Family Sharing

[ReciprocityV]

I am exasperated after learning that if I’m playing any game in my library my family can’t play another game from my library. I understand limiting the ability to play 2 instances of the same copy of a game to cut down on lost sales. However, as I paid for MY games, they are MY games! If I’m not playing one of MY games MY family should be able to play MY games! It makes absolutely no sense that I can open 5 different games at the same time on my PC but my wife can’t play one of my games on our new Steam Deck if I’m playing one on my PC. I was playing BattleBit with a buddy last night and my wife went to play Hogwarts Legacy, which was available to her through my shared library, and it would not allow her to play. Sad thing is that I can circumvent Steams’ restrictions by just turning off the Wi-Fi on the Deck, but that is entirely unnecessary. I shouldn’t have to do anything to force Steam to allow me to be able to do what I should already be able to do.

Let’s go back 20 years…if I had a copy of Hogwarts that I wasn’t playing and my wife wanted to play it while I played another game all she would need to do is pop the disk into her machine and presto. The game wouldn’t prompt her with anything preventing her from playing, she would have just been able to play one of my games! That’s how you share! (Yeah I’m aware CD keys existed, I was playing PC games 20 years ago. You could still share games)



My suggestion/idea: allow authorized family share accounts access to parent account games if the parent account isn’t playing that particular game, simple as. I am baffled it doesn’t already function this way.



I hope this gets visibility from someone with some pull. I was planning on buying my wife her own Deck and, in the future, my child, but with the current state of family share I won’t be.

[Wolf Knight]

this is how family share has worked since it was added to steam. you may want to go and read the EULA for those games you have on disk, they have the same terms as games have today. the only difference is the game developers have the ability to enforce those terms now.

your not the first to request a change to family share, and clearly no one with pull is going to bother changing it.

[Brian9824]

You should really use the search. It won't be changed and the limitation was put in place so developers would agree to have their games family shared. Without the limitation their would be widescale abuse as friends would family share their libraries and developers would lose billions of dollars. The restriction was the only way Steam could get the developers to agree to family sharing, and as it is any developer is free to opt out of family sharing whenever they want

Physical discs have more friction with wear and tear, having to share the discs etc. Steam you could share your account with anyone in the world, instantly with no friction.

[ReciprocityV]

引用自 brian9824：

You should really use the search. It won't be changed and the limitation was put in place so developers would agree to have their games family shared. Without the limitation their would be widescale abuse as friends would family share their libraries and developers would lose billions of dollars. The restriction was the only way Steam could get the developers to agree to family sharing, and as it is any developer is free to opt out of family sharing whenever they want

Physical discs have more friction with wear and tear, having to share the discs etc. Steam you could share your account with anyone in the world, instantly with no friction.

This is patently false. There is a restriction to prevent your slippery slope argument. Only 5 authorized/devices users may borrow from a parent account at a time. Allowing family to play games that you are currently not playing WILL NOT HURT DEVS BOTTOM LINE. If anything it will encourage people to buy more. Example: You want to play a game that your friend/family let you borrow on an authorized device but they are playing that same game preventing you from playing. Well you’ll either have to buy it or wait until they are done playing that game. Literally the only difference from how it is now and what I propose is that family would be able to play game A while you play game B. WHICH I CAN ALREADY DO IF I GO INTO OFFLINE MODE. Which raises the question, if the restriction is so easy to bypass, going offline, then why have the restriction at all?

You can’t share your account with anyone in the world unless YOU logon to that machine and authorize steam family sharing on that device. Or you can give your user and password to another person which obviously is not recommended whatsoever.

If you’re going to defend a crappy policy please try harder.

[ReciprocityV]

引用自 Wolf Knight：

this is how family share has worked since it was added to steam. you may want to go and read the EULA for those games you have on disk, they have the same terms as games have today. the only difference is the game developers have the ability to enforce those terms now.

your not the first to request a change to family share, and clearly no one with pull is going to bother changing it.

I would say that if that was in the old EULA’s that it probably wouldn’t hold up in court. Or it will hold in court but that would mean I don’t actually own any of my games. Only the license to “use” the game. Which if true would not be surprising and just demoralizes me that much more.

Thanks for the reply. I just want my wife and kid to enjoy the games I enjoy and I don’t want to spend a fortune.

[Brian9824]

引用自 ReciprocityV：

This is patently false. There is a restriction to prevent your slippery slope argument. Only 5 authorized/devices users may borrow from a parent account at a time.

