Steam Families Gives You More Parental Control When Sharing Games With Children

While I admittedly have no use for Steam Families, being the only gamer in my household, the new features that are in the now available Steam Beta Client sound like a real win for the company and parents.

Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View are being combined into the new Steam Families, and with it comes new features that can help parents manage their child's playtime. Gamers can add up to 5 family members and manage them through the Steam Client, mobile device, or web browser. Once a Steam Family is created, each member gains access to Family Sharing, parental controls, and child purchase requests.

Family Sharing allows members of your family to play your games, but you can only play the same game at the same time if you have multiple copies of said game. Fair enough I guess. You can play a game in your library and have someone you are sharing with playing a different game in your library at the same time, though.

The Parental Controls really stood out to me as a great feature for parents of younger children as you can manage their play time through hourly or daily limits, restrict access to the Steam Store, and grant access to appropriate games. Children can make requests for additional playtime or feature access which you can grant permanent or temporary access to. Playtime reports will be available to parents in order to help them manage their child's playtime. Children can also make purchase requests which can be either confirmed or denied and, if approved, paid for by the adult without having to gift or use the credit card on the child's account.

The Steam site will give you all the details on how to opt into the Steam Families beta. It sounds like a great set of features that parents can utilize to help them monitor playtime and what their children are playing. Were I a parent of gaming children, I would definitely be utilizing these new tools, but alas, my fur babies have no thumbs and watch whatever the hell they want on TV anyway.