Why can't two users share a library and both play different games at the same time with Steam Family Sharing?

[random guy]

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[Darren]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย mitchav66:

Late reply but I've found a workaround for this. Simply have the user that is accessing your library disconnect their internet AFTER launching a shared game.

It might not work for all games but it will probably work for most. Games can if they choose poll Steam regularly to check if the account is still allowed to play, which should fail on the shared account once the internet was disconnected.

[boofy!]

Every answer posted here defending Steams heavy handedness is ridiculous. It would be trivial for Steam to allow you to register 2 or 3 or 5 devices, as does Netfix, iTunes, MS Online, etc.., to use your account on. Apple has been restricting usage of your iTunes account to 5 devices for at least 10 years. My Apple family sharing allows me to purchase a game once and my son, wife and I can all play it at the same time on 3 different devices. How freaking novel. Steam does not understand device fingerprinting? Give me a break. It is an arbitrarily heavy handed police by Steam and a money grab.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

this is something that the developers/publishers would have to agree upon with valve.

as of now, they do not want their games to be freely shared like you want.

this is the middle ground that valve has made, and the developers/publishers are ok with how it works now.

you would be better off asking them to allow you to share the games like you want. but i know the answer to that.

[cheep crybabby hatter]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย {TACT} Celestial:

People want their cake and eat it too. Way too much entitlement here on Steam. The same people complaining about the refund system complain about family sharing. Be thankful either is offered at all.

You may not have heard over the noise your axe-grinder is making, but the OP has a good point that has nothing to do with "entitlement". Why add a feature that behaves worse than already existing functionality?

For that matter, why make the feature selective, relatively broken, and basically misleading?

Also, why must we be more thankful to Valve for implementing features than they are to us for supplying their money? Is business not a two way street? Do you really believe that Valve includes these features as some kind of personal favour to each and every one their customers?

[ReBoot]

I think SFS works like it works to prevent game pooling. You know, a couple of people buying few games and sharing them all the time. The way the feature works right now, game pooling kinda sucks and I think that's the whole point.

[cheep crybabby hatter]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ReBoot:

I think SFS works like it works to prevent game pooling. You know, a couple of people buying few games and sharing them all the time. The way the feature works right now, game pooling kinda sucks and I think that's the whole point.

But as the OP pointed out, there are ways around it. Simply by logging into a different Steam account, you can access another person's entire library. If you then go into offline mode, you can access it for as long as you like. It's not convenient, but it can be done.

The best Family Sharing could hope to achieve is to legitimise the whole process; streamline it so that it becomes less of a hassle, and maybe include some sneaky restrictions in as well (such as not allowing two people to play the same game). Instead, the alternative is fairly broken, with several games silently opting out of the service (so its utility is not even guaranteed).

[ErickaUnlimited]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย cheep crybabby hatter:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย {TACT} Celestial:

People want their cake and eat it too. Way too much entitlement here on Steam. The same people complaining about the refund system complain about family sharing. Be thankful either is offered at all.

You may not have heard over the noise your axe-grinder is making, but the OP has a good point that has nothing to do with "entitlement". Why add a feature that behaves worse than already existing functionality?

For that matter, why make the feature selective, relatively broken, and basically misleading?

Also, why must we be more thankful to Valve for implementing features than they are to us for supplying their money? Is business not a two way street? Do you really believe that Valve includes these features as some kind of personal favour to each and every one their customers?

It stems from a point-of-sale contingency. Family share lets you share what you already have; it doesn't magically give you extra copies of games for free. Take my XBOX One for example - I share it with my family, but that means only one person can play Fallout 4 at a time and nobody else can use the XBOX while I'm playing it.

The same applies here, only in digital form. It makes perfect sense when you sit down and think about it.

[cheep crybabby hatter]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ErickaUnlimited:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย cheep crybabby hatter:

You may not have heard over the noise your axe-grinder is making, but the OP has a good point that has nothing to do with "entitlement". Why add a feature that behaves worse than already existing functionality?