Yes, so you make 1 account and share it with 4 people, meaning 80% less game sales for developers.

引用自 ReciprocityV：

Allowing family to play games that you are currently not playing WILL NOT HURT DEVS BOTTOM LINE.

You didn't read... The issue isn't so much family as its friends. You could share it with your 4 friends and instead of you all buying say Starfield you buy 1 copy and share it.....

引用自 ReciprocityV：

If anything it will encourage people to buy more. Example: You want to play a game that your friend/family let you borrow on an authorized device but they are playing that same game preventing you from playing.
Well you’ll either have to buy it or wait until they are done playing that game. Literally the only difference from how it is now and what I propose is that family would be able to play game A while you play game B. WHICH I CAN ALREADY DO IF I GO INTO OFFLINE MODE. Which raises the question, if the restriction is so easy to bypass, going offline, then why have the restriction at all?

Offline mode is enough of a restriction that the game dev's agreed to it.

引用自 ReciprocityV：

You can’t share your account with anyone in the world unless YOU logon to that machine and authorize steam family sharing on that device. Or you can give your user and password to another person which obviously is not recommended whatsoever.

Yes because remote connecting to your friends PC to set it up, or just going over to his house is SOOOOOO hard

Please use the search, this is discussed ALL the time, and its not going to change.

[Brian9824]

引用自 ReciprocityV：

引用自 Wolf Knight：

this is how family share has worked since it was added to steam. you may want to go and read the EULA for those games you have on disk, they have the same terms as games have today. the only difference is the game developers have the ability to enforce those terms now.

your not the first to request a change to family share, and clearly no one with pull is going to bother changing it.

I would say that if that was in the old EULA’s that it probably wouldn’t hold up in court. Or it will hold in court but that would mean I don’t actually own any of my games. Only the license to “use” the game. Which if true would not be surprising and just demoralizes me that much more.

Thanks for the reply. I just want my wife and kid to enjoy the games I enjoy and I don’t want to spend a fortune.

You should read those old EULA's you never owned the game, you only owned a license to play that could be revoked at any time. The only difference is now developers have more tools to enforce the rules

[Tito Shivan]

引用自 ReciprocityV：

Let’s go back 20 years…

And the path we've walked in those 20 years brought us specifically to the actual situation.

Devs are not going back to where everything started again, because they all know where it ends.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

引用自 ReciprocityV：

Or it will hold in court but that would mean I don’t actually own any of my games. Only the license to “use” the game. Which if true would not be surprising and just demoralizes me that much more.

You do not own any of those games. You never did. You own a license to play the game.

This is how it is has always been and, as already said, the only difference is that it can actually be enforced now.

Just turn off the wifi on the Steam deck or go offline. Offline is how weve all been doing it since family share was added.

[nullable]

引用自 ReciprocityV：

引用自 Wolf Knight：

this is how family share has worked since it was added to steam. you may want to go and read the EULA for those games you have on disk, they have the same terms as games have today. the only difference is the game developers have the ability to enforce those terms now.

your not the first to request a change to family share, and clearly no one with pull is going to bother changing it.

I would say that if that was in the old EULA’s that it probably wouldn’t hold up in court. Or it will hold in court but that would mean I don’t actually own any of my games. Only the license to “use” the game. Which if true would not be surprising and just demoralizes me that much more.

Every armchair lawyer thinks they can just dismiss an inconvenient EULA. Well, good luck. It can happen sometimes. Just not every time someone wishes it based on a casual conversation where they've never read the terms and don't know anything about contract law.

The developer owns the game. You own a license to use their game, and back in the day you also owned a bit of plastic which contains the data they own because that was only reasonable way to move hundreds of GB's of data around for most people, twenty years ago..

Now be properly demoralized that your assumptions were completely wrong.

引用自 ReciprocityV：

Thanks for the reply. I just want my wife and kid to enjoy the games I enjoy and I don’t want to spend a fortune.

Well relatively speaking gaming is still pretty cheap. May not feel like it, especially when you don't like the idea of buying multiple copies of something. There's no way to make you happy. But the sooner you get with reality the better you can manage it.

[Tito Shivan]

引用自 nullable：

Well relatively speaking gaming is still pretty cheap.

And an important question people should ask themselves is WHY gaming is as cheap as it is nowadays.

[Pickle Wick]

this topic has been brought up again, and yet again the keyboard crusaders resort to the old "Awktually did you read the EULA" argument, there is no point in bringing up the TOS or the EULA, as this has been posted in the "Suggestions / Ideas" topic and if the idea were accepted then the EULA would change to support the new functions, and the argument that all the developers would pull their games from the family sharing list is a null argument.

