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 acce...
I'm pretty sure this was already the case in some games before, depending on the netcode of the game.
The old FAQ said:
What if a borrower is caught cheating or committing fraud while playing my shared games? Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, not all VAC protected games are shareable. We recommend you only authorize familiar Steam Accounts and familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.
If it's a game with VAC it probably always worked as described above, but for example: People in Fall Guys did use this trick to avoid getting banned for cheating until they turned off Family Share for Fall Guys shortly after release.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
Yeah, but I an see why as it would be easy to abuse. Only need one copy of the game and you could cycle accounts that never owned the game out of the family sharing when they get banned.
Might be other ways to limit that, but would also likely need more restrictions on the feature that might be more annoying.
Do bans typically only affect the multiplayer portion of a game? I could see my nephew fucking around and finding out with one of my games. I never play competitive multiplayer, but if I got locked out of the game completely, I'd be pretty cross with him.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
On the other hand, Rust had a cheater issue at some point because they only checked the account ID when banning in EAC. Cheaters leveraged this by purchasing the game in a master account, and using secondary accounts tied with Steam Family Sharing to play.
Secondary account banned? No problem. Log out, share with another account, rinse and repeat. From what I can see they disabled Family sharing altogether.
I don't think it's horrible. First, it prevents abuse, and second it adds extra social pressure to not cheat if you're using this since you know if you get caught all your family comes with you. Sure, maybe some parent sharing with a stupid child it sucks, but I use this with my brother and we're both adults and know it isn't an issue for either of us. I don't really care if this prevents more cheaters from existing. The harm will be very minimal, with pretty good upsides for the vast majority of people.
It's stuff like this that makes me not even think about pirating games. Imagine a company that literally just improves features and makes it easier for me and my family to enjoy the media they sell. Why the fuck wouldn't I buy from their store?
Why streaming services don't understand this, I'll never know. Seems like the games industry is riding purely on Steam's usability while the film/TV industry is speedrunning enshittification.
The only games I've ever pirated are Sims 4 (I ain't paying 1000 bucks worth of dlc) and Starfield (I still feel robbed) because Steam just makes buying games at reasonable prices so easy.
The other day I bought RDR2, player it for an hour, didn't enjoy it and returned it no questions asked
So the main takeaway is that you no longer need to be offline if 2 family members want to play at the same time as long as they’re playing different games.
That’s fair and it should alleviate a bunch of headaches.
Awesome! That would mean that family sharing finally works like I thought it would work. No more tears because I started a game while the kid was playing another one.
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
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.
I kinda hope they grant the ability to block some games from being shared. I trust my kids not to use cheats, but I can understand being a bit paranoid from being banned from a game you really enjoy and not wanting to take a chance.
So this is great except for the cheating thing. Why am I being punished as the games owner because someone else in my family was banned for cheating? Ban the cheater not the owner.
Do it on a 3 strikes basis. They don't ban an account in a single offense. And therefore shouldn't do that to account groups either. It's not perfect. But it's much more forgiving and fair.