Valve shuts down Steam Family Libraries for good

The family sharing function on the Steam gaming platform is finally history after 12 years. Valve is switching it off in favor of the successor function Steam Families, which has been running in parallel since its completion in September 2024. Anyone who now wants to share games via Steam must set up a Steam Family. This has advantages and disadvantages.

With Steam Families, Valve is removing the biggest restriction of the previous family libraries: Members can now play different titles from the same account in parallel. Previously, Steam blocked the entire library for others as soon as the owner started any game. Multiple family members can still only play the same title if they purchase it multiple times. Rights restrictions for children are functionally new.

Fewer options for friends

Valve is restricting the ability for friends to share games. Users can only join a single Steam family, which is also limited to six members. You can only join a Steam Family every 12 months and as soon as you leave one, your place is blocked for the same amount of time. Valve admits in its blog that family relationships can certainly change, but probably not so frequently that constant changes would be necessary.

There are also reports on Reddit that Steam families can often only be set up if the members have already been on the same network (via WLAN or Ethernet). Valve apparently performs a similar IP synchronization during setup as the video streaming service Netflix, for example. After the initial setup, the Steam location should not matter.

Larger or multiple groups of friends can no longer share games with each other due to the default settings. In addition, users will hardly be able to buy Steam accounts with individual games and link them to their main account.

(mma)