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You are not allowed to share your account with anyone, including family members.
It is 100% legal and you agreed to not share your account when anyone.
https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement
If you want to play 2 games from the same library at the same time, whyever you wouldn't want to buy your daughter Pony Island on her own account, use offline mode.
As for this being legal, you're REALLY late to the party. The first people to complain about this were there over 10 years ago! Don't you think that if this really was illegal, this would've been a legal case with customer protection agencies somewhere? It's not like Valve had none of those, I remember EU authorities going after them (that was well over 10 years ago), I remember Australian authorities going after them.
This topic not being touched legally AT ALL can mean to things:
1. You're the only genius in this world to think of it
2. It's actually damn ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ legal
No idea (nor care) which of those 2 you consider likely but I bet whatever you want, it's #2.
It's not. What you own are licenses for personal use, that's it. It's perfectly legal.
And it's this way to prevent people from renting out their accounts to people, meaning both Valve and the developers/publishers lose money.
You have some options:
- Create other accounts, family share your library to them and use the workaround that your account plays in offline mode while the one other account plays in online mode (has to, for verification that they have access to your library). Keep in mind, only one account can access a library;
- Give everybody their own account and ensure they have the games they want to play on their own accounts;
- Do a mix of the previous two.
Its not impossible, its designed ot prevent piracy. You bought a PERSONAL license. So you can't share your accounts. Its perfectly legal. Only options are family sharing and off line mode.
Don't expect it to change otherwise people would just share their accounts with friends and cost developers billions in sales.
No it is not, and I'll explain why.
That is exactly the point.
I own licenses for personal use. If I buy a game at, say, Walmart, or two, or ten, I can give/lend them to my kids, my wife, my brother, for playing them, after or before me, and I and they can play one game each at the same time, perfectly legal, and that's called "personal use".
Now, what Steam does, is like Walmart somehow telling me I can't do that, that I cannot give one legally bought game to my son to play while I simultaneously play another game, because I bought these two games at the same store!? And you seem to be okay with that?
This is NOT about "renting out an account to people", this is about preventing ME from legally using the licenses for the games I bought via Steam, as it would also be the case if I bought these games anywhere else. I get that Steam WANTS to prevent me from exercising my rights in order to allegedly make more money, but does that make it LEGAL? Or acceptable in any way?
I mean, I could buy my games somewhere else, or create 200+ Steam accounts, one for each game I graciously buy on/for their platform, if Steam continues to be that hostile against its paying customers.
That's just the point, the publishers, whose games I bought, do NOT lose money, see above. I just won't buy games on/for Steam anymore, then.
I'll try that offline mode, thanks for the tip! :)
The problem is, I surely will not buy a game twice if my son/wife/brother and I want to play a certain game at some time each - again, NOT at the same time.
There's nothing new here..
(edit)
No, it's not. If others are playing your games ("using your license") then it's not personal use anymore.
Just because you could do it doesn't make it legal. I can easily run a red light and argue that because I could I was allowed to. It doesn't work that way.
Read the license agreement and you'll see. Nothing changed here.
Thing is, a) in the 80s you installed games from diskettes, not CDs, and b) this is an entirely different point? "To share or install on another computer" meant/implied that you could, theoretically, USE the SAME GAME on different computers AT ONCE, e. g. pirate a game, which was/is illegal and not the topic here.
That is something very different from "having game data installed for one account, on several machines, that can only be used one instance at a time". One cannot play the same game on several computers at once, Steam's mechanic forbids that and that is perfectly fine and not the problem, that's not what I intend to circumvent.
I am talking about using the shopping platform, on which I individually and independently bought these games from, on more than one computer at the same time so I can play two individually, absolutely separate, DIFFERENT games on two separate machines. That, of course, isn't "sharing" anything (except the proverbial Walmart bill for these games, maybe), since each game can only be used on one computer at a time. "Back in the 80s" it was also perfectly fine to play a game, then let another person play that very same game when you're not currently doing so. Yes, that's perfectly, legally "personal use", like handing a console controller to your brother when you're done playing.
