I just experienced the dark side of Steam

Even in offline mode?

Yes, it's my understanding that you have to be in online mode to access the library.

"Do I need to be online to play a shared game?

Yes. You must be online to access and play games which are shared with you."

http://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

Well, that's pretty fuckin useless without setting up for it in advance...

I'm pretty sure this isn't the reason so many people hate Steam, but I do agree it doesn't exactly help.

Yes

It's all about DRM. Any way you slice it, it sucks. They are so scared of pirates, that they are willing to screw legit customers. As with most companies with an effective monopoly, they are too big to care.

This, is about half the reason I hate steam.... the other half is the constant, required, useless updates, that as often as not, seem to cause problems.

I play in offline mode all the time, I have no internet connection to the machine Gal Civ 3 is resident on.

Part of this is simply to end-run steam.

N/A

If I'm reading the FAQ right, I believe you have to be online. I find this to be a strange requirement. You have to be logged into Steam for your family member to access your library, but you can't play...so why would anyone normally sign into Steam if they didn't want to (or couldn't) play.

"Do I need to be online to play a shared game?

Yes. You must be online to access and play games which are shared with you."

Steam does make a decent IM client.   If you play on the same account, and one is offline, I think that works.

Family sharing is probably different, and I can see why you wouldn't want you kid using your account.

N/A

Yea, I hope you're right.

I don't see anything wrong with it.

Yea, I don't expect anyone at SD to say anything negative about Steam. Biting the hand that feeds you, and such.

I was just hoping I could play SD games without being limited by their draconian Family Share restrictions.

I can see this driving customers away from Steam games and towards alternatives.  Not good for Steam's business!

It depends on how many people are using the family option.

Like this doesn't affect me at all.

Probably because you didn't understand. I buy Sorcerer King on Steam. I buy GalCiv on Steam. I cannot play GalCiv while my kid plays Sorcerer King.

There's no reason to restrict access to a person's entire Steam library to one computer at a time.

Edit: OK. There's one reason. To dick around your paying customers. But that's not a good reason.

So, you're saying that my situation is very unusual, like I'm a Fringe user of Steam?

Not necessarily, just not everyone's impacted.

I do not think that makes your complaint invalid, though. I don't see the point of the Family option if only one person can use the account at a time. You should be able to have simultaneous usage, like with Netflix.

Also, I did in fact see what you did there.

I have the exact same problem as the OP.  Except I have 4 computers and 4 children wanting to use them at the same time.   I am so sick of switching steam from online to offline and then fighting with it to work...

I wish I could transfer the games to their individual accounts, but of course I can't, I have to re-buy them.   

Despite all this, family sharing is much better than the previous options which was same account open everywhere.

perhaps you are looking at this wrong? is there any reason why your son needs his own account?

any reason why you can't setup your own steam account on that machine, update whatever games, make it offline mode and block internet access (for steam only?)

obviously i ain't done this before, nor do i need to.... but unless people are fine with somehow verifying their rl id to steam with all sorts of info, i don't see them allowing people to share things across accounts just on some sort of honor system. and i imagine it's not too hard to see how if they get some people to give id info, they won't start demanding info from everyone eventually..

I don't believe it's ever been mentioned that it was made to play games from 1 library at the same time by multiple people. To me, it sounds like you want it to be something different than it is and are blaming Valve that it isn't. *shrug*

Do you see where publishers/developers would lose money if everybody just started sharing accounts and nobody was paying for the games they played anymore?

I never said it was mentioned that that is the way it was made. But IMO, it should be. Otherwise, the feature is limited. Under this arrangement, if I we both want to play games, one of us is going to have to wait. That's no different than sharing a single PC.

In my case, I've already paid for the games. I have no interest in my son's games, so the developers actually got paid for the games that I would never have purchased on my own, had my son not wanted them.

Also, with family share, there is a limit to the number of shared accounts. It's not a share everything with everyone arrangement.

Well look, if Steam doesn't give at least a little ground, then it's back to the good old days of physical media which you can actually play in whatever machine you like.

Nobody is denying that digital distribution is a big step forward, but it also has the potential to shoot itself in the foot if contending with disc checks is an easier thing than letting a family play games as a family.  It's not like they're getting away with the old 'one disc between four machines' trick if they all want to multiplayer.

I'm all for developers earning a living, but needing to have two game licenses when only one player is playing at a time seems a tad bit overkill.  Can you even do that?  Have two licenses for a game in one Steam library?  No?  Then maybe that's something to consider.

Here's another idea. How about allowing someone to transfer a license to another person. Person A transfers the license to person B. Person A can no longer play the game, but person B to whom the license was transferred, can.

Of course, now that the media is digital rather than physical, the person who purchased the game doesn't actually own one copy of it.

Is it working?

Fascinating legal issue (although I'm sure there is something about it in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that says users have no rights whatsoever about anything anywhere). I wonder if me reading book1 from shelf3 prevents another household occupant from reading book7 from shelf2, simply because they are in the same library? Are we heading in Digital Age tyranny?

How are two occupants of the same household, playing two different - paid for - games (from the same account\library), hurting publishers/developers? Are they hurting publishers/developers because they didn't buy multiple copies for household occupant #1, #2, and #3? When did it become normal to buy multiple copies of - insert entertainment product (e.g. Book, Movie, Board game, Toy, etc.) - for the same household? Doesn't anybody share with their family members anymore? How does a "Family Share" option promotes sharing when they lock you out of your account if somebody from your household is playing a different game than the one you want to play? Wouldn't it make more sense to allow multiple accesses to the same account\library if said accesses share the same physical address (or credit card, or IP, or something along those lines)? I find it hard to believe that there isn't a more reasonable solution than locking out the original owner of the account. I also find the almighty dollar argument unconvincing and somewhat vile in this context.

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