collection, they will simply be doled out to family members as they attempt to play the game. Compared to the system’s previous iteration, this is a huge quality-of-life improvement. Further, as long as a game supports family sharing (which is not always a given), it can also be played offline by any family members.

Two types of accounts can be created in the context of a given Steam Family: Adults and Children. Adults have unrestricted access to all available game licenses, as well as the ability to curate the type of content Children-type accounts can see, which Steam features they can access, set playtime limits, and more. Children, on the other hand, only see the bits that Parents want them to see. They can also set up game purchase request, which is a neat addition. Generally, this is excellent PC gaming solution for, you’ve guessed it, families of video game aficionados.

There are some caveats to keep in mind about Steam Families, however. Firstly, whereas Family Sharing worked beyond the limits of a single household, users report that Families specifically does not support this use-case. Regional limits do still apply, too, as was the case during the beta-testing period. In other words, there are some key limitations to the new system that are going to make it incompatible with some Family Sharing users’ specific needs.

The silver lining, for the time being, is that Family Sharing is going to stay in place as an optional legacy feature. So, if you’re one of those who just cannot make use of Families due to living abroad from the rest of your family, now’s the time to think of an alternative. Further, do remember that developers and publishers do sometimes opt out of the feature. Ubisoft games, for example, were often excluded from Family Sharing, and that’s going to continue being the case. Something to keep in mind as Families continues to gain more and more steam.