Purchasing for Family Members

[Tragic]

Love the beta so far, sharing games with my kids and limiting what games they can play is so easy now it's a huge QoL improvement.

The side that I think will need some work is purchasing games for people in my family. This is particularly an issue with multiplayer games or games my kids love that they often play on separate devices at the same time. In these cases I need more licenses than just the copy I have on my own account.

The current ways to buy a game for my kids:

• Gift it to my kid - Go on to my account, purchase the item as a gift for one of my kids, they get an email (which means I have to now figure out how to get on to their email and do this for them), then you have to accept and activate the purchase, but there are restrictions on their account, so you have to request access to these features, then go back to my account and accept that they get access, then finally activate the item
  
• Buy it for my kid on their account - Log on to my kid's account directly, request access to the store, go to my account to approve the request, go back to the kid account and add the item to their cart, go to payment options and add a payment option without accidentally adding it to their account, finish buying, and then hope over the next hour I haven't accidentally left their account open enough that they can now buy games arbitrarily

Both of these flows are hard to manage with kids who have a lot of features disabled on steam and may not know how to do things like manage an email address or sign in to their account on a browser, etc. There's a lot of back and forth between accounts, and something that should be simple (buy a license for a game for a specific kid) is not.

My proposed way to buy a game for my kids:

When purchasing a game on my account, in addition to the options like "For my account", "For my account: private" and "This is a gift", add an option that is "For a member of my family" and then let me choose the person that I am buying it for in my family group, and then it just is added to their account, no activation needed.

Thanks!

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

There is a gift notification within Steam itself with the other notifications. When the gift is ready to be redeemed, another selection in the notification window will appear for them to select and it will pull up the gift window.

[Tragic]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

There is a gift notification within Steam itself with the other notifications. When the gift is ready to be redeemed, another selection in the notification window will appear for them to select and it will pull up the gift window.

:cool_seagull:

In practice, I haven't seen this be the case. When gifting the kid, since I have social features and the store turned off, they won't even get the notification. And then when I request to have access from their account to these features, it doesn't show up either for some reason. Could be there is a bug with families with how I have things set up, but my kids are pretty young so I'm keeping their accounts very locked down. With an older teen who may not have all these restrictions this probably isn't an issue, but it is with younger kids with more locked down accounts.