Introducing Steam Families

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Same household only? Why can't they just allow a certain number of people in your "family" use it? I have no kids, but I'd like to allow my siblings or in-laws use my games. They live in different cities.
- I really doubt they've got an IP lock in place; just set up a Family and invite your siblings and in-laws.
  Edit: tried it with a buddy, and it is in fact IP locked; he was unable to join until I set up a VPN for him to connect through. After initial setup, you don't need the same IP address.
  
  They do point out that they will be monitoring how it's used, and could adjust things later.
  Sounds like corporate-speak for "if people abuse this, we'll lock it down harder."
  Even if people are using it to share with actual family around the country, they may get caught up in future updates that remove that feature. Also note that any publisher can opt out of the sharing. If EA or Ubi or some other big company doesn't like the lack of limits, they may be able to force Valve's hand in changing the policy.
  The idea is wonderful, but there are a ton sof ways this could end up worse than the old system.
  
  This is technical but you could set up a wireguard vpn server and let your friends connect to your computer. Then you all look like you are sitting in your home network from the steam servers point of view.
  Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.
  Your friends will have a bit of lag though since all their connections have to go through your computer to the steam network. But I believe it may not be noticeable.
  
  Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.
  Free for 100 devices! You can legit install it on every device virtual and physical device in your home and maybe run out of devices for the free plan. Right now I use it to secure the connection between my VPS proxy and my Minecraft server, as duct tape fixing some network fuckery, and as my primary means of connecting to services inside and outside of my LAN
  
  That's very generous of them. I thought it was just 3. :)
  
  I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they'd have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn't the case so they upped the free accounts
  
  Bait and switch. Stay tuned for enshittification.
  
  Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be "get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses" and they're in the "establish growth" phase so I think there's a few years before enshitification begins.
  There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven't tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper
  
  Thanks for the Netbird link, wasn't aware of it.
  If I'm not badly mistaken it's also possible to self host Tailscale. For example:
  https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
  I haven't tried either. Probably should at some point, but I haven't really found a use case yet.
  
  By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering
- Because people will absolutely abuse it for other means, like selling shared accounts and what not.
- I don't think they put a restriction on household Internet IP, just that you can only share with people within your region.
  
  Region meaning country/continent? One of them lives across the country.
  
  Region meaning country
- You can likely use it from different physical locations. But just know that I'm order to set it up, you have to login with your account on their computer at some point to enable the family sharing feature. So unless you go there qnd do it, or remote into their computer to do it, or give them your password, you can't use that feature. Some level of trust in each other is required.
  
  That is not how the new families work. The new on all you need to do is sent an invite and they'll be able to join the family. No need to log in their computers or authorise anything, just a simple invite.
  
  It actually is how it worked in the beta at least. I've been using it for several months with my friends and the invite wouldn't work unless I had logged into steam on their pc previously.
  
  That is certainly not the case, either something unexpected happened or either of you didn't have the families beta on. I have never logged in someone else's PC and neither have someone logged on mine, I always use Steam on beta and I was able to send family invites to my friends, however only the ones in my region (country) were able to join.
  
  I did (and do) have the families beta on. Maybe that's the way it worked for some people? I don't know, but it certainly is what happened in my case.
  
  How new is it? I just set this up about 2 weeks ago and it required logging into both computers
  
  But just know that I'm order to set it up, you have to login with your account on their computer at some point to enable the family sharing feature
  I doubt it, because I think that's literally how it used to work
- Because the point of this is to force friends and adult family members to purchase extra copies of games. Do yall actually think Valve is giving away free game access?
  To those who are saying it's not IP locked: people on reddit are all saying that the newer sign-ups are locked but they didn't clear older sharing from early beta.

30 comments