Steam :: Steam News :: Introducing Steam Families
steamcommunity.com
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 access and when they can play. Create a Steam Family To get started, you can create a Steam Family and then invite up to 5 family members.

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
  • KedlyEnglish
    33·
    8 months ago

    No ones ignoring the real issues. Steam isnt a monopoly and the 30% cut is industry standard. I’m not going to fault those who take issue with “Valve Time” or Valves shit communication. And frankly, the good stuff doesnt need to last forever, as soon as Steam enshitifies, GoG or Itch’ll be there to dethrone it, and Piracy’ll be there to get our games back if worst case scenario happens. You want better competition? Shit on Epic and EA to actually provide it

    • Spedwell@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      8 months ago

      This is demonstrably wrong. The 30% cut is standard because Steam has used the same strategy as Amazon to fix prices across the market (a “Platform Most Favored Nation” clause—see the Wolfire Games v. Valve class action, specifically items 204 and 205 on pg 55). Competing storefronts cannot undercut Steam, so why would they take less than a 30% cut?

      Epic Games Store—which is trying to undercut steam at a 12% fee—still list games at the same price as on Steam because of Valve has strongarmed publishers into fixing the prices. If Epic is charging 18% less but Valve is stopping publishers from reducing the game cost by that much, how is that not blatantly anti-competitive and anti-consumer?

      enshitifies

      Oh good, you are familiar with Cory Doctorow. He has an article on how Amazon abuses their position using the exact same playbook Valve uses.

    • DingoBilly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      8 months ago

      I don’t care about the things you mentioned, but yes, those are also issues.

      I was talking more about the issues around gambling and making loops specifically to take advantage of gamers with problems.

      As well as the real problem that a single leader leading a company/nation will mean that company/nation always fails. The successors will inevitably mess it up sometime.

      • KedlyEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        You say this like the competition hasnt already failed at the get go. Valve has the market share it has because no one else is offering anything better. Itch and GoG offer some things Valve doesnt, and because of that I wont say ALL of Valves competition is shit, but MOST of the competition STARTED off as your worst fear for what Valve MIGHT become

        • DingoBilly@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          8 months ago

          You are doing exactly what I said.

          Valve is good, but they have shit features and I’m not sure why you’re defending them (but maybe you’re just a troll/ignoring my points?).

          I don’t care about the competition - it’s like saying a person is molesting a child but hey, those two over there are molesting multiple children and murdering them! So they’re worse!

          Marketshare is also a poor predictor as it’s often the first person to market as opposed to what’s best.

          Think of it another way - Google has the most marketshare of search. Is it the best and is it doing only good things? If you say yes to both then I can’t help you further.

          • KedlyEnglish
            2·
            8 months ago

            Just like you dont care about the competition, I dont care about CS:Go. I havent really defended anything they’ve done with CS:go. Right from the start I’ve focussed on two arguements, Steam’s (not a) monopoly, and its 30% cut

            • DingoBilly@lemmy.worldEnglish
              14·
              8 months ago

              You can’t just ignore the arguments that don’t fit your world view/argument. In that scenario I could just look at the negatives of Steam and the positives of Epic and say that the Epic Store is better than Steam because I ignore all the stuff that doesn’t fit my argument.

              It’s not just Cs go but multiple games like Dota Etc. They have specifically built a whole market and ecosystem to convince you to buy stuff and gamble effectively.

              • KedlyEnglish
                2·
                8 months ago

                At no point did I say that steam is a perfect clean organization. I was calling out two very specific and common complaints against Steam, that is that its a monopoly and that it doesnt deserve its 30% cut. Your grievance against them is valid and I dont really have much to argue against it. Your fight is not mine personally, but I have no qualms against it