Found a Steam Family Sharing Loop Hole

[system2]

Steam Family Sharing Loop Hole?

I discovered a way to bypass the 1 person playing at a time rule for single player games.
If the account owner or family sharing member starts up a Single Player Game [Skyrim for example] they can then open the task manager and force close steam and then open steam back up which allows both steam to be running and also the game in the background which steam no longer recognizes as started. This way people will be able to play their friends/family members single player games pretty much for free with no inconvinence to the account owner. I don't really see how valve is intending on fixing this if at all. Anyways just thought Id share that info with everyone. Interested to see how valve will respond.

P.S I know you can also do this by having one of the person(s) run the game in steam offline mode but that restricts access to the friends list so by doing what I stated above you can have your friends list [although without the steam overlay] and your game both running.

[Esca]

Might wanna move this to the bug report subforum. Good work, at any rate.

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Originally posted by stanleyc415:

Steam Family Sharing Loop Hole?

I discovered a way to 1 person playing at a time rule for single player games.
If the account owner or family sharing member starts up a Single Player Game [Skyrim for example] they can then open the task manager and force close steam and then open steam back up which allows both steam to be running and also the game in the background which steam no longer recognizes as started. This way people will be able to play their friends/family members single player games pretty much for free with no inconvinence to the account owner. I don't really see how valve is intending on fixing this if at all. Anyways just thought Id share that info with everyone. Interested to see how valve will respond.

P.S I know you can also do this by having one of the person(s) run the game in steam offline mode but that restricts access to the friends list so by doing what I stated above you can have your friends list [although without the steam overlay] and your game both running.

I would expect that the normal checks for acheievements or cloud saves would reawaken Steam to the game being live. Also the new OS will no doubt have even more control.

[system2]

@ #2 Well yeah but the game in question would have to support that. Like for instance I know the first load onto Dust an Elysian Tail I believe does a one time check for steam but after you load and then do the trick mentioned above then your in the - all clear - . Im really not sure what they could do to fix this. I definitely don't want to see this system abused though as it would really hurt the sale of single player Pc Titles.

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Originally posted by stanleyc415:

@ #2 Well yeah but the game in question would have to support that. Like for instance I know the first load onto Dust an Elysian Tail I believe does a one time check for steam but after you load and then do the trick mentioned above then your in the - all clear - . Im really not sure what they could do to fix this. I definitely don't want to see this system abused though as it would really hurt the sale of single player Pc Titles.

I doubt Valve would need to worry in that scenario. If the Publisher has not put in place the protection to allow them to keep their game to a single instance then yes.. they would lose sales if their game was popular, and the people playing it were those who like such exploits.

I suspect many publishers of children's games would not worry too much about protection as we are unlikley to see small children at different IP's all abusing the access to one licenced copy.

However, it clearly is a matter to be reported to the Beta team. And I too offer my congratulations on your finding it ;)

[talbeats]

You probably shouldn't have posted this on the valve forums, as they are now probably trying to fix this, but good job finding it

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Originally posted by Jetsup:

You probably shouldn't have posted this on the valve forums, as they are now probably trying to fix this, but good job finding it

I wouldn't worry too much. These threads are moderated so if it's not been looked at it soon will be. If they are worried they can kill a thread fast.