Teen son wants to install Steam - what do I need to know?

[nevvermynd]

Son (15) wants to install Steam on his laptop, which is currently mostly used for school work, apart from a bit of minecraft, online chess and netflix. Apart from the fact that adding a gaming platform is likely to be a distraction, Is it likely to be memory/storage intensive and is there anything else I need to know about it before deciding? (I am the administrator so he can't install without permission).

Steam itself won't be memory intensive, Steam is a platform from which you buy and install games, which then take up memory.

You'll need to be quite vigilant in relation to monitoring and parental controls, @nevvermynd - there's also a social-media/open chat functionality.

there's also a social-media/open chat functionality

Which is impossible to monitor, difficult to remove and easy to work around the parental controls to return.

I guess I'm kind of lax but at 15 I would trust teens with control of a personal laptop.

Steam is mostly a gaming platform, the only issue would be the social aspect if you don't trust him with that, the messages tend to disappear so are hard to monitor. If you're worried about it maybe agree for him to just not add anybody to his friends list or only real life friends and check up on that.

If you're going to purchase games for him make sure you don't save any credit card details so he can't buy anything you don't want if that's a worry. But there are also a lot of free to play games on there he might just want to play anyway