Valve has been doing a GREAT job of making gaming better. Their push to be the primer, customer focused, gaming platform is obvious by every release of the Steam Client and update to the SteamDeck. This is about how they have taken another step to make family gaming time even better.
Background
One of the challenges I have had with Steam over the years as my kids have become interested in playing games on Steam with their own machines is the ability to share the Steam Library. Since my oldest has his own computer with his own Steam account now, I would rather share my copy of “Lego Star Wars: A Skywalker Saga” with him than buy the whole thing over again with all the DRM. It makes sense to me because if we had more than one Super Nintendo in the house, I could very easily let him have the cartridge to take to his room play it there with his friends, right?
There has been a family share feature with Steam but it has been historically rather frustrating. Before you can play the game, you have to play this game of dancing accounts on one computer. It wasn’t exactly self-evident as to how to share previously. We made it happen but not after some time of fiddling about with it. Here is the help on the previously used system for family sharing.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6B1A-66BE-E911-3D98
Now, Steam has made it much easier, dare I say, “and “intuitive” to share your library within the family and I am now smiling from ear to ear! It is still in Beta, at the time of writing, but works smashingly well.
Introducing Steam Families News Release
So, in CubicleNate fashion, where what is that I’m doing is probably unnecessary to most people as I have claimed that much of what I do infrequently has actual value, here are my notes to myself on this very thing.
Steam Settings
In Steam Settings which can be found under Steam > Settings. Go to the Interface Tab.
Within the Client Beta Participation Section, select the drop-down and pick Steam Families Beta.
This will require you to restart Steam as it will download the new beta client and so forth. This is a client update that is required. Depending on your Internet speeds, this may take a little while.
Enable Family Share
Once the Steam Client starts back up, go to the Family tab and select the button that says “Manage your Steam Family.”
This will open or focus the main Steam window. Look for “Invite a Member”
When prompted, who would you like to invite, select “Search friend list”
A window will pop up to search your friends list to add to your “Steam Family.” Do note, that you can’t join more than one family at a time. At least, that was what I last read, this could change, of course as all things seem to be in a state of constant flux.
The other note you want to keep in mind is that you can’t change families within six months or something like that. Also, terms change so this could move left or right as well.
From there, specify whether or not the family member is a child or an adult and complete the process. There are options to enable parental controls and limit the games and other factors as well. Truly, super cool and super convenient.
The person being added to the family will have to accept the Steam Family invitation. Once accepted, you are all set. The job is done, family share of your library is active! There is no need to do the Patting Juba with accounts to get the games you want shared with your family members. I truly appreciate this incredible enhancement to the Steam Client and how Valve is making gaming even more accessible to those that want to take part of this form of entertainment.
There is much more to this, read through the news release on all the other features. The big win for me was having the ability to share games with family members and now I am able to do it, easily!
Final Thoughts
Valve has bee a great steward of the gaming community on PCs and especially great to the Linux folks. When I started using Linux in 2002, the game selection was pretty light with not a lot of options outside of the various community efforts of games like “Tux Racer,” “Armagetron,” “Pingus,” and the like. Those games are great but they don’t exactly bring the masses to Linux. With Valve bringing Steam gaming to Linux, this all started to shift. Proton has really opened up the floodgates of gaming to the Linux world and now, there are only a handful of games out there that are not Linux friendly. It is a great time to be a Linux user and especially a Linux Gamer on Steam. Thank you Steam for being awesome!
References
Introducing Steam Families News Release
SteamDeck
River City Ransom: Underground on openSUSE Linux
