How to open two steam clients on the same computer at the same time.

[sirsyorrz]

Firstly, Don't know if this is in the right section.

Well i found out a way to open to steam clients on the same computer and log into two seperate accounts.

I don't know if this is agaisnt the TOS of steam so if anyone could tell me that would be great.

I did try it and tried to trade items from my other account onto my main (this account) I couldn't trade it said that this account has to have steam guard enabled for 15 days (i have this enabled)
so i couldn't trade. When i exited the other steam client I could trade again. So i would like to know if its agaisnt the TOS and if not is there a way to do this without the steam guard?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Simple; u can't

Who and why would u need to?

Just open them via browser and then u can both be logged in @ same time on same machine.

U can't both play @ same time on same machine; so it's pointless to do it.

Reason why it does this is because even with multiple Windows Users; there is still the background services/processes and only one instance of Steam Client could run at any given time.

Now if u want to share a single system with multiple Steam users making use of that system; best way to do this is like so:

Once you have a copy of Steam Client (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam)
Copy that folder to a different location for each user.
For example:
C:\John\Steam
C:\Jane\Steam

Then on each users desktop make them their own Steam.exe shortcut pointing to the correct location based on the above custom folder layout.

Such as for John, on his desktop make a shortcut pointing to C:\John\Steam\Steam.exe
Then for Jane, on her desktop have hers be C:\Jane\Steam\Steam.exe

And do not let other users handle Steam Client installer. You should never need to Install/Uninstall Steam Client. Long as you have Steam.exe by itself, it can work from anywhere on any Windows OS.

[sirsyorrz]

Originally posted by Bad-Motha:

Simple; u can't

Who and why would u need to?

Just open them via browser and then u can both be logged in @ same time on same machine.

U can't both play @ same time on same machine; so it's pointless to do it.

Reason why it does this is because even with multiple Windows Users; there is still the background services/processes and only one instance of Steam Client could run at any given time.

Now if u want to share a single system with multiple Steam users making use of that system; best way to do this is like so:

Once you have a copy of Steam Client (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam)
Copy that folder to a different location for each user.
For example:
C:\John\Steam
C:\Jane\Steam

Then on each users desktop make them their own Steam.exe shortcut pointing to the correct location based on the above custom folder layout.

Such as for John, on his desktop make a shortcut pointing to C:\John\Steam\Steam.exe
Then for Jane, on her desktop have hers be C:\Jane\Steam\Steam.exe

And do not let other users handle Steam Client installer. You should never need to Install/Uninstall Steam Client. Long as you have Steam.exe by itself, it can work from anywhere on any Windows OS.

I just ran the "steam.exe" normally and then ran it using sandboxie
I was just wondering if it was agaisnt steams TOS to have more then 1 instance of steam client open.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well its not going to work properly like that; so good luck.

But not against ToS; account sharing would be ToS violation.

It just makes no sense to run two client on one machine at same time. When one person is done, exit Steam and click Start > Log Off (or Switch User) and then go on your other User. Very simple.

[sirsyorrz]

Anyways well thanks :)

[Nova | EZesports.co.uk]

why does it not make sense to have 2 accounts?
what if you have an account to hold all in game items so you dont accidently sell the wrong one or trade wrong thing...
if you do csgo betting you can have 1 account purely for betting that sits with skins and such and then the good ones you send back to your main account... so why is it that you cant trade with your self from the browser... if logged in on mobile and pc you cant trade with your self so 2 clients means you can trade to your self...

[sirsyorrz]

I posted this AGES ago and I'm pretty sure my reason for having two steam clients open and logged in was too have 2 csgo clients also open and party with myself to derank. Pretty sure my main goal was to have 5 accounts and have a "bot" that would just start a search, accept on all clients, then just afk for the derank

[NookieMonster]

Run a Virtual Machine, tadaa!

[sirsyorrz]

Originally posted by NookieMonster:

Run a Virtual Machine, tadaa!

As I said

Originally posted by Shiro:

I posted this AGES ago and I'm pretty sure my reason for having two steam clients open and logged in was too have 2 csgo clients also open and party with myself to derank. Pretty sure my main goal was to have 5 accounts and have a "bot" that would just start a search, accept on all clients, then just afk for the derank

It would waste so much computing power to run 5 VMs

[Whilpin]

Originally posted by NookieMonster:

Run a Virtual Machine, tadaa!

I elabourate on this further down.

Originally posted by Sirs:

Originally posted by NookieMonster:

Run a Virtual Machine, tadaa!

