It sounds like the big change here is allowing for playing a game from a family member's library even while they are playing some other game. Currently accessing one game from a family member's library locks that family member out of playing anything at all, requiring offline mode shenanigans to circumvent.

This was the big limitation we run into constantly in my house - if that's removed, this is pretty awesome news.

Yes, no more offline mode shuffle and dealing with saves getting out of sync.

“Steam Families are intended to contain your immediate family. As major life events can change who lives in your household, it is understandable that some day you may need to join a new Steam Family. Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family.”

I get that this is intended to prevent some form of piracy-adjacent usage, but I've seen disfunctional households where a family member has been kicked out/left multiple times in a year.

Your steam family does not require a 1:1 mapping to who is in your household at all times.

This is awesome! I'm incredibly happy to see some flexibility here:

> While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.

As opposed to plans like Amazon Household which allows:

> Up to two adults (aged 18 and over), each with their own Amazon account

Even minor recognition that "family" doesn't always mean "two adults and 2.4 children" is great. This means that Steam Families could include things like two married adults with their children, two married adults with a live-in elderly parent, a polyamorous triad... way more than the standard "nuclear family" model that is often imposed.

It does seem to fall down a bit on cases like a child who splits time between two families (e.g. divorced parents) but might have siblings/step-siblings in each. But I'll celebrate the progress over the Amazon model for sure!

This is actually great. Of course it really only mirrors the situation that you would be in if we all still had software on physical disks: if the family owns two copies of a game, then two people can play at any one time, regardless of what anyone else is doing. Still happy though.

Very happy here too. The previous iteration (Family Sharing) locked you out of the entire library while someone was playing, now it's on a game granularity. The multiple copies part is also great. It was a hassle to set up an account and buy games for minor just to play certain coop games together. (Remote play together already works well for couch-coop games though)

It also gave away if you’re playing and invisible, as someone who has access to your library wouldn’t be able to play :))

Ironic that they're reintroducing being able to play games from a shared library at the same time as the sharer is playing something else, when they removed that years ago for . . . Whatever their reason was at the time.

>Whatever their reason was at the time

Selling access to shared accounts on eBay-like sites.

I believe they addressed this by having different saves, if the post from Steam is to be believed.