For that matter, why make the feature selective, relatively broken, and basically misleading?

Also, why must we be more thankful to Valve for implementing features than they are to us for supplying their money? Is business not a two way street? Do you really believe that Valve includes these features as some kind of personal favour to each and every one their customers?

It stems from a point-of-sale contingency. Family share lets you share what you already have; it doesn't magically give you extra copies of games for free. Take my XBOX One for example - I share it with my family, but that means only one person can play Fallout 4 at a time and nobody else can use the XBOX while I'm playing it.

The same applies here, only in digital form. It makes perfect sense when you sit down and think about it.

The hardware is not the issue here. We have two PCs, both capable of playing multiple games from the library. If you had two xboxes (as the OP points out), then you only need one disk per game, and you can share your library as freely as you want, with the exception of sharing a single game.

But that wasn't my point anyway. The same functionality already exists in Steam, just slightly less convenient, but way more powerful. If people are using family sharing, more power to them, but I just don't see the purpose of restrictions that are so easy to circumvent.

[Forcen]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย cheep crybabby hatter:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย {TACT} Celestial:

People want their cake and eat it too. Way too much entitlement here on Steam. The same people complaining about the refund system complain about family sharing. Be thankful either is offered at all.

You may not have heard over the noise your axe-grinder is making, but the OP has a good point that has nothing to do with "entitlement". Why add a feature that behaves worse than already existing functionality?

For that matter, why make the feature selective, relatively broken, and basically misleading?

Also, why must we be more thankful to Valve for implementing features than they are to us for supplying their money? Is business not a two way street? Do you really believe that Valve includes these features as some kind of personal favour to each and every one their customers?

The existing "functionality" of sharing accounts has downsides.
Firstly it's against the rules technically, could get you in trouble.
Secondly you are forced to share friendlists, savefiles via steam cloud, rank in online games, achievements, playtime, usernames and all that stuff. Savefiles especially can be problematic with games like bioshock infinite which is a game that has only one saveslot and it sync via steam cloud (last I checked).
Maybe you could avoid using all the above to avoid issues but then you are still missing out on functionality.

The way I view family sharing is that they added "profile" support like most modern consoles has to avoid the stuff listed above but as a HUGE bonus it lets you do all the gamesharing on different machines instead of limiting the functionality of letting you switch users on one PC that is shared. I never expected them to add this feature of just sharing your games online and that was OK, seems they could never ever convince publishers of letting them do this but they did for the most part.

EDIT: About xboxes, you should think of each steam account as one console with digital purchases tied to it. The PC is kind of like the TV in this comparison. Then you get an idea how it compares.

[ReBoot]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย cheep crybabby hatter:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ReBoot:

I think SFS works like it works to prevent game pooling. You know, a couple of people buying few games and sharing them all the time. The way the feature works right now, game pooling kinda sucks and I think that's the whole point.

But as the OP pointed out, there are ways around it. Simply by logging into a different Steam account, you can access another person's entire library

And what if I don't want to share my Steam account? No really, I don't. Plus, if I give my sister my Steam account data, then she can cause me to stop playing. With SFS, she can't.

[cheep crybabby hatter]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Forcen:

The existing "functionality" of sharing accounts has downsides.
Firstly it's against the rules technically, could get you in trouble.

Well, there's no way that Valve can police this, at all. There's no requirement to run Steam on only one of your computers at a time. I can also confirm that I would never have made the switch to downloads over physical copies if this were not the case, which would mean the 10s of thousands of dollars I've spent over the years would be decimated.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Forcen:

Secondly you are forced to share friendlists, savefiles via steam cloud, rank in online games, achievements, playtime, usernames and all that stuff. Savefiles especially can be problematic with games like bioshock infinite which is a game that has only one saveslot and it sync via steam cloud (last I checked).
Maybe you could avoid using all the above to avoid issues but then you are still missing out on functionality.

