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...
Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
up to 5 members
game sharing
parental controls
allow access to appropriate games
restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
view playtime reports
approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
recover a child's account if they lost their password
Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there's no alternative.
I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn't be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.
It's also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.
Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually "RiDiNg sTeAmâS DiCK".