Steam Families unlocks game library restrictions (mostly) ^↗

Steam Families is a great upgrade to the current Steam Family feature. With Steam Family sharing, when members borrowed other membersʼ games, all other members are locked out of the entire library that the game belongs to, including the owner of the library. With the new Steam Families system, members are only locked out of the borrowed game only when itʼs being played - this is a huge upgrade that provides a much wider access to family libraries.

Note that some games do not allow sharing, notably multiplayer games. You will have to purchase those games for each family member.

How To Opt into the Beta (Rewritten from a post from Reddit)

Instead of using the entire beta channel on your Steam Deck, you can use stay on the stable OS and use the beta client to have access to a new family system. You can do this through the developer settings.

Go to Settings > Developer > Show Advanced Update Channels. Then in Settings > General, choose Stable for the Steam OS channel and choose Beta for the Steam Client channel

Decky Broken?

If you use Decky and it disappeared after doing the above, apparently the new Steam Recording feature breaks Decky so you might want to turn that off. Then, go into Desktop Mode, use the Decky Installer and install the prerelease/beta version. While you're at it, if you use TabMaster, use this guide to fix it (except use the latest release instead of 2.4.0). Then go back into Gaming Mode and you should have Decky (with TabMaster working) and Steam Families. I would highly recommend NOT to install any Decky or Steam OS/Client updates after doing all of this since it might break things.

Note that this might not work with Steam’s old Family Sharing feature, so you should probably only follow the above if you’re using the new Steam Families feature that came out in March 2024.