As I said

Originally posted by Shiro:

I posted this AGES ago and I'm pretty sure my reason for having two steam clients open and logged in was too have 2 csgo clients also open and party with myself to derank. Pretty sure my main goal was to have 5 accounts and have a "bot" that would just start a search, accept on all clients, then just afk for the derank

It would waste so much computing power to run 5 VMs

Any of the Intel Core series have native virtualization that pretty much eliminates all the overhead of running VM's. Running VM's in WINDOWS would take a ton of computing power.

There are 2 possibilities, one of which works better than the other depending on your budget/current PC, and your needs.

SoftXPand is available for Windows 7 (maybe 10 now? idk it's been a while), it "splits" your current Windows install into two "terminals". This splits resources dynamically and works really, really well. However it uses virtual desktops to achieve this effect, so if one terminal has Steam open, the other can't unless it's through Sandboxie, which is a real big pain in my experience. Not to mention sharing resources doesn't work for some games. CSGO hates it, and the second player to start the game ends up with shiny untextured surfaces everywhere. I did manage to get it to work properly, but again, a big pain (essentially had to make a second steam library with another copy of the same game). The big advantage of this is it's super easy to set up and it will share GPU, CPU and RAM as needed, so if someone's gaming, and the other is surfing the internet, the gamer is going to get most of the power. However if both players are gaming, it is going to split it pretty evenly.

then there's UNRAID, I have no experience in this but LinusTechTips on youtube has done both a two player PC, AND a $30,000 7x 1440p 7 player PC utilizing 7 R9 Nano's, two 14-core HT Xenons (Windows saw 56 cores), 128GB RAM and 7 1TB SSD's. This is a far more elegant solution, utilizing VM hardware (You NEED the core iX series to be able to game with this setup), but requires a much beefier PC. Essentially instead of dynamically allocating resources as needed, it dedicates them (from my understanding anyway), so you need two GPU's, double the RAM, double the processor, etc. You just save money on the case, PSU, storage and CPU really... But Steam doesn't complain about second instances, it runs natively. It runs as its own PC.

Both cost about the same for the software, but these are for multi-user setups so may be overboard, but hey, who DOESNT want a 2 player, 0 latency LAN gaming PC?

[gnode]

This is simply impossible without being in a private LAN. The only way to bypass this would get you in trouble and maybe even banned.

[MocroManiac]

Originally posted by Sirs:

Firstly, Don't know if this is in the right section.

Well i found out a way to open to steam clients on the same computer and log into two seperate accounts.

I don't know if this is agaisnt the TOS of steam so if anyone could tell me that would be great.

I did try it and tried to trade items from my other account onto my main (this account) I couldn't trade it said that this account has to have steam guard enabled for 15 days (i have this enabled)
so i couldn't trade. When i exited the other steam client I could trade again. So i would like to know if its agaisnt the TOS and if not is there a way to do this without the steam guard? :batsilo:

THIS KID IS A GENIUS HE HAS THE AWENSER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heW1Xzttz1k

[✰Kei✰]

its hard if ur on windows, but if ur on mac u can run a V-machine And load up Steam with the normal client and login in to a profile on that, and log in on another profile using the Virtual client.

[Nathan]

Just to give a use-case for why a person would run two instances of steam at once: I'm running Steam on my Mac. I also installed Steam in Wine and am running them both at the same time. The problem I have is that when I start another Steam instance, the previous one things it has no connection anymore and I'm not sure why this is.

[shinra_battle]

Running multiple instances of steam on 1 physical machine is no problem at all (if ur machine can handle the resouces needed). use a virtualization solution (vmware workstation).

pro's/reason's:
-run multiple (offline) games at once
-can run games if they wont run the host (physical machine), because of no multiple monitor, multiple cpu/core, multiple graphics resolution support or fail on running on displays, that are not the primary display
-u can "safe/freeze/suspend" guest the system, so you can safe game progression when normaly no save mode is available (save and return to any moment u want)

con's:
-only 1 online connection at a time (so progrssion/cloud functionality/.. wont work)
-depending on the vm solution you can only run games up to a certain directx/opengl version, so newer games might not run at all
-performance*

[✰Kei✰]

Originally posted by Nathan:

Just to give a use-case for why a person would run two instances of steam at once: I'm running Steam on my Mac. I also installed Steam in Wine and am running them both at the same time. The problem I have is that when I start another Steam instance, the previous one things it has no connection anymore and I'm not sure why this is.

I dont know know why it does'nt work on yours, but ive been using wine (wine bottler version) and steam skin and they both seem to work well on my mac, the only problem i get often is my steam skin not opening up properly but thats all. perhaps u should try bootcamping that the best alternative way to run windows version of steam on mac. And that doesnt mess with ur hard drive, wine killed the last hard drive i had, and now i dual boot with 2 harddrives. whick i think is better than spliting one hard drive into miltiple partitions.