PC gaming giant Valve has announced Steam Families, a new extension of their Steam client that will let users share and play games from the

The new Steam Families functionality is available now via the latest Steam Beta Client and will let a household of up to 6 family members share games off the same Steam Library.

Furthermore, while game sharing was possible before on Steam with users that shared their library with friends or family, the new Steam Families feature will let users play simultaneously off the same library.. even if they’re online at the same time.

This means a single Steam Library tied to a Steam Family account will essentially be able to let up to 6 users play games from that library at the same time, online or offline.

The only catch with Steam Families is if two members of that Steam Family want to both play the same game – you’ll have to buy two copies of the game, which are stored in the account.

Sharing games isn’t the only focus of Steam Families – as the name implies, it’s focused on an actual family with parents and their children, hence the brand new parental control features and even robust game stats monitoring. You’ll be able to limit what your kids play and even see how much they’re playing.

For those parents concerned about their kids meeting unsavory and unwashed degenerates online, you’ll even be able to manage various Steam features at the granular level, locking off access to the Steam Store, Community, and even Steam Chat.

Child users in Steam Families will naturally be able to request approval to purchase things, where the child user can add a game to their Steam Store cart and have the purchase approved and paid for by their parent. This would go hand-in-hand with limitation of Steam Store access, of course.

This is Niche Gamer Tech. In this column, we regularly cover tech and things related to the tech industry.