Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
- up to 5 members
- game sharing
- parental controls
- allow access to appropriate games
- restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
- set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
- view playtime reports
- approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
- recover a child’s account if they lost their password
- child purchase requests
This is demonstrably wrong. The 30% cut is standard because Steam has used the same strategy as Amazon to fix prices across the market (a “Platform Most Favored Nation” clause—see the Wolfire Games v. Valve class action, specifically items 204 and 205 on pg 55). Competing storefronts cannot undercut Steam, so why would they take less than a 30% cut?
Epic Games Store—which is trying to undercut steam at a 12% fee—still list games at the same price as on Steam because of Valve has strongarmed publishers into fixing the prices. If Epic is charging 18% less but Valve is stopping publishers from reducing the game cost by that much, how is that not blatantly anti-competitive and anti-consumer?
Oh good, you are familiar with Cory Doctorow. He has an article on how Amazon abuses their position using the exact same playbook Valve uses.