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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Its shit like this why I want to smack the “B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY” types who claim Steam does nothing with its 30%. Steam is one of the only companies out their in our late stage capitalist society that actually does things for its customer base without being forced to. We have digital refunds, completely remappable controllers, a linux operating system and portable computer that functions as a console when you dont want to use it as a computer, the only DRM in the world that doesnt actively suck, built in mod database/support, VR, official early access marketplace support (I know it has its issues), user game reviews with multiple sorting options, and thats everything I can currently think of. Steam is not only the only company I dont actively hate (Ok, I kind of like Costco too), vut I actually quite like Steam as a company.
Digital refunds isn’t them being good, it’s them getting sued by Australia.
I think it’s also just generally a good thing for them. I’m way more hesitant to buy stuff from humble and fanatical because I can’t return stuff, so I rather pay a bit more to get it through steam.
I too hate everything that’s not completely perfect in every way
Ah yes, my comment openly states I hate steam because it isn’t perfect. It’s definitely written in there.
And they repeatedly ignored my requests for games which didn’t work, as it was three weeks or thereabouts.
Ehh… Idk if that’s really on them. You can get around the playtime restriction by just playing offline, so there has to be an alternative restriction that doesn’t have that same vulnerability.
Three weeks is more than enough time to figure out something you own doesn’t even work.
I didn’t have the time to play it, tried to play it once and it didn’t work. I have a life and it often gets in the way, especially if I buy something on sale with the intention to play it later.
I’m honestly surprised you are defending it; if my car, bought new, stopped working through my continued usage in its first year, it would be repaired for free. A game which I booted up once after three weeks wouldn’t work… And I get told “no”. Not really acceptable. 30% fee for zero accountability and my money lost.
A car isn’t at max $70 lmfao, you’re comparing completely different worlds of cost. Also depending on where you buy said car, that isn’t the case lol, you buy a lemon… Get fucked it’s capitalism baby.
Or my phone, or my TV, or my (insert device here).
Faulty goods are faulty goods.
Err no. Grow up.
The problem is that without that rule, you can just buy a game, go offline and play the entire game, then return it. You could essentially play any game you wanted to for free
That already happens; I’ve got a few thousand games on Steam so I’m not taking the piss when I want to refund a faulty game. My total is probably five or ten refunds in the life of my account (almost 20 years).
without being forced to. We have digital refunds
Small nitpick, but it’s funny that you specifically listed their refunds first. Because they were forced into that. Some may remember how comically awful Steam’s customer support used to be. It was genuinely horrible, with resolution turnaround times measured in days and weeks instead of minutes or hours. There was no instant messaging or automated system; You had to email a sketchy email address, then wait days or weeks for them to finally respond. And chances were good that the response would basically boil down to “lul git fuckd loser, sux 2 b u”
Europe started pushing for them to be more customer friendly, because their refunds in particular were breaching some local European laws. In order to keep operating in Europe, they revamped their refund process entirely and recommitted to better customer service going forwards. But they only started the entire refund revamp in 2015 because they were going to be pushed out of European markets if they failed to comply.
I brought it up because until Steam did it NO digital game marketplace had refunds. Whether or not they got sued, Steam led the way
Don’t forget private games, it’s a win-win because customers can buy games they don’t want to show to their friends and Valve get more money because they get more people buying those
embarrassingawesomegames.RIGHT! I FORGOT ABOUT THAT ONE
The company is called Valve.
Fair point. I interact with their storefront more than I’ve played their games, so my brain jumps to the word Steam before it does Valve.
What happens when the leadership or ownership changes hands?
We go back to piracy. Easy enough
Edit: Wait. Do you guys think we use Steam because we HAVE to? GoG exists bros, we’re using Steam because we prefer it. If Steam goes to shit we’ll just stop using it
Do you guys think we use Steam because we HAVE to? GoG exists bros, we’re using Steam because we prefer it.
Do you think many are aware of options like GOG? Every other time I’ve seen it mentioned/suggested, it’s often accompanied by, “What’s GOG?”
Uh yes I do. Itch and GoG are pretty well known, specifically because they are competent competitors to Steam
A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly.
The vast majority of games you pay for on Steam can be taken from you in a couple of clicks from a Valve employee. The second there’s a chance in management everything can go out the window very quickly because their position is ripe for abuse.
It’s not steam’s fault that the competition is garbage 🧐
1: Steam is NOT a monopoly, competition exists for it, its just that most of it is garbage, and the few that arent, GoG and Itch, Steam outcompetes
2: This is a problem of Steams competition being bad, not with Steam itself
A company can be considered a monopoly without having 100% of the market. Microsoft is considered a monopoly, so is Google.
