Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families is now available for all users. 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 access and when they can play. Create a Steam Family To get started, you can create a Steam Family and then invite up to 5 family members.
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
Not sure I agree, how else are they meant to prevent the ocean of “It wasn’t me, it was my brother” excuses from hackers smurfing accounts?
I’d recommend (to everyone) that if you’re unsure -or have even the slightest doubt about the person you’re going to give access to your Steam account- to politely decline and play it safe.
Unless I’ve misunderstood; that’s exactly why I asked the question in my original comment. I’ll explain my / the reasoning:
I own a game on a Steam account (A) and want to hack (and evade bans) using another Steam account (B).
I share my library/game from account (A) to account (B) then hack on account B and only account B gets banned… What’s to then stop me from making Steam account C, D, E, F… etc? Absolutely nothing. Hence the double ban.
I stress that if you do share a game / your Steam library with others you trust them explicitly.
Restrict the number of accounts that can join that family group. And/or remove the ability to share the library from the main account for repeated offenses.
Or require multiple family members accounts to have to cheat before the owner account is banned.
I think it’s a great rule. If you’re sharing your library with others, don’t be am asshole and cheat. If you do you’ll be a disappointment to them too. More social pressure to not cheat is only a positive in my opinion, but also I will never cheat and I only share my library with people I’m confident won’t cheat as well. I don’t associate with people who want to ruin other’s fun. If you do then that’s on you. It’s your choice to risk getting banned.
Not sure where you’re going with this - I was implying that there are consequences for cheating, like losing access to a game library even if temporary.
I know it’s to make sure cheaters get punished. But that destroys the whole purpose of sharing your gaming library with your kids. They are prone to making mistakes. Should a parent be punished for that? I think the kid should.
15+ years ago I used an aimbot on the first Call of Duty that I got as a gift and got a PunkBuster ban. I was 13 years old and found something new and wanted to try it out. I got punished, in a single game, all by myself. My parents did not get punished, but I was crying.
I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games. That would be absolute horror. Not only for little kid me then, but also for my parent. If I would share my cureent Steam account with my kid and they’d get a VAC ban, I would lose €700 in CS skins alone.
I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games.
Well it’d be just the one game that they cheated in. That’s where you can sit the kid down and tell him that cheating has consequences. Ideally this talk would’ve happened before you share access though - I’m thinking of it as making sure the kid knows how to drive before you let them borrow the keys to your car.
EDIT: just to be clear, when I brought up the kid losing access to a library, I meant the shared access being revoked by the parent.
I mean, someone should get banned from cheating. I can see why this happen though, since the account playing does not own the game the account which has the game linked gets banned instead. If the account cheating has the game they are instead playing on their copy and that gets banned instead (i assume).
However the ban should be linked to the account and not the copy of the game. I do not understand why this isnt the case. Maybe because someone could just make a new account and link that to play on instead, therefor never having to buy more than one copy of the game while cheating.
Yeah, it’s most likely to prevent someone from using the family feature to get away with cheating.
As it stands now, if you get caught cheating you must create a new account and repurchase the game. So the main deterrent is the full cost of a game.
With the steam family function you could potentially create 5 new accounts per year, and simply remove them when they get caught cheating. The only deterrent would be the wait period.
So I agree with their decision. The downside is that you must trust someone before adding them to your family. If your cheating son gets you kicked off counterstrike, then just remove him from your family. They’re never too old to drop off at the fire station.
It is not different from how the previous shared libraries worked. I guess it’s there to stop cheaters from buying a single copy of the game and sharing it with throwaway accounts.
This bit is a bit fucked up:
Not sure I agree, how else are they meant to prevent the ocean of “It wasn’t me, it was my brother” excuses from hackers smurfing accounts?
I’d recommend (to everyone) that if you’re unsure -or have even the slightest doubt about the person you’re going to give access to your Steam account- to politely decline and play it safe.
