No Stupid Questions

• Each account has their own saves.
• Each account has their own digital purchases
• Each account can nominate one physical console as their "primary"*, any other account on that console is then licenced to run their games. Note however:
  • child accounts can be restricted from running mature content
  • accounts that don't own the content can run the games but not install them. This is a hassle for me because I own my family library but have to cycle through the games when my son wants to replay something.

* technically each account can have one primary ps4 and one primary ps5, in the cross gen period people you use this to lend their ps4 console and library to family/friends but that isn't so relevant today.

Edit:

For digital purchases the owning account can login to other non-primary consoles and access their library there (for the duration of the login session). This can be used to share the library when visiting other households but does require careful consideration about who should own each title.

One tip when you have kids: If all the accounts are set up correctly as family accounts you can control playtime right in the settings. The PS will then log out the kids after (say) one hour of play automatically.

Using the PSN website you can grant an extension day by day. When my son had done his homework before playing I would regularly grant another hour. "Can I play more? - Have you done your homework? - Yes - No problem"

In the long run that conditioned him to do his stuff before playing. (And I did trust him, when he said he was finished with his work)

When you have kids it's really worth finding out how to set that up. And it saved us sooooo many "turn it off now" discussions.

PlayStation has a feature where each account has a "primary console". Games that are purchased on an account can be played by that specific account on any console, or can be played by any account on the primary console.

Everyone plays on the same console? Great, that should be everyone's primary console. So offspring A buys a game on their profile, offspring B can play it.

If offspring A goes somewhere and logs into their account on another PS5 console, offspring A can download and play their game, but no one else can play it on that other console.

If offspring B plays a game on their account and creates a save, offspring A can't log into their own account and mess with offspring B's save.

I don't have a PS5 but I'd assume many things are carry overs from the PS4. With that out of the way, purchased games are tied to the account, not the console and same for the saves; offspring B's save is perfectly safe from offspring A, for example.

Now, on the PS4 there was a primary account. If the primary account bought a game AND DOWNLOADED IT, the other accounts could play that game and have their own save. I'm not sure if a game purchased by an additional account would be accessible to the rest but logic would follow that they could so long as the game had been downloaded by the owner.

Most, nearly all games will have unique saves for each user. My son sometimes goes into a game, his save isn't there, and realizes he needs to switch users.

When we all play a game together, we typically use my account as the "main" account, unless that game is particularly important to one of the kids.

We make all purchases through the main account as well just for consistency. The purchase is tied to the account. When we upgraded to PS5 from PS4, all of the games were accessible from the account.