I would rather see 90% of the games pulled from that list and have an actual family share experience then whatever this mess is.
How is it that when I try and share a simple game to my child I loose all access to my entire library but somehow i can do a simple search on ebay and see triple A titles released less than a year ago that are still selling for 60$ a copy having their family share slots sold for 3.50$? and then tell me again how you are protecting the developers intellectual property. Its all bull$hit.
And the argument that "that's why the games are SOooooO cheap, so you can buy multiple copies" then why do we have to wait for sales? why aren't they just 25-90% off all the time.... you know since we are just paying for a "Service" anyways.
BTW! before you say that all platforms pull this $hit i emailed GOG and they said that even though they sell you a personal license for your personal use, immediate families count as "fair use" in their eyes.
by ignoring this issue steam is giving the middle finger to its users that have families and its developers providing the content and turning a blind eye the the users that actively abuse the current system which if isn't fixed will drive developers to abandon the feature all together...

If your a developer reading this i don't blame you for removing your game from the family sharing system, in fact i hope you do, I know i would.
Also have you stopped and asked yourself why there are so many people creating this thread over and over again? maybe this is important to the community?

[Brian9824]

引用自 Pickle Wick：

Also have you stopped and asked yourself why there are so many people creating this thread over and over again?

Doesn't take a genius to figure it out. People are greedy and want what benefits them, they don't care about the companies or the employees who suffer as long as they can benefit.

[ReciprocityV]

引用自 AmsterdamHeavy：

引用自 ReciprocityV：

Or it will hold in court but that would mean I don’t actually own any of my games. Only the license to “use” the game. Which if true would not be surprising and just demoralizes me that much more.

You do not own any of those games. You never did. You own a license to play the game.

This is how it is has always been and, as already said, the only difference is that it can actually be enforced now.

Just turn off the wifi on the Steam deck or go offline. Offline is how weve all been doing it since family share was added.

That is asinine! It’s like when I was growing up in a dry county. County next to us wasn’t dry so where did everyone go to get what they wanted? Next county over. Completely defeated the purpose of having any restrictions completely. As long as there is a way to circumvent a restriction then the restriction is pointless and ineffective. If I can circumvent steams restrictions by going into offline mode then the restrictions are only preventing people from playing online, not from sharing copies and playing them simultaneously.

It’s all so tiresome

[ReciprocityV]

引用自 Pickle Wick：

this topic has been brought up again, and yet again the keyboard crusaders resort to the old "Awktually did you read the EULA" argument, there is no point in bringing up the TOS or the EULA, as this has been posted in the "Suggestions / Ideas" topic and if the idea were accepted then the EULA would change to support the new functions, and the argument that all the developers would pull their games from the family sharing list is a null argument.

I would rather see 90% of the games pulled from that list and have an actual family share experience then whatever this mess is.
How is it that when I try and share a simple game to my child I loose all access to my entire library but somehow i can do a simple search on ebay and see triple A titles released less than a year ago that are still selling for 60$ a copy having their family share slots sold for 3.50$? and then tell me again how you are protecting the developers intellectual property. Its all bull$hit.
And the argument that "that's why the games are SOooooO cheap, so you can buy multiple copies" then why do we have to wait for sales? why aren't they just 25-90% off all the time.... you know since we are just paying for a "Service" anyways.
BTW! before you say that all platforms pull this $hit i emailed GOG and they said that even though they sell you a personal license for your personal use, immediate families count as "fair use" in their eyes.
by ignoring this issue steam is giving the middle finger to its users that have families and its developers providing the content and turning a blind eye the the users that actively abuse the current system which if isn't fixed will drive developers to abandon the feature all together...

If your a developer reading this i don't blame you for removing your game from the family sharing system, in fact i hope you do, I know i would.
Also have you stopped and asked yourself why there are so many people creating this thread over and over again? maybe this is important to the community?

THANK YOU! CHRIST

[Pickle Wick]

引用自 brian9824：

引用自 Pickle Wick：

Also have you stopped and asked yourself why there are so many people creating this thread over and over again?

Doesn't take a genius to figure it out. People are greedy and want what benefits them, they don't care about the companies or the employees who suffer as long as they can benefit.

if valve cared about the companies and employees then they would fix the problem where 60$ titles are being family shared from 3.00$ ebay listings using their platform.. it doesn't take a genius to see valve really don't give a $hit