Valve Announces Family Sharing On Steam, Can Include Friends 263
Deathspawner writes "Valve has today announced its next attempt at a console-killer: 'Family Sharing' is a feature that will allow you to share your Steam library with family and close friends. This almost seems too good to be true, and while there are caveats, this is going to be huge, and Valve knows it. As Techgage notes, with it you can share nearly your entire Steam library with family or friends, allowing them to earn their own achievements, and have their own saved games. 'Once a device is authorized, the lender's library of Steam games becomes available for others on the machine to access, download, and play. Though simultaneous usage of an account’s library is not allowed, the lender may always access and play his games at any time. If he decides to start playing when a friend is borrowing one of his games, the friend will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.'"
Steambox (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as Steambox allows me to play games with a keyboard and mouse, it will be a superior choice to any other console.
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Re:Steamboxen (Score:2)
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You told us what a Steambox is, but what's a Steamboxen?
Re:Steambox (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Steambox (Score:5, Informative)
So, you call GP wrong, and then say the exact same thing.
Steambox is a PC designed to hook up to a TV instead of a monitor, with the primary intent of playing games. Valve was the first company to really start pushing this concept, and are currently working on creating a mass produced unit themselves... hence the name is based on their Steam platform. Whether you build it yourself, or buy a pre-built unit from Valve or their partners is immaterial. Whether you limit yourself to Steam games or the other potential vendors (per your list) is also immaterial.
Best part is, GGP was most likely a sarcastic remark. A tongue in cheek reference to the fact that valve has talked about a mass-produced Steambox for years now, yet nothing has hit the market.
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What Steambox?
it's like buying a mid range pc to run steam and pay extra to valve for it. for some reason people are waiting for it anxiously. I never understood why, especially if they want to use kb and mouse. just buy a pc.
typed on my laptop. with wireless kb. with wireless mouse. sitting on my sofa, typing on a 55" screen. I genuinely don't understand why the fuck I would like a steambox, since all the games on steam work perfectly with this and this is a proper pc to boot.
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Most laptops have crap for vid cards, and so can't play any kind of demanding 3D game. That's about it though.
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Re:Steambox (Score:4, Interesting)
No co-op (Score:4, Interesting)
Still no ability to play multiplayer with somebody without them buying the game, the one spot where I feel consoles definitely have the advantage over PC games.
Re:No co-op (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this functionality depends on how the game is implemented, rather than what Steam can do about it.
Re:No co-op (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps that will come. But still, this is a step that Valve didn't have to take, and another reminder that as far as global companies controlling intellectual property are concerned, Valve is about the closest we've got to a "good guy" to root for.
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Perhaps that will come. But still, this is a step that Valve didn't have to take, and another reminder that as far as global companies controlling intellectual property are concerned, Valve is about the closest we've got to a "good guy" to root for.
Except for when they change this ToS and if you don't agree to something you're locked out of all the games you had purchased previously...
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Just out of interest, why is it good when Valve does this sort of thing with Steam but it was ultimate internet uproar when Microsoft proposed the exact same thing for the XBox One before having to backtrack?
This requires the exact same phoning home that Microsoft originally planned to implement and they were offering this exact same feature as a result of that.
Is there a particular reason as to why it's suddenly now okay other than the fact Valve seems to get a free pass when it introduces ever more intrus
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Just out of interest, why is it good when Valve does this sort of thing with Steam but it was ultimate internet uproar when Microsoft proposed the exact same thing for the XBox One before having to backtrack?
Because the XBox is console, and Steam games are on a PC. Think of them being at opposite ends of a spectrum. This is valve taking a step in the right direction (more sharing where there's basically none at the minute), and Microsoft were taking a step in the wrong direction (limiting sharing where it was previously easy to do).
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I don't think that makes sense. Until Steam DRM came along I was perfectly able to share PC games. It's only a step forward if you ignore the fact that Steam DRM was a massive step backwards in the first place so effectively you're saying Valve is now taking one step forward after previously having taken PC gaming 2 steps back whereas Microsoft was taking 1 step back after having always been one step forward.