That is certainly a point; I didn't think of that. However, I use none of these, as I have no interest in online multiplayer, and I just keep Steam offline almost all the time.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Forcen:

The way I view family sharing is that they added "profile" support like most modern consoles has to avoid the stuff listed above but as a HUGE bonus it lets you do all the gamesharing on different machines instead of limiting the functionality of letting you switch users on one PC that is shared. I never expected them to add this feature of just sharing your games online and that was OK, seems they could never ever convince publishers of letting them do this but they did for the most part.

That's one of the things I really like about Valve: that they'll look after their end-users, and relatively spontaneously implement pro-consumer innovations. I just get the impression that Family Sharing was a failure of negotiation on Valve's part, whereas refunds was a rousing success.

[Forcen]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย cheep crybabby hatter:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Forcen:

The existing "functionality" of sharing accounts has downsides.
Firstly it's against the rules technically, could get you in trouble.

Well, there's no way that Valve can police this, at all. There's no requirement to run Steam on only one of your computers at a time. I can also confirm that I would never have made the switch to downloads over physical copies if this were not the case, which would mean the 10s of thousands of dollars I've spent over the years would be decimated.

There used to be a "only logged in on one place" thing before, they removed that. Playing games however...

Anyway, nothing was lost for you? they only added funtionality with family sharing right?

[cheep crybabby hatter]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Forcen:

Anyway, nothing was lost for you? they only added funtionality with family sharing right?

Sure, that's true. I wasn't really complaining (except that the feature is misleadingly presented -- I think that should change); I was just more confused than anything. But you guys have made some good points, specifically that there are features that I forget about that family sharing plays nicely with, that logging into someone else's account does not.

The thing is, from my perspective, Family Sharing has always seemed to be more like a restriction than a feature. I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds; Steam has always had the ability to be exploited to an extent, ever since it implemented an offline mode. A lack of an offline mode would be an unequivocal deal-breaker for me, but it does pose some problems. Family Sharing, as I saw it, was a way to keep people on the straight-and-narrow, by giving them the ability to share their games to a limited extent. The potential for abuse is still there, but in giving the practice, when done to a limited extent, some legitimacy and ease of use, it encourages people to play by the rules. If the only way to allow people in the same household to play one copy of a game was to log into someone else's account, then that's what people would do, and become used to doing. That's a stepping stone to abusing the system.

If family sharing wasn't so limited, it would work that way for me. But if it works for others, then I'll just have to accept that it works better for people other than myself.

[Slit-Throat (Paulos)]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย ErickaUnlimited:

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย cheep crybabby hatter:

You may not have heard over the noise your axe-grinder is making, but the OP has a good point that has nothing to do with "entitlement". Why add a feature that behaves worse than already existing functionality?

For that matter, why make the feature selective, relatively broken, and basically misleading?

Also, why must we be more thankful to Valve for implementing features than they are to us for supplying their money? Is business not a two way street? Do you really believe that Valve includes these features as some kind of personal favour to each and every one their customers?

It stems from a point-of-sale contingency. Family share lets you share what you already have; it doesn't magically give you extra copies of games for free. Take my XBOX One for example - I share it with my family, but that means only one person can play Fallout 4 at a time and nobody else can use the XBOX while I'm playing it.

The same applies here, only in digital form. It makes perfect sense when you sit down and think about it.

This point is moot. You realize you can share your xbox one library with a friend and both play the same game at the same time right? People mention that the game devs would have to agree with valve doing it... but its already a thing on xbox so they either already have agreed or they dont have to agree...

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย The Skook (Gojira):

This point is moot. You realize you can share your xbox one library with a friend and both play the same game at the same time right? People mention that the game devs would have to agree with valve doing it... but its already a thing on xbox so they either already have agreed or they dont have to agree...

try to play together in a multiplayer match doing that.