Sharing Steam games with friends and family

[joker454]

Just saw this:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/11/4719748/steam-launching-friends-and-family-sharing-10-devices-beta-program

When the console world scrapped that feature I was hoping Steam would run with it, and looks like they will give it a try. Very cool! Hopefully they will let you put the games you want to share in a group, like the 200+ games that I no longer play I'm fine sharing all the time. The other 7 that I'm currently playing would be trickier to share since only one person can be playing those games at one time. Anyways glad to see this feature get new life.

 

[Billy Idol]

Do I read it right? Only one user can access the library at a given time. The owner of the library is getting preference if more than one user wants to access the library.

And if I read this right, is game library my whole steam library? So when I play one of my games, during this time no one can play this or another game of my steam library?

 

[joker454]

That sounds about right. It's a little more clear in this article:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/11/steam-family-sharing/

Of note:

Your library can only be used by one person at a time. So if you, the primary user, log in to spend some quality time with Call of Duty Ghosts, your buddy checking out Bastion ahead of Transistor's release will have only a few minutes to either save and quit, or buy the title for themselves.

So if you aren't playing a game on Steam, then your library is free to be used by whomever you have authorized on your friends list. Once you play a game on Steam though they get kicked off (after a few minutes warning) since you always get priority on your own games naturally. Presumably it will require an online connection to work so it can perform the necessary checks, I know that's a no-no on the console side but it's no big deal on the pc side since we're all internet connected for years now anyways. It doesn't sound as flexible as the Xbox One's family sharing setup was purported to be before it got nuked, but it still seems like a great idea to me. I do wish it worked on a per title basis, but maybe that will come another day. At a minimum though you can use sharing to try a game and see if your machine is fast enough to run it, or see if you like the game before buying it, etc... It probably can work best with family/friends in different time zones since if our time zones are way off they it's unlikely we'd be both playing at the same time.

 

[BRiT]

Only one user can access the library at a given time. The owner of the library is getting preference if more than one user wants to access the library.

So when I play one of my games, during this time no one can play this or another game of my steam library?

Yup. They're going with the worst possible and most restrictive way of "sharing".

 

[Malo]

Your actually criticizing Valve for allowing us to share games with friends soon? Did you want them to provide the ability for anyone to play any of your games irrespective of how many are playing it from your library?

 

[joker454]

Yup. They're going with the worst possible and most restrictive way of "sharing".

I do wish it was per title. If I'm at a library reading a book then sure no one else can read the book I'm reading, but they are not all kicked out of the library until I'm done reading my one book! So Steam's solution is not ideal, but I presume its their first step to see how that works, if it gets abused, etc... Like I wonder if people will now try making one Steam account per game or some craziness like that to get around the library limitations. Still compared to consoles where I'd have to drop the disc in the mail and hope it gets past customs in 7 days to my relatives for them to be able to share games with me and then hope the disc makes it back to me intact another week later, etc, compared to that Steam's solution is still much better.

 

[Grall]

Your actually criticizing Valve for allowing us to share games with friends soon?

It's a rather lame scheme. If you can get booted out by the owner at any time, how relaxed can you really get playing that game? Many games don't even offer quicksaving these days, you could potentially lose a lot of progress.

Did you want them to provide the ability for anyone to play any of your games irrespective of how many are playing it from your library?

If I own a physical copy of a game I can lend it out with no limitations to how I can access/play my other games.

It's difficult to think up very many - if any - credible reasons why downloadable games should work differently. No, the only one that bobs up to the surface in my mind at least is greed, and valve's always been good at that.

Valve's been abusing their cred with gamers from years ago to foist their incredibly locked-down and limited DRM-ridden platform on the general public, and the only reason they're getting away with it is because people still love half-life, half a decade since the last game in the series came out. Two rather less-loved companies, EA and microsoft for example, haven't met with a fraction of the same success.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

It's a rather lame scheme. If you can get booted out by the owner at any time, how relaxed can you really get playing that game? Many games don't even offer quicksaving these days, you could potentially lose a lot of progress.

You'll have a few minutes between being notified that the owner has started playing a game and when it actually kicks you out. That allows you time to save (assuming it's not a checkpoint type game) or as Valve would prefer, time to purchase the game before you get kicked out.

Limiting it to kicking a person out if the owner is playing the same game versus the owner is playing any game is obviously a compromise between allowing the sharing of games and Valve/Publishers/Developers wanting to make money from people buying a game.

