Balanced Play › Setup guides › Steam

Steam: the setup, then the link

Balanced Play drives Steam’s own daily play-time limit, which means the cap follows your child to any PC or Steam Deck they sign in to — a local app can’t dodge it. Steam only offers that limit inside a Steam Family, so there’s real setup on Valve’s side first.

Part 1 — set up Steam

All of this happens in Steam, not in Balanced Play. Expect 15–20 minutes, and you’ll need a moment on the child’s PC. If your family is already set up this way, skip to part 2.

1. Give the child their own Steam account

   On the child’s PC or Steam Deck, as them. Steam’s play-time limit is attached to an account, so a child playing on your account can’t be limited separately from you. If they don’t have one, create it at store.steampowered.com/join and sign in with it on the machine they actually play on.

2. Create your Steam Family

   Back on your own PC, signed in as yourself — not the child. This matters: whoever creates the family owns it. Open Steam → Steam menu → Settings → Family, then Create a Family. A family holds up to six accounts.

   Get the membership right the first time. Two separate year-long cooldowns bite here. An account that leaves a family waits about a year before it can join or create a different one — and the seat it vacated stays locked for a year too, so a mis-click costs you one of your six. (Re-inviting the same person back into the same family is generally fine.)

3. Invite the child — as a child

   Still on your PC, as yourself. In Settings → Family, choose Invite a Member, find the child’s account, and pick Invite as Child. Steam can’t change that role afterwards — correcting it means removing and re-inviting, which costs a seat for a year (see above).

   Then, on the child’s PC signed in as them, open the same panel and accept the invitation. Until they accept, Balanced Play won’t see them.

4. Turn on parental controls for that child

   Back on your PC, as yourself again. Open Settings → Family, find the child’s row, and open their parental-control settings. Choose what they’re allowed to see and do — the store, the community, friends, and which of the family’s games they can play.

5. Set the PIN — and write it down somewhere you’ll find it

   Steam will ask for a recovery email and a numeric PIN. That PIN is the single most important thing on this page, because Balanced Play cannot set a time limit without it. Steam will not show it back to you later — if you lose it, the only route is a reset through that recovery email.

   Why the PIN matters so much. Steam accepts a read of your family’s settings without it and rejects every write — which means every time limit. A link saved without a working PIN would look perfectly healthy while nothing was actually being limited. So Balanced Play checks the PIN against Steam before saving: a wrong one fails while you’re standing there, rather than quietly at bedtime.

6. Install the Steam Mobile app on your phone

   Sign in to it as yourself. Linking uses its QR scanner, so you never type a Steam password into Balanced Play and we never see one.

Part 2 — link Balanced Play to Steam

1. Open Balanced Play and start the link

   Your child → Link a platform → Steam. A QR code appears and Balanced Play starts waiting.

2. Approve it from the Steam Mobile app

   In the Steam app: menu (☰) → Scan QR, point it at the code, and approve. No password is typed anywhere.

   Reading this on the phone that has Steam installed? You can’t scan your own screen — tap “Or open in Steam on this device” and approve there instead.

3. Wait — the screen moves on by itself

   Nothing to paste. Balanced Play picks up the approval the moment you tap it. Steam sometimes rotates the challenge mid-wait; the code refreshes on its own if that happens.

4. Enter the PIN, then tap the child

   This is one screen, and the order matters: the PIN box is at the top and the children’s names stay greyed out until a PIN is in it. Type your Steam parental PIN — the field is labelled Family View PIN, which is Steam’s older name for it — then tap your child’s name to finish.

   If we couldn’t read your family, you’ll get boxes for the child’s 17-digit SteamID (the number at the end of their profile URL, starting 7656119…) and the PIN, then a Finish button. Linking never dead-ends on that.

What this covers — and what it doesn’t

Covered: every Steam game, on any PC or Steam Deck signed in to that Steam account, because the cap lives on Steam’s side rather than on one machine.

Bedtime, but through the cap. When your household’s bedtime starts, the limit Balanced Play pushes to Steam drops to zero. We leave Steam’s own allowed-hours schedule alone rather than writing a second, competing clock into it.

Not covered: games on that PC that aren’t Steam games — Minecraft Java, anything from the Epic launcher, browser games. For those, also set up the Windows PC agent. The two are designed to work together: the PC agent deliberately skips Steam-installed titles so they’re never counted twice.

If something goes wrong

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