Steam Families is a new one-stop-shop for managing shared games

This week Valve announced a new feature for Steam called Steam Families, and it’s a new one-stop-shop for managing all of your shared games.

Gaming can be fun for the whole family, but maybe you aren’t fond of the way things were before. It can be a pain to stay on top of stuff with separate locations for all of the family-related features. And that’s why Valve created Steam Families as a way to simplify this whole thing. Steam Families replaces the Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View features. If you were previously using those, the settings within both will now be part of the new feature.

If you’re new to sharing games and content with your family on Steam, you’ll have to get things set up to take advantage of the new feature. To get rolling, set up a Steam Family. Once you’ve finished this step, you can invite up to five people to be a part of that family. From there, you can manage what’s accessible and what’s not. You can also manage things from the web browser, mobile app, and the PC Steam client. Say you’re not at home and you want to add or remove a game from the family list. Just hop into the mobile app and you can do it from there.

The Steam Families feature comes with new parental controls

The whole point of the family features for Steam is to make games accessible to those who might be part of your family but not own the same games. But sometimes that means you have to have controls in place to protect certain aspects of the accessibility. In particular, if you’re sharing games with your kids. If they’re younger, then you might have plenty of games that are meant for older audiences that you don’t want them playing. And this is where some of the new parental controls come in.

Starting with the Steam Families rollout parents will now be able to manage which games they can play, and when they can play them. If you want to lock them out of playing games outside of a specific window between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., you can do that. You can also restrict access to the Steam Store and the Steam Community. This will go a long way to ensure parents have more peace of mind when it comes to their kids interacting with other Steam users.

Approve or deny game purchase requests

Another neat new feature parents will like is the ability to approve purchases of games that their children request. Steam Families introduces a new way to pay for a game that their kids may want. The kids can make the request for their parents to purchase a particular game in their cart, and the parents can approve and then pay for that game. It will then be added to their library along with other owned titles. Additionally, parents can deny this request if they don’t feel their kids should play whatever game is being requested.

Before this feature, parents had to gift games or give payment information to their kids. The latter of which could easily lead to more purchases than parents were willing to pay for. To check out the new Steam Families, you’ll need to join the Steam Family beta. You can do that by going into Steam Settings, navigating to the “interface” menu, and then choosing the correct beta from the dropdown menu under the “client beta participation” section. You can also read a little more about the new Steam Families feature in Valve’s blog post.