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.
Wow this is huge. I’ve been wanting this for years.
It seems like a not great deal for developers who will want to sell multiple copies to the same house though. We’ll see how many disable the feature.
Oth people are more willing to pay for a digital game if it’s easily shared within the family, just like the physical game.
I think this is the gamble and Steam does well in these
For me personally it doesn’t make a huge difference, the bar to greatly increase my willingness to pay starts at DRM free (i.e., being on GOG). But perhaps for others this will matter a lot more (especially people with children)!
I like the steam ecosystem. You can message and call friends, easy to map controllers, watch your friends play or remote play together, and it works on the steam deck and Linux. Overall a great platform and worth a lot more than buying disks.