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yeah that is when i was made aware of just how useless "Family Sharing" was, spend money on the game and spend 380$ on a steam deck so my kid could play said game only to find out if i do anything on my account it turns it into a 380$ paperweight. only way the steam deck is useful is outside of the steam eco system
If you want the kids to be able to play, help them create their own account, put parental controls on it, and buy them their own copy of the game.
You can, it just requires you to be in offline mode. Again it would be easily solved, but the result would be rampant piracy with people selling access to their accounts and developers pulling their games out of family sharing.
Steam got developers to agree to family sharing because of the restrictions. Without them no one would participate and you'd have the issue GOG has with 99% of games not being available on their platform
It has already resulted in rampant piracy, Pirates have a system to exploit for money and family's have a broken system that doesn't fit their needs, sounds like a HUGE SUCCESS, GG steam!
Any solution opening up game sharing will result in some piracy. The current solution is a compromise that the developers are ok with, your "solution" is one that would drive developers off the platform.
Ask yourself why GoG doesn't have 99% of the games that other sites have...
I never said that gog had all the games you could buy on steam, Could you find where i said that?
I believe i said buy gog games when possible.. the other up side to that is the more gog becomes relevant the more games that will be placed on their market and the more it can compete with steam. so win win.
and as far as "driving developers off the platform" that statement is also a steamy pile. Family sharing is an optional feature that is given to developers... if they don't want it, they don't need to enable it. its as simple as that. and if they don't enable family sharing for a game I'm going to share with my family, then i wont buy it... it all balances out, now i just don't buy any games from steam. I'll snag the occasional pack from humble bundle/fanatical. but as far as steam marketplace? none
I pointed out that GoG won't have the majority of games because without DRM they are pirated. It's not a matter of being relevant, most dev's won't release their games there because they know people will pirate and steam them. Or they release them after most of their sales are over, hence why they just recently got Fallout 4 added
Well here's the deal, you can say that it would make piracy a bigger problem but the truth of the matter is that piracy is already a big problem, you could see this by searching nearly any game that exists on ebay 9 times out of 10 there is someone selling a family share for a few bucks which is disgusting. the system is already broken and abused and needs to be replaced with something else anyways.
If you would like to see what generally makes piracy a really big problem is when companies start to get greedy. look at the movie industry. piracy was increasing massively because cable companies kept increasing their rates to the point where people just wouldn't pay them so instead they would just pirate the media that they were interested in.
Then came along Netflix. they offered a speedy service that started with dvd's and eventually went full streaming. people could watch their movies and shows in a reasonable amount of time and it was affordable. This made piracy decrease.
now fast forward to today you got dozens of streaming services making the media exclusive to their platform for a period of time.
they all cost nearly 10-15$ a month. I think actually Netflix is nearly 20$ a month now, (I wouldn't know i canceled my subscription years ago). to get all the fragmented streaming services would cost you likely 100$+ a month. and even if you bought all of them good luck trying to find what you wanted to watch because now you have to search through your dozen apps to find it, this concept is making piracy a more convenient and i do believe that it is becoming more rampant again.
now compare this to steam games you have a platform that advertises a "family share" that doesn't function as it sounds like it should. its clunky and inconvenient to get working (but works just good enough so that people can abuse it by selling copies). so the solution is to buy a copy for each kid on an account their technically not allowed to have... so multiple transactions... kinda sounds like streaming services. except its like making us buy a subscription for every person consuming the media.
Now I don't support piracy, I don't encourage it. but i could see where a parent would look at this and say "this is ridiculous I paid for this i'm not buy it again" and then they would proceed to buy the first copy and pirate the rest, but we all know in the end it will lead to people eventually pirating all of the copies.
these companies are getting greedy, they can allow us to share our media with our children and get 70% of something. or i fear a large portion of people will start resorting to piracy and these companies will likely get 100% of nothing.
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." ~ Gabe Newell
^^^ I believe this was supposed to be the goal of the steam service. and now there is a portion of the service that is surpassed by piracy. Obviously you will always have people too cheap to buy a game and would rather pirate it, you will never satisfy those people. but i feel there are a portion of people where the steam service doesn't fit their needs and the service ( piracy ) fits their needs better which is not good for the end user, not good for steam, and not good for the developers. This needs to be addressed
You do realise that these limitations with only having one user playing games at any one time from an account have been in place long before Steam even had a store. And these limitations stem from piracy which is why Steam was created, along with being somewhere for us to keep our games up to date which used to be a nightmare to do.
Steam has always been a Single User Account from day one, there has never ever been any Family Accounts, I know I've been here since day one.
Taken from the frequently asked question page of the Family Sharing
"Can two users share a library and both play at the same time?
No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time."
https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing
I don't understand why you think having a Steam Deck makes any difference. We have had laptops and multiple PC in the home since before Steam. You couldn't have more than one user playing games from the same account at the same time on multiple PC or laptops so why should a Steam Deck be any different?
1) Steam is purely digital. This seems like a non-issue but again its a pretty big thing because it removes literally all friction from anything. Any system you implement is easy. And that's actually a big problem. You can give a physical disk to neighbor, but you can't give that to someone on another continent in 10 seconds
2) The other issue is enforcment. Consoles have more broad family sharing because tehy have PHYSICAL limitations and tracking. The console itself is a limiting factor. it is also an unchangable and knowable tracking mechanism. You can absolutely track and most importantly ban physical consoles. This allows consoles to be more confident that even abusers of any potential system can be obliterated. In fact they can take it further. Because they knwo WHO logged into a console they an also ban anyone ELSE that used the console as well. Forza does this with tehir system so that a user can't use a burner account, farm a bunch of stuff, then give all their spoils to their main. Forza literally tracks down not only the account, but the consoles they used and anyone logged into those consoles and bans them all. This level of tracking isn't possible on PC since its trivial to spoof changes.
This is why HWID has largely been abandoned for blacklisting purposes, because its trivial to spoof minor changes to change your HWID. Note Microsoft uses HWID as a WHITELIST for windows PC upgrades. It doesn't use it as a BLACKLIST which is a very very important distinction. Console banning works on consoles because they can absolutely track the HWID of the console that cannot be spoofed in any way since users dont' control not only the OS but also the efuses provide additional checking of physical updates
Ultimately the openness of the PC allows for things you can't do on console. but the closed nature of consoles lets them do things that are impractical or easily abusable on PC
Thats your own ignorance, if I share a console it doesn't mean 5 people can play 5 games at once. There is even this handy dandy page for it that tells you how it works.
Which again your ignoring that developers are customers, and per this idea you'd lose access to most games, as proven by GoG who most developers won't release their titles on.
Again its not complicated, the current system is far from perfect, but its already being abused. Making it EASIER to abuse is not the answer, and unfortunately there isn't a way to provide a family share like you and others want without opening the floodgates to massive abuse and leading to an exodus of developers.
People seem to forget that Valve is stuck in the middle, between the user and developers. Both are their customers, not one or the other. Valve had to find a solution that would work for the majority of both and Family Sharing as we know it was that compromise.
Is it perfect? No, but before we couldn't even do what little we can now.
And if developers had their way, no game would be shareable, on PC or Console. If the issue was forced, they they would likely leave the platform and then we all lose in the end.
So keep perspective realistic and remember there is more then one side to the issue.
Correct me if i am wrong but isn't family sharing an optional feature that can be enable or disabled by the developer?. so changing it in a more liberal way would effect nothing being the developer can simply disable it on their title so i see this as a none issue
Doesn't make much sense to have a feature that every developer would just disable, then people would have nothing.