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Simply put, as you've discovered only one person can access a library at a time. There's no convenient workaround. If you have games you play but your daughter doesn't and vice versa, you could make three accounts: one with games you both play which uses Family Share with the other two accounts, one with games only you play, and one with games only your daughter plays. That way while someone is using the games on the family share account, the other person can log into their personal account and play "their" games. Best I can suggest.
Seems I made a grevious error in choosing PC gaming over a Playstation 4. For some reason it never occurred to me that PC gaming would be so assinine as to not allow for a viable means of dealing with families.
We have a single family and a collection of games. If my wife wants to play a game she takes the disc and inserts into her console. If I want to play then I take a disc and insert it into another console. It seems to me that Steam expects me to purchase every single game multiple times, which is not going to happen.
Message has been recieved loud and clear; PC gaming isn't ready for the masses.
So what's the point of family sharing? You cant play different games at the same time and you cant even block several games you dont want to share (because they are banned for minors). Well if you use family sharing you are going to share Dead Island and Left4Dead with your kids and younger brothers/sisters...
You don't have to rebuy copies of your entire library. Just buy a copy of what they'd like to play. The family sharing lets them get an idea of what they'd want to play first so you don't have to spend money on a game they won't like.
If Microsoft had their way, you'd have this restriction on the Xbox One as well.
The better analogy is that having one Playstation 4 shared with the household.
That not analogous of my situation. We have four PCs in the house, just as we had 3 XBOX-360s in the house. When I purchase an XBOX-360 game, I purchase 1 copy, not 3. If someone is already playing that game, no one else can play that one game so they will play a different game. This steam logic, however, mandates that if any one person is playing an XBOX-360 anywhere in the house, then no one else is allowed to play the other 360s (no matter that there are 150 games not being played by anyone at that time)
Except that I have a real family and need a real family sharing solution. There is no person A or person B. There is me, who buys all the games for the house and then there is my wife and my children who play the games that I purchased for the family to play. My wife and kids don't own any games because we are a family and as such we have a family collection of games.
When I used to come home from the store with a new 360 game, I didn't lock it into a dad box or anything. It was a new game going on the shelf for us to play and enjoy whenever we wanted to.
It seems we really have no choice but to go back to that lifestyle since PC gaming isn't agile enough to consider the rights of families.
I had such high hopes that PC was finally ready to migrate into the mainstream but alas, like the year of the Linux desktop, that fantasy has vaporized into thin air given my experience over the last week of messing with this.
http://store.steampowered.com/parental/set/
No idea how digital game companies run their business but none of our other services act this way. For example, we have 4 TVs streaming Netflix. Its not like only one person/one TV in the house is allowed to watch a TV at any given time.
As I stated originally, I was greviously mis-led about what steam had to offer.
At the end of the day it was an expensive lesson but the message has been recieved loud and clear.
You can play games; just not games on your own Steam library.
That's what I meant to point out, bring out the gray side instead of having it be left in the black & white you made it sound like.
I had no way of knowing your sister doesn't own any games you could play meanwhile she plays on yours, but I do now. Also, like Zetikla said; we should be happy the feature even exists to begin with, in its limited form or not.
No we shouldn't "be happy it exists at all". I would have never considering going with a gaming PC to begin with if I had known this is how the state of PC gaming is. I have owned console games since the Atari 2600 and it has never been this way and it still isn't this way today.
But I don't want to beat a dead horse... like I said, I'm buying the family a PS4 this coming payday so the problem is solved. I will continue PC gaming with the account I've been building over the last several years and they will play on consoles.
If I get rich someday and can somehow afford to purchase 4 copies of every game I buy then maybe I'll reconsider PC gaming again as a legitimate family/friends eco-system but in its current state its just not ready.