Yes, it is. "Personal use" is something very different from "personalized use", these are two different things.
Like this parable.
And it's fine if you don't like the terms Steam has, though that doesn't mean Valve has to change the terms. You can use the offline workaround for a large amount of the games. And if it all still doesn't suit you, there are other platforms available. GoG is DRM-free, so that platform probably suits you best.
Personally I don't have an issue with how Steam functions, family sharing to my kids works perfectly fine for us. As does buying them their own games on their own accounts when on sales (mostly on keyseller sites, mind). But I don't limit myself to only Steam either.
I can fully understand why the licenses work as they do. Would I want it to be different? Sure. But people being people is why we can't have nice things.
... depending on how you look at it: copy protection was also very easy to bypass. It drove 'm mad, up to a point where you could buy a C64 game and it wouldn't run because of anal copy protection schemes.
Yes it was, because you're arguing against Steam preventing you to do so. And the only reason they do... is due to licensing issues.
It's not my fault that you apparently never bothered to read those.
And for the record... don't get my feedback in the wrong way. When it comes to Steam I can only agree (edit): side with them, but when it comes to "loose media" I also think that they're overdoing it and being a bit over-zealous.
Talk about lame excuses 101.
You still don't seem to get it: you never bought a game, you bought a license. Not a license to kill but one to play that game. That's what Steam is all about: personal licenses.
Even though you enter a grey area when it comes to hard storage (5.25", CD's, etc.) I can only agree that it should be allowed to install on 2 - 3 computers and have fun. The problem here.. is that there are always "some bad people" (quote: one awesome female personal assistent from GTA5) who will abuse all of that. Leaving the devs who got you the awesome game with nothing.
But this is Steam we're talking about. Digital media. It's not the same, not at all.
I sometimes play GTA5 online & Elite Dangerous with my gf (always silly in Los Santos: me being a girl (guy IRL) and vica versa...). Thing is: when gf made up her mind that she wanted to play together, we got her her own license as well. That's just how it works on Steam.
You're only making it obvious for all to see that you never bothered to read a license agreement yet still pretend you know how things work. There's a reason why all of them start with a definition section. It doesn't matter what you think something should mean, all that matters is what the license agreement says.
The rules didn't change, just the enforcement of them. Even when you buy a game on Steam, you are only buying a license for the game to be run by you and you alone(just like it always has been) and not by anyone else. When you launch a game through Steam, Steam uses their tools to enforce this licensing for everything in your library.
You still don't get to decide what personal use is, the owner of the content does. They have decided that personal use is one instance on one machine at a time.
Eh... no. I explicitly did not. Once more, for the n-th time: I do not want to play one game on two machines at once. I want to play different games on different computers, each of which I've bought separately and paid for separately, at the same time.
Like if I had two gaming consoles; On console A I play game X, while on console B I play game Y.
What can I say... people seem to not always read what they're replying to properly.
I don't need an excuse, there is nothing to excuse but my right to use what I've paid for. Yeah, I get that Steam would like to sell every member of my family each game I buy for our household separately, but that - to turn the table - is not how it works, and it can be written ten times in Steam's terms of service, that doesn't make it any more valid. If Steam's TOS said one of their reps has the right to watch me shower naked once a month when using that service, that'd be just as 'right'.
I am fully aware of that. Once more here, too: A "personal license" is something entirely different from a "personalized license", which is what you are describing and/or probably mean. A "personal license" just means that I cannot use that game in a commercial context, that I cannot make money with it in any way. Letting my family use it IS part of a "personal license". Steam's conduct in this matter is just a sneaky and legally very questionable way to sneak around this that's sadly just accepted by most, it seems.
"Leaving the devs with nothing" is what a pirate does, regardless of me sharing my Steam account full of paid games with my family members; restricting a paying customer is doing nothing against that and just drives some of us to seek out less customer hostile options. Although I do not condone it, I wouldn't be surprised if some even consider... more extreme options than that.
That's what some WANT to be the status quo, doesn't mean we have to accept it like that.
And that's how it should work, and practically always did, no challenge here from my side.
I do know well what's in there; I already stated my thoughts about that.