They are hoping that by getting a taste of a game, and potentially then getting kicked out of a game they are having a lot of fun in, that a user may get hooked enough that they'll want to buy the game instead of being kicked out every time the owner starts up a game.

If it was purely game by game. Then just get a group of 10 friends, and share one account with people agreeing on which games are going to be played by which people at any given time. Obviously works best for single player games.

Regards,
SB

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Thats why GOG and humble bundle (most of the games) rock ! We get games without DRM which we can share within family or outside, like we own the game.

If GOG and HB did not exist, I would have never got all those fab games running on my niece's desktop. Right now she plays Botanicula, all tell tale games and many more which are actually "mine" !

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

So how would this go if the owner disables his NIC? Would steam just go into offline mode and essentially allow two persons to access?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

So how would this go if the owner disables his NIC? Would steam just go into offline mode and essentially allow two persons to access?

If you're willing to share your account, you can do that already. A friend and I do that. We each have our own account, then we have one account that we share for games that neither of us would be willing to buy on our own at full price, but at half the price (splitting it) we'd get it. Quite often one or the other of us finds out that we probably shouldn't have gotten it even at half off, but the other finds good value in it.

If I like it, I quite often then end up buying it for my own account during a Steam sale.

This Steam sharing thing would make that shared account unnecessary for us for most games.

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Yup. They're going with the worst possible and most restrictive way of "sharing".

When it's put that way, it almost seems like they're doing a bad thing to the customers.


This sharing scheme is obviously not for giving FREE GAMEZ to our friends and family.
It's an excellent replacement to the lack of game demos that we see in most PC games and and it even gives us the opportunity to play games from start to finish if our friend is away on vacation or going through a phase with no time for gaming.



However, if we enable a "friend" that lives in a timezone that is 6+ hours away from ours, there's a big chance we'll never kick each other out of the game.

 

[Billy Idol]

Well, this way of sharing plan seems plausible and realistic to me.

And it is quite nice.

 

[Lightman]

Great news as I will be able to finally create Steam account for my son and let him play my games in the living room without interfering with MY cloud saves!
One thing I wonder is how Steam will react if I only log in into it. Will it automatically block family shared library or let my son play while I'm reading internet with Steam client being reduced to simple IM app.

 

[Sxotty]

Yup. They're going with the worst possible and most restrictive way of "sharing".

The most restrictive way of sharing would require you to give up the rights to the game. I think this is a very very positive change. I never have time to play my steam games anymore either so

 

[BRiT]

I really don't get the consensus here. Most seem to love this sharing plan by Valve. I compare what Valve announced and what Microsoft had announced and Microsoft plan seems significantly better. Of course people hated the Microsoft plan. Are people truly that blind and biased by brand names to react solely off of company names?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I really don't get the consensus here. Most seem to love this sharing plan by Valve. I compare what Valve announced and what Microsoft had announced and Microsoft plan seems significantly better. Of course people hated the Microsoft plan. Are people truly that blind and biased by brand names to react solely off of company names?

Yup, the Microsoft plan was a hell of a lot better. It's too bad it was torpedo'd due to the complaints of a very vocal minority.

I look at this as "better than nothing."

Regards,
SB

 

[Davros]

Of course people hated the Microsoft plan. Are people truly that blind and biased by brand names to react solely off of company names?

Are people truly that blind and biased to not have noticed that no one was against sharing, people were against not being able to sell their games.

 

[BRiT]

Are people truly that blind and biased to not have noticed that no one was against sharing, people were against not being able to sell their games.

I think you're being disingenuous. You do not have [selling games] with Steam and yet everyone loves it.

 

[Billy Idol]

In my opinion (and I know Joker will kill me again for it ) MS never exactly detailed and explained their plan and it is really not necessary to bring MS sharing up again and again as MS canceled it (at least for the moment)...so there is nothing to see here.

As I said: Steam sharing seems plausible and realistic to me in contrast to some interpretations of MS sharing that floated around in this forum. I openly stated that I could not believe the way MS sharing was interpreted due to it being financially risky. And the Steam way at least does not contradict my point.

Furthermore of course sharing is nice...why Brit do you think someone is against it? Sharing is nothing new. PS3 introduced it for its digital PSN content already this gen in such a liberal form that they had to bring it down to two members because everyone loved it and did it...again, huge financial risk.

I really hope not all of your thinking is in terms of black and white in the sense of 'the Microsoft haters'...this seems to be a common pattern in your latest posts...forcing me to learn that I cannot put a B3D mod on my ignore list.