They should know the account it is that’s currently using it. They’re not using your account when playing your games
Unless I’ve misunderstood; that’s exactly why I asked the question in my original comment. I’ll explain my / the reasoning:
I own a game on a Steam account (A) and want to hack (and evade bans) using another Steam account (B).
I share my library/game from account (A) to account (B) then hack on account B and only account B gets banned… What’s to then stop me from making Steam account C, D, E, F… etc? Absolutely nothing. Hence the double ban.
I stress that if you do share a game / your Steam library with others you trust them explicitly.
Restrict the number of accounts that can join that family group. And/or remove the ability to share the library from the main account for repeated offenses.
Or require multiple family members accounts to have to cheat before the owner account is banned.
stop sharing your library with strangers and kick your brother’s ass when he gets you banned
I guess it’s to prevent creating family members for the purpose of cheating
I think it’s a great rule. If you’re sharing your library with others, don’t be am asshole and cheat. If you do you’ll be a disappointment to them too. More social pressure to not cheat is only a positive in my opinion, but also I will never cheat and I only share my library with people I’m confident won’t cheat as well. I don’t associate with people who want to ruin other’s fun. If you do then that’s on you. It’s your choice to risk getting banned.
This is about families.
On one hand you have a responsible adult with over 500 collected Steam games and on the other hand you have a 14 year old discovering porn and cheats.
Sounds like a great life lesson to be taught by a responsible adult to a 24 year old discovering cheats.
Like how we respect eachother in online gaming and there are not cheaters?
Not sure where you’re going with this - I was implying that there are consequences for cheating, like losing access to a game library even if temporary.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this either.
I know it’s to make sure cheaters get punished. But that destroys the whole purpose of sharing your gaming library with your kids. They are prone to making mistakes. Should a parent be punished for that? I think the kid should.
15+ years ago I used an aimbot on the first Call of Duty that I got as a gift and got a PunkBuster ban. I was 13 years old and found something new and wanted to try it out. I got punished, in a single game, all by myself. My parents did not get punished, but I was crying.
I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games. That would be absolute horror. Not only for little kid me then, but also for my parent. If I would share my cureent Steam account with my kid and they’d get a VAC ban, I would lose €700 in CS skins alone.
Well it’d be just the one game that they cheated in. That’s where you can sit the kid down and tell him that cheating has consequences. Ideally this talk would’ve happened before you share access though - I’m thinking of it as making sure the kid knows how to drive before you let them borrow the keys to your car.
EDIT: just to be clear, when I brought up the kid losing access to a library, I meant the shared access being revoked by the parent.
I’m talking about how an account that cheats while using the shared library of a parent, would get the account of the parent in trouble.
That’s what I took away from this whole ordeal.
If they just lose access to that game on their own account, sure, perfectly fine.
I mean, someone should get banned from cheating. I can see why this happen though, since the account playing does not own the game the account which has the game linked gets banned instead. If the account cheating has the game they are instead playing on their copy and that gets banned instead (i assume).
However the ban should be linked to the account and not the copy of the game. I do not understand why this isnt the case. Maybe because someone could just make a new account and link that to play on instead, therefor never having to buy more than one copy of the game while cheating.
Yeah, it’s most likely to prevent someone from using the family feature to get away with cheating.
As it stands now, if you get caught cheating you must create a new account and repurchase the game. So the main deterrent is the full cost of a game.
With the steam family function you could potentially create 5 new accounts per year, and simply remove them when they get caught cheating. The only deterrent would be the wait period.
So I agree with their decision. The downside is that you must trust someone before adding them to your family. If your cheating son gets you kicked off counterstrike, then just remove him from your family. They’re never too old to drop off at the fire station.
It is not different from how the previous shared libraries worked. I guess it’s there to stop cheaters from buying a single copy of the game and sharing it with throwaway accounts.
That sort of behaviour should be easy to track if it happens more than once though