I’ve been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I’ve got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I’m cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just… easy.
That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck plugged into the TV downstairs.
I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV… and that’s where everything breaks down. If she’s playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that “someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off” or some nonsense like that.
I’m suddenly face to face with the fact that I don’t actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren’t spent on what I expected. It’s… enraging to put it gently.
I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that’s bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware is not ok.
I don’t see how family share solves anything, I looked it up a few years ago, and it seemed pretty useless.
What exactly does family share do that is actually useful?
Edit:
We have tried it now, and yes now you can actually play games owned by other family members.
I’m pretty sure that the current functionality wasn’t available last I read about it on Steam.
Now it does what you’d expect from the name.
They changed it recently where you can have two members of a family able to play two different games at ones (or rather number of copies of the game at once).
But that requires different accounts even if one account owns all the games.
Can we just declare us family members and then have access to each others libraries?
Yes
With a caveat - you need to share an ip address with the user at some point. A friend of mine logged into Steam on a pc in my house to get around that issue but my brother (who’s 1400 miles away) joined my family with no issues because we lived together at some point a decade ago.