Valve politely requests that you use Steam's Family Sharing only for 'close family' members in a household', but let's face it: everyone shares their games on Discord with friends

Steam's new family sharing system, simply called Steam Families comes with a lot of rules to prevent it from becoming a lending free-for all. Steam Family groups are restricted from joining or leaving at will due to a year-long cooling off period.

I understand: Valve must walk a fine line between making users happy, and keeping developers from being worried that they will lose sales to a bunch small lending libraries. This would lead to them all opting out and making the feature useless. Valve has a stipulation for how we should use Steam Families, but it's a request that even they know is futile.

Valve wrote: "While we understand that families can take many forms, Steam Families was designed for a household with up to six members." "To that end we may adjust requirements for joining a Steam Family over time as we monitor usage to keep the feature in line with its intent."

I'm certain that many people will use Steam Families in a single family, and it has some nice parental controls. This statement about the "intended use" of the feature is clearly motivated by the knowledge that many Steam users have actually used Valve's Family Sharing features since 2014: To share games with their buddies.

Of course they are. Steam users can share their libraries with either a sibling, or a Discord buddy from Minnesota. The only difference is that the Discord buddy from Minnesota may have better games.

Valve added region restrictions to the new Families system. This was not present in the old system. For example, a PC Gamer writer from the UK couldn't share his library with someone in Spain. The "household" rule is only a soft one, at least until now.

I'm not certain what requirements Valve can adjust to enforce the one household, close-family intention. Ensure everyone has the same IP? A shared home network, like Netflix's crackdown on password sharing? If it goes too much, such as kicking kids out of Steam Families when they leave for college, this feature will become a huge hassle for Valve.

I can't be sure, but I suspect Valve won't crack down on sharing games among friends - hence it refers to "intended" and not required use - although the region restriction complicates things for the multinational gaming friend groups. Steam's support page has more information about Steam Families.