As for the rest, I don’t know how their competitors being bad changes the fact that you don’t really own the games you purchase on Steam.
I’m sorry bud, but Monopoly doesnt mean “Really large company” Steam has competition, it doesnt do anything to hamper competition, and its easy enough for new competition to arise. It is not a monopoly in any sense of the word. It is the top player as a digital videogame marketplace because it is leaps and bounds better than all of its competition. You dont like the risks of digital ownership? Understandable, GoG exists to fill that niche.
If you have the power to sway the market in the direction that you want, you’re the only one with that power and you’re the default option for your product then yeah, you very much are a monopoly and that’s the position Steam has in its market.
It’s currently in court for adopting anti competitive policies regarding pricing.
Valve is a multi billion dollars company, it doesn’t need you to defend it bud.
It definitely doesnt need me to. I’m just calling bulshit on arguements that are bulshit. And it being in court for that doesnt mean its going to lose, I’d be surprised if someone wasnt attempting to sue them if it meant they could get more money, welcome to capitalism. And Steam has the position it has and is the “default” game store entirely because it is an amazing storefront and its competition sucks. You have to go out of your way to install Steam, the same amount of steps as any other digital storefront. Anyways idealists like you who dont even have a toe in the real world exhaust me, so I’m going to block you now
Microsoft was found to have a monopoly over operating systems software for IBM-compatible personal computers.
You: “But other OS exist! So it’s not a monopoly! People could just install another browser if they weren’t happy!”
This stuff is great.
But ignoring all the real issues with Steam is stupid. Its people like you that require others to point out all the issues with Valve and how it won’t last forever.
And it’s bizarre that some of them seem to get angry when someone else points the issues out.
Looks weird from my side too, when someone starts frothing at the mouth about monopolies when steam is so much as mentioned.
Its the braindead takes that are getting the Ire, Steam ISNT a monopoly, and the 30% cut is industry standard
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Valve can be attributed with saving PC gaming. When people were terrified of buying “digital only” games on this fugly client called Steam—which only had Valve games and a few no name indies—the PC gaming shelves in places like Walmart and EB Games looked like a clearance section. Just a hodgepodge of games in no particular order, worn out looking boxes of new games picked up and put back down, meanwhile the PlayStation and Xbox walls flourished and even GameCube got more love from a merchandising standpoint.
Now we trust Valve with our digital libraries the way we’d trust a bank with our money. They’ve earned that trust, and I can’t say the same for Sony or Nintendo which are happy to charge you repeatedly for the same game. Microsoft actually does a pretty good job of making your old games still playable in some form, so Kudos to them.
So will we be surprised when Epic Games Store goes tits up? No. Will we care when we lose all our games? No, they were all free. Should we support Valve as long as they continue to be the champions of PC gaming? You better if you care about where it goes.
100% These idiots shit on Valve like the PC marketplace wouldnt be infinitely worse without them. If you truly care about the PC sphere getting better, shit on Valves lack of competition, dont try to tear down the best example we have. That being said I’m hesitant to say ONLY option as at this point GoG and Itch are passable competition, even if what they provide is TINY compared to what Valve has brought the PC Gaming Sphere
I’ve used GoG. It’s good. Never used Itch.
Yeah I love how they pioneered marketing gambling and loot boxes to children, so visionary
CSGO cases pulled $1 billion revenue in 2023. The steam store brought in $8.5 billion in that same year. That’s a 30% cut of all sales traffic on steam vs. in-game loot crates on a single title.
Loot boxes pull insane numbers. And yes they exploit children and problem gamblers. Love to see so many Valve fans downvote you :/
I too love how you can make shit up on the internet
It’s literally facts lol
The other reply to my comment has some links, but there’s no way you like Valve and don’t also know about Counter-Strike loot boxes and the third party market sites.
who claim Steam does nothing with its 30%
I don’t think that’s the argument against it. Just that it’s inordinately high. But Valve is a corporation so not unexpected.
Out there*
Sigh… I’m getting tired of the Valve apologetics in every thread. They make good products, yes. They also abuse their market share to implement anticompetitive policies. The first doesn’t absolve them of the second.
Truth is, no one has any idea what it would look like if there were actual competition among the PC games platforms. Steam may be the best possible world, or maybe we don’t know what we’re missing.
To learn more about Steam’s anticompetitive practices:
- See the complaint from the pending class action case Wolfire Games v. Valve (at a minimum items 204, 205 on pg. 55) for how Steam’s PMFN clause affect publisher pricing.
- See Cory Doctorow’s Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly as a starting point for how a PMFN affects the market unfairly and harms the consumer.
What is a PMFN?
