Steam Family Share becomes even better (hopefully) with Steam Families

Not sure about the "fake" part, they are being clear about the intended use of the feature:

Who can be in a Steam Family?

While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.

To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.

^^ seen reports of people in the EU who live close but in different country's not being able to share anymore

Damn. There goes my game sharing with my gf when she's away.
Another great "improvement", Steam.

No, only opt into the new beta and invite.

i read through it a bit....
you can add your son as a "child" and apparently decide which games he can play

im still not sure about visability for both children and adults alike... especially about certain adult games i wouldnt want others to see
edit: maybe by using the private feature...?

"Family" was really just a misnomer. The feature was already pretty limited as it was since you couldn't access your library while someone else was using it etc

Yep. Each account has its own saves, achievements and whatnot

That's what it sounds to me too (which wasn't the case before). That would be nice indeed.

yep my dlcs showed up im my brother acount

If both you and friend have the game but different DLCs, you will be able to complete the game on your account, but you'll have to use friend's copy, their DLCs won't appear on your account.

https://imgur.com/a/OALghB2

Which means if you have Game + DLC1 and friend have Game + DLC2, then officially you can't merge them into Game + DLC1 + DLC2 (unofficially, depends how game check DLC ownership - some check if DLC is on account, others just check if you have files).

You could also always use something like Teamviewer to remotely access his PC and give authorization.

Only the owner, and whoever gets the actual ban, there's an FAQ point regarding to this exact situation.

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. Other family members are not impacted

Yes but before only one person could play at a time. Now at least two people can use the same account.

The nice part about this system is that if you all have copies of the same game, there wont be conflicting problems playing at the same time. Before, you couldn't use your acc when someone played a game from your library. So now, you could have a family member try out a game, and if they really like it and you want to play it, then they can either way till you're playing something else, or buy the extra copy.

Pretty sure this implies you can't:

[...] Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family.

Nope. The accounts part of a same family get grouped together.

If you could there'd be no point to buy games anymore, it would be one master acc store set up by a capitalist business where they invite people to different families, buy a few copies of each game, and then after they finish the playthrough kick them out, and they'll charge a sub fee like a game pass fee to join the family. Highly doubt steam will ever go in this direction, as it's basically shutting down their own business, and allowing "entrepreneurs" to exploit steam instead. Doubt it's in steams interest to go this route.

That would be me, I know it existed? I guess? But I had no idea it was out already, I thought it was a Steam beta thing just like the new client was a few months back. It's going to be so cool for my brother even my mom to play some of my games I have grow to love. Such a cool feature if it is implemented correctly.

you still do have to buy games multiple times if you want to play them together and they aren't split / shared screen and you have controllers. would love to share more of my multiplayer games i got cheap in bundles with my kids but don't want to buy extra copies if the multiplayer isn't actually good.

still, being able to play something out of my library while my son is playing my copy of plants vs zombies is an improvement! i wonder if this will also allow me to leave an idler game running on my main computer and then start up a controller game on my htpc, which are both signed into my steam account. right now it won't let me do that even though i can totally leave the idler running as long as i launch my second game on the same computer.

It makes no sense as to why they'd ever allow this intentionally, unless you got two heads and 4 arms. I get you wanting to afk hours in an idle game, but do that when you sleep maybe. It would be like asking them to willingly provide another exploit for afking hours and faking acc data.

They provided you a secondary option, make a separate acc and make a family for yourself and now you can play the games from the main on two accts effectively being able to idle on your pc and steam deck on an alt.

I don't get the problem. If they're free games, you can just add the game to all the accounts. If they're not free, then yeah, they'll never allow being able to simultaneously play more copies than are owned in the group.

i've run into a similar issue. idler on my main pc means i can't launch lego batman from my same account on the htpc in my living room to play with my son. i can of course run the idler on my main pc while also launching lego batman (or whatever else i want to actively play) on that same pc, so weird it makes a distinction.

guess when it's different devices it could be different people? like i could have a huge library and give the login information to everyone i know and then we could all play different single player games at the same time. maybe they could let it count against the family and allow same account different devices to run different games at the same item up to the family account limit.

i could try setting up the htpc with its own steam account and add that to my family (i have 4 people in my family now) but i'd rather have the achievements on games i only really play in the living room still be on my main account.

I guess that's what it means. I'm in the same boat with my gf who goes back and forth between France and Portugal.

Parental control features let adults:
Allow access to appropriate games

So seems there is some options.

Like come on, just use the feature for it's intended purpose for once.

That's a limited perspective. My gf is from Portugal. She now shares her life between France, where we live, and Portugal, where she visits her family, and works part time with her law practice for several months at a time.
We never used the feature to abuse the system. We shared games to have fun together when we're apart.
The only other persons I have shared games with are my nephews on a temporary basis (who share their lives between Canada, where their dad is, and France where their Mom is) so the feature is now useless for me.

It's not an unusual situation. I have colleagues whose families live all over Europe. I have a friend whose husband lives in Sweden while he himself lives in Norway.

It would have been way more useful to just lock the feature to a couple accounts rather than geolocking it, if the goal was to crack down on abusers but as always Steam just made an arbitrary decision that affects more than the abusers.

Currently it's in beta, so you and rest of "family" have to manually sign in - best check link for instructions.