Steam :: Introducing Steam Families

Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 677 points – Steam :: Steam News :: Introducing Steam Families
steamcommunity.com

Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.

Features:

  • up to 5 members
  • game sharing
  • parental controls
    • allow access to appropriate games
    • restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
    • set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
    • view playtime reports
    • approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
    • recover a child's account if they lost their password
  • child purchase requests
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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.

This is going to be hilarious. Can't wait to see the whining online.

Isn't that exactly the same as how it worked before?

There may have been a brief moment where that didn't happen, and then people discovered they could make cheat accounts, share their own games with them and get only the cheat accounts banned, and then make new ones and repeat.

It is. My vac ban is currently 4990 days old. Thanks son!

TIL to make my future children their own steam accounts

And buy them their own copies of online games.

Instead of the sax talk, I'm going to sit them down to chat about how cheating in video games is bad m'kay

Parents, talk to your kids about saxophones. That, and cheating on video games, are the most important subjects to cover.

Currently each steam account is given a unique steam id number which is how most steam games identify the player and when you family share you are just associating that new steamid with your steamid so you can share certain purchases with if the developer allows it. Since each account is unique if I ban one it doesn't ban the other. In the past you could use the steam public web API to query a steamid to see if it was a family shared and it would respond with the parent account and you could compare that to your ban list and then ban the new account. A few years ago steam removed that capability for privacy protection and moved it to the game developers partner only access so a game developer could implement that same check but very few did and older or abandoned games are rife with cheaters now.

Now it would steam they are automagically making that check now or instead of a steam id it's a family id, I have no idea but if it prevents account whack-a-mole and brings back automation I'm all for it.

It's the only way I can see it working. Otherwise, you could just make infinite cheat accounts.

i mean theoretically they could just make it count as a strike, and if your account gets 3 strikes this way then your account is out as well

That's two cheating incidents too many.