Let me play game A on my main pc while I play game B on my Steam Deck on the same account simultaneously.

[Khrainos🧿]

I can't believe that Steam still does not let you play a different game on another device while you are playing a game on your main device.

I simply wanted to start an idle clicker game on the Deck to play on the toilet while a game was running on my main pc... but I couldn't... I had this with many other scenarios.

No, please don't come to me with solutions about creating another account and buying that specific game again, that does not benefit anyone. I'd like to keep my cloud saves, achievement and played hours on one single account please, thanks.
Yes, I can just turn my Steam Deck to offline mode but that would mean losing access to many function of the Deck, such as streaming the Deck to my PC while I am on VRChat hanging out with friends.

Steam knows that I have a Deck and should have anticipated that people would play different games simultaneously on both devices, they surely have come across this issue when working on the Steam Deck and just didn't do anything about it or let us know?

Screw the paying customer, I guess.

[BlueRobin]

What about if you install an emulator on your Steam Deck, and play something on that on the toilet, or just do what whatever you used to do while pooping before you had a Steam Deck?

[Khrainos🧿]

Originally posted by RobinRedwing:

What about if you install an emulator on your Steam Deck, and play something on that on the toilet, or just do what whatever you used to do while pooping before you had a Steam Deck?

So you are telling not to do the things for the reason I bought a Deck and the purpose of the Deck is for?

[BlueRobin]

Originally posted by Khrainos🧿:

Originally posted by RobinRedwing:

What about if you install an emulator on your Steam Deck, and play something on that on the toilet, or just do what whatever you used to do while pooping before you had a Steam Deck?

So you are telling not to do the things for the reason I bought a Deck and the purpose of the Deck is for?

I'm not telling you not to do anything. I made a suggestion. In fact, I made it in the form of a question. Don't be so needlessly defensive.

[Prezidentas]

👍

[Khrainos🧿]

Originally posted by RobinRedwing:

Originally posted by Khrainos🧿:

So you are telling not to do the things for the reason I bought a Deck and the purpose of the Deck is for?

I'm not telling you not to do anything. I made a suggestion. In fact, I made it in the form of a question. Don't be so needlessly defensive.

Thank you for the suggestion but no need it for it, since this post was made to resolve an issue not seek for an alternative solution that does not fix the issue, it is not like I or others can't come up with it.

[BlueRobin]

Originally posted by Khrainos🧿:

Originally posted by RobinRedwing:

I'm not telling you not to do anything. I made a suggestion. In fact, I made it in the form of a question. Don't be so needlessly defensive.

Thank you for the suggestion but no need it for it, since this post was made to resolve an issue not seek for an alternative solution that does not fix the issue, it is not like I or others can't come up with it.

Okay. I thought the issue was that you wanted to play games on your Steam Deck while you have a Steam game running on your computer. So, that's what I suggested in the form of an emulator.
But I see now that you're looking for the solution where Valve completely changes their policies in a way that opens them up to people sharing games with much more freedom, almost certainly damaging their own sales.
I don't know why I didn't see before that you were looking for something reasonable and attainable, not like my ridiculous alternative solution of playing some other games on the incredibly versatile gaming machine.

[Taktloss]

I would add that its Not only a Steam "issue" most likely Publishers wont even allow this themselve. Anyway its not like this is something new but maybe they will/can Change It we will see.

[tekchip]

I'm going to give this a bump. It's not unreasonable in this day and age of technology to use two devices of the same platform at the same time. All manner of platforms allow this.

Here's a real life anecdote. I was playing Rust on my desktop machine. If you don't know of Rusts crazy long load times even on an NVME then you're a lucky person. Also the even longer load times because of queueing on wipe day (unrelated to toilet decking noted above). To the point I'm waiting to load in Rust and absent-mindedly grab my Deck as I would a phone, tablet, or switch to bide my time. Got, punted from Steam instantly but the server queue, and subsequent loading, seemed to continue just fine. So I thought maybe the "Steam check" wasn't persistent or that the game client might not care after a certain point. Nope, once the entire queue, and load, completed I got a message that Steam was unavailable. I had to sleep the deck, make sure Steam was re-connected and then re-queue and re-load Rust blowing nearly 30mins of queueing and loading time all because this PLATFORM has arbitrary, not technological, restrictions that virtually no other PLATFORM has. Also 30 or so minutes where I couldn't use my Deck while I wait.

Most platforms that do have restrictions, I'm thinking VPN, Streaming services, etc. have ones that are more sane to the technological environment of modern life. Like a restriction of >1. Valve can see I own a deck. Valve also authenticates me. There's no reason I couldn't have a restriction of "other device" + Deck. Or, just take a page from the aforementioned services and let me choose any 2 (or 3 or 4 maybe). Would Valve probably need to do some work to get this cleared by content owners, probably. Should it be impossible? For a company with the cash flow and clout of Valve absolutely not.

[ukky]

as it happens with all platforms (not only steam) you can not log in on two different devices, it is logical.

If this could be done I would have lent/rented my account

[Prezidentas]

Originally posted by ukky:

as it happens with all platforms (not only steam) you can not log in on two different devices, it is logical.

If this could be done I would have lent/rented my account

people from the last thread pointed out that indeed you can do it on other platforms

[darrenphillips666]

There's a reason you can only play one game at a time
or do you have 4 hands, 4 eyes, and 2 brains?
Because that's what you need to play 2 games at once
unless you're just letting a friend play one while you play another.
And there's the reason for the rule

[my new friend]

Originally posted by darrenphillips666:

There's a reason you can only play one game at a time
or do you have 4 hands, 4 eyes, and 2 brains?
Because that's what you need to play 2 games at once
unless you're just letting a friend play one while you play another.
And there's the reason for the rule

You can play multiple games on one device, up to 30 as long as your PC can handle it.
It only starts to be an issue when you want to play any game on one device and then try to play a game with that same account on another device.

[Prezidentas]

Originally posted by darrenphillips666:

There's a reason you can only play one game at a time
or do you have 4 hands, 4 eyes, and 2 brains?
Because that's what you need to play 2 games at once
unless you're just letting a friend play one while you play another.
And there's the reason for the rule

where is this "rule" written exactly?

[SolarLune]

This would be very useful, and I would also like to be able to run multiple games at the same time, especially considering that one could legitimately need to have multiple Steam apps open at the same time for work (for example, if you were using Aseprite for doing pixel art, Blender for doing 3D modeling, Godot for programming a game, etc).

As a quick partial workaround, though, if a game doesn't utilize Steam's API to authenticate and you don't need to use Proton to run the game if you're on Linux, you can start the game using its executable file directly on your PC. (As an example, Baba Is You falls into this category.)

If a game doesn't use Steam's API and you start it directly (i.e. not through Steam), Steam doesn't hook into the game to determine if it's running or not automatically, so it doesn't count toward the "one game quota". If Steam doesn't automatically change the "Play" button into a "Stop" button for your game after you start it up, you're good to start something else on your Deck.

But yeah, it's not ideal, of course. Still would be good to expand this rule out to allow multiple apps at a time.

[C4EFFECT]

Steam deck is a PC..
You cant,or never have been able to play different games at the same time on the same account.
I don't see why just because steam deck is released,anybody would of expected this to change..lol
Even library sharing to different accounts on different computers is not possible if the main account is playing games from the shared library I believe..
I don't really see it as a massive problem and can't see valve ever changing this.
Certainly not in the foreseeable future..