Valve has launched improved Steam Families game sharing. The main novelty is playing titles in a shared library at once

Function Steam Families after approximately half a year of beta testing, it enters live operation. With this service, users can share games within their immediate family, manage parental controls or approve children’s game purchase requests. Steam Families is largely similar to its predecessor, Family Sharing, but it brings a few improvements over it.

The most important one is the removal of the limitation of playing only one game within the shared library. Now all family members can play different games across the shared library without restrictions. The restriction on multiple family members playing a single title in a shared library remains.

But users have found that if the owner of the title goes offline, other participants can play the game at the same time as the owner. Whether this is Valve’s intention or pure coincidence is uncertain, but for now this option is functional.

Steam Families can be created by anyone and up to 5 other participants can be invited to it. Each family member can earn achievements and other achievements on their account by playing each other’s games. If you leave your family, you will have to wait a whole year before you can join another family. With this step, Valve wants to prevent the rapid change of users in different families.

The Steam Families feature is now available on Steam and will fully replace the old Family Sharing feature. So if you’re using the old feature, you’ll have to set up Steam Families all over again.