Steam Beta brings massive changes.

This week, Valve has release a beta of their upcoming family sharing revamp — and it’s better than ever. Plus, we got a behind the scenes look at the Steam Deck OLED trailer’s creation. And, how is it that the “impossible” MiSTer core is complete already? All of this and more today. Let’s get right into it!

Steam Deck OLED trailer video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpExNYMxALEFirst up, do you remember the Steam Deck OLED trailer? It had this awesome video wall — or more accurately an orb — made out of OLED Decks. And all the screens were synchronized. It was pretty neat. Anyway. Valve released a new video this week. It was a time lapse of assembling the orb. It looked awesome.

SUYU Version 0.0.2

Remember the Yuzu fiasco? Where Nintendo attacked an open source Switch emulator in order to intimidate the whole emulation scene? Well, Suyu, a fork a Yuzu with a cheeky name, has just had a new release! This is the Yuzu you know and love with new branding. Version 0.0.2 is out now and it’s available for Android, Linux, Mac and Windows. Check it out.

MiSTer N64 Development

One thing I’ve been getting into recently is messing around with the MiSTer FPGA hardware emulation stack. I’ve got my MiSTer here and I’ll be releasing a video about it in the coming weeks. Make sure you like that smash button and get subscribed so you don’t miss that.

MiSTer is an excellent little Linux-powered device and it does full hardware emulation of retro consoles. It’s absolutely neat and I’ve been enjoying my time with it.

MiSTer uses “cores” to emulate specific consoles. Cores are a set of instructions that tells the FPGA chip exactly how to arrange itself to emulate other hardware. And recently one Core developer, Robert Peip, has been doing what most thought impossible: implementing the N64 hardware on the MiSTer board.

With about 95% of the N64 core’s work complete, Robert has stated that we’ve hit the ceiling in terms of what the MiSTer’s hardware can actually do. Most N64 titles will work fine here, but games like Jet Force Gemini and Conker’s Bad Fur Day will sadly never be compatible with the MiSTer cores.

This is a massive achievement as many thought getting any N64 games to run would be impossible, so Robert’s work here is a triumph. He’s going to be submitting his work to the official MiSTer project and then he’ll take a well-earned vacation, since he hasn’t just been working on the N64, but also the PS1.

If you want to pick up a MiSTer kit for yourself, you’ll find some links below!

Steam Deck’s top 100 games

Every month, Valve releases the most played games on Steam Deck via their X account. They’ll post a Tweet I’m sorryy… an Xcretion and it shows the most played games for any given month. Well, they just went a step further and have given us a list of the top 100 most played games on Steam Deck over the last year. This is pretty awesome. Let’s look at the list.

Number 1 is Baldur’s Gate 3, which Emily plays all the time… so I get it. Then there’s Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver, Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring, Palworld, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V, Stardew Valley, Red Dead Redemption 2, Hades, Brotato and more.

That’s pretty neat to see. But the list goes on and on.

What I find fascinating, though, is that the very last game on the list is Rocket League. That game is not purchasable on Steam because Tim Weeney is a jamoke. So it’s fascinating that the game is in the top 100 most played games on Deck.

Another thing to note is that Kotaku says 27% of the games on that list are not verified—some of them are even “unsupported.” It’s no secret that there are many games with an “unsupported” rating that continue to work

Steam Families

This week, Valve made a huge splash with Steam Families. This is quote:

…a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play.

You can create a Steam Family which can consist of up to six members. When an account joins a family, it gains access to Family Sharing, Parental Controls, and Child Purchase Requests.

Parental Controls

Parental Controls include new features that allow parents to set limits on what games their kids can play and when they can play those games.

Parental Control let parents:

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

Child Purchase Requests are a new feature aimed at streamlining the process of purchasing games for a child’s account. This is probably the biggest reason for Valve to create Steam Families as, as they mentioned in their post, buying games for your kids is a quote “common (and sometimes time-consuming task… as if involves gift purchases or let[ting] your kids borrow a credit card.”

Seeing as it’s such a source of friction, Valve wanted a way to enable parents to spend more money, more easily. I can imagine that kids will pepper their parents with purchase requests, though. It will be interesting to see how this feature, specifically, evolves over time.

Family Sharing

When you join a Steam Family, your shareable games are pooled with the rest of the family members’ titles. You will see the “Steam Family” category in your library. One huge improvement, here? Playing a game from the Family’s library doesn’t lock out the library from the rest of the family. This is huge. And if multiple family members own Stardew Valley, then the family owns that many copies of the game and are able to play simultaneously… and non-owners “create their own save games, earn their own Steam achievements, have access to workshop files and more.”

I just want to take a moment and recognize something, here. If Epic, EA, Microsoft or pretty much any other major company with a storefront announced a major change of this scale, you can bet your ass that they’d take that opportunity to degrade something about the service. Think about reading the words from the Steam Families post and imagine the dread you’d feel if any other platform had said them: “[families] replaces… Family Sharing”

Yet, here? Valve went out of their way to improve this system. True capitalists who pride themselves on the quality and functionality of their products and services, rather than the sniveling, shareholder bootlicking enshittifying corporatists like Microsoft and Google.

Interesting Details

So, there are cooldowns when it comes to Steam Families. Meaning, that if you leave (or are kicked out of) a family, you have to wait one year since you joined it before being able to join another. Additionally, there is a one year cooldown time for each slot in a family, too.

If someone else in your family is banned for cheating while playing a game you own, you’ll both be banned.

Valve has said that they’re going to be actively monitoring the usage of Steam Families and may change the maximum size, and requirements for participating in a family to keep its usage in line with the intent of this program. And I’d say that seems fair.

Beta

Currently, this is only in the Steam Beta client, but hopefully we’ll see Steam Families coming to the Stable client soon.

Well, that’s going to do it for this video. Thanks to everyone who supports this show on Ko-fi, Patreon, and as YouTube Members. And I’ll see you next time!

-- Chapters --
00:00 - Intro
00:19 - Steam Deck OLED Trailer Behind the Scenes
01:20 - Yuzu fork SUYU reaches version 0.0.2
01:50 - MiSTer's impossible N64 is ""done
03:42 - Top 100 most played games on Deck
05:07 - Steam Family Beta hits with MASSIVE upgrades to sharing your games