“Platform Most Favored Nation”. It’s a type of clause in platform/marketplace agreements that prohibit a seller from listing their product for a lower price on a different sales platform. Specifically, it prevents selling on a different marketplace with lower fees (e.g. Epic Games or a publishers own website) and passing the difference as savings to the consumer.
Oh, I hadn’t read of it in that form, thanks!
Doesn’t Amazon have the same stipulation on every item listed on their site?
Edit: I think I misunderstood you here. I thought Amazon’s game division was complaining about Steam. That would have been very hypocritical.
Epic gives me free games and I still don’t like them… The “problem” is Valve is Steam-rolling the competition because people want to give them money.
Yep. Because honestly, Steam is better than Epic in almost every way. When you want to buy a particular game X, you get a lot more from your purchase if it’s on Steam (workshop, friends, multiplayer, etc.). There is strong inertia and network effects that keep us all preferring Steam.
Epic can’t compete with the Steam experience. But if Epic was able to list everything 18% cheaper (the difference in fees between Epic and Steam)—then they would rightly be able to compete on price.
I understand now and that does make sense. No point in undercutting your competition if you can’t pass those savings to the customers.
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.
BuT wHy iS eVeRyOnE RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK? ThEy aRe A mOnOpOlY!!11!!!
- Some fuckwits
To be fair, a lot of monopolies are great in the beginning. It’s the inevitable power-tripping downslide that sucks.
I still love Steam and Valve though.
The only reason this hasnt happened with valve is because it’s a private company. Publically traded companies are the cancer of ou society tbh
Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.
Well and GaBeN is still alive.
He need to find a successor before his time
From what I’ve heard, his son is cool, so we might get two generations of awesome steam.
Laughs in Rockefeller and standard oil
Steam is a private company and being run by a decent human. Didn’t have to be both.
This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. My son is 13 and we share a Steam library. It’s not usually an issue but sometimes he does want to play something that requires online connection at the same time as me. Now that problem should be permanently in the past.
Even if he moves out in who knows how many years he can still take all his games with him. This is why I never feel guilty about spending money on Steam/Valve; I know that as long as GabeN lives, I won’t get stabbed in the back.
While it’s perhaps morbid, could there ever be a feature of Steam Inheritance? Eg, a person owns many thousands of dollars in games, passes away, and has a family that might like access to them.
Has some legal difficulties where you’d need to verify identity and have contact with lawyers to execute it, so it’s not exactly a software problem.
We kind of dealt with that for my Dad, but it was never really an issue. My brother just assumed control of the account and that was that. We already had all the access info, so it wasn’t like we had to ask them for anything. We just got it setup on this new Family thing yesterday though, so I can actually access most of his games again (for some reason on the old Family Sharing, his games got blocked out).
This is good
and
I wish it was easier to manage multiple steam account on a single computer because some of us have more family than devices
There is actually a way to quickly switch accounts now.
These changes are great although on a slightly unrelated note. I can sort of understand why they don’t allow you to do it but it’d be nice if I could play something on my Deck while playing something on my PC too. Sometimes I’m just idling waiting for friends in a game and want to pass the time. I know you can just switch off Wi-Fi in the Deck to do that but it is still mildly annoying.
It seems easier these days than it was back in the old times. Four of us in the family hopping around on 2 desktops and 2 old laptops. Pretty fluid! Not sure if you’re experiencing something specific?
I was also using the heck out of the ‘local fire share’ feature in steam, i only had to download Ark survival evolved (128gb!)1 time!
What I would really like is to be able sign on to my windows account and then log into steam as me without typing in another password BUT the kids can’t log into steam and then switch to my account because they don’t have my password and they’re not signed in to Windows as me.
This is so amazing I’m wondering how on earth they got publishers on board with this. I guess technically they don’t need their permission, but I see some hilariously oversized coffee mugs being thrown across board rooms in anger after reading this announcement.
Probably because it’s mostly just a QoL update which also restricts people to one family group - which was always the intention but it closes a loophole where person A could share with person B and B could separately share their library with person C unless all three are in the same family group and geo location. Plus there’s now a year penalty to switch family group or refill a slot that has been vacated so you really have to commit to it. In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I’m a little bit sad because I shared my library with my brother and niece in other countries in Europe and that’s no longer doable. Ah well
Can a family have more than two adults?
Yep
Ok now this is exciting news!!
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game sharing
Do family members have to be in the same residence, or can they be in different locations?Edit: never mind got my answer from this comment.
time limits are a super cool way to maximize addiction
What would be a good method to minimize gaming addiction in kids?
I agree that time limits aren’t ideal, but is there a better solution besides vetting every single piece of media a child wants to consume? I grew up with both, and it just taught me to be sneaky, which then ended up with me exposing myself to some truly awful stuff on the internet
I have no clue my man