My Quake CD was shared with most people I know (and I think every one of them went on to buy their o
Re:No co-op (Score:5, Insightful)
Still no ability to play multiplayer with somebody without them buying the game, the one spot where I feel consoles definitely have the advantage over PC games.
Don't console gamers have to have two copies of the game to play multiplayer, too?
Re:No co-op (Score:5, Informative)
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PC games supporting local multiplayer (Score:3)
Personally I see [local multiplayer] as a major benefit of console gaming that has kept me from gaming on PCs for decades.
First connect a PC to an HDTV or other large monitor. Then plug in USB gamepads, such as Xbox 360 controllers you bought at a pawn shop. Then install something like Blur, Dungeon Defenders, Lego $MOVIE, Street Fighter IV, or Trine, or any of several games on this list [co-optimus.com]. What's stopping that?
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For games that don't offer split-screen, yes.
On the other hand, if I want to play one game (say, Halo: ODST) while a friend plays a *different* game, say Halo 3, we can do that. Even though I, and not he, own both games. Steam doesn't let you do that, even with this so-called "Sharing" feature. I didn't want to share access to my account's games list, I wanted to share access to my games, individually. Don't let us both play Foo at the same time if you must, but if I want to play Foo and he wants to play Ba
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Isn't that exactly what "family sharing" does?
FTA: "See a family member's installed game that you want to play? Send them a request to authorize the computer. Once authorized, the lender's library of Steam games become available for others on the machine to access, download and play. "
Re:No co-op (Score:5, Informative)
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There are some loopholes with downloadable games on Xbox and Playstation that lets two people play the same purchased game.
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I meant to add "... play the same purchased game at the same time on two different consoles, even against each other, using two different accounts".
Barely an improvement at all, really. (Score:3)
To hell with that, still no way for me to play Foo while my friend plays Bar. If I want to play Halo ODST while my friend plays Fable 3, I hand him the Fable disc and put the Halo disc in my own console. Even though both games are in my "library".
Steam is still DRM bullshit. This just slightly improves the current system of sharing a single actual Steam account between multiple people. Note the key word "slightly" in there.
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Steam is still DRM bullshit. This just slightly improves the current system of sharing a single actual Steam account between multiple people. Note the key word "slightly" in there.
That's not how I read the summary. It isn't the account that is being shared, it's the games. So your games that you have in your account can be shared to my account. You can play Halo while I play your copy of Fable 3 that you shared to me. If you quite Halo and start up Fable, I have to quite playing since it is your game and I am just borrowing it.
This is different from sharing the Steam account. For one, you don't need to give others your password to your Steam account where they could purchase things a
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True, but how many concessions must Steam make for this? If that was the case then entire communities could just "go in" and buy one of nearly every game they enjoy, and as long as they all just play one game at a time, you could have hundreds of people sharing these games.
While this /can/ happen in real life, the chances that these kind of uses actually going on (outside of netcafes) is so slim it would be a big presumptuous to assume it should work like this online. This really isn't that big of a restric
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Still no ability to play multiplayer with somebody without them buying the game, the one spot where I feel consoles definitely have the advantage over PC games.
Your being far too cynical here; this is a HUGE deal.
Consoles require you to have two copies of a game to play multiplayer too for the same class of multiplayer play.
The notable exception being split-screen multiplayer, and steam supports split screen multiplayer with just one copy the same as any console -- its the games that don't offer it. Its no
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Consoles require you to have two copies of a game to play multiplayer too for the same class of multiplayer play.
So does this. If you want to play your copy of any game in your library while someone is using it, they get booted. Even if it's a different game. 'cause it's the whole library that is shared, not individual games.
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This is 100% the case for digitally sourced games.
I do not see a way for Valve to implement per-game sharing until they also implement some kind of first-sale doctrine rights. If you can just lend out X games to X people where X is the amount of games in your inventory - entire groups would just go in on one huge "group library". Even for Valve that's kind of hard to justify from a business perspective.
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Ha! That actually goes all the way back to WC2, never mind SC1. Good to see them getting back to one of the things that helped make SC a big deal, though. Does it allow offline LAN play yet?
Also, just to be clear: "this" is "play the same game with a friend without buying it". StarCraft may allow it, but Steam does not and nothing in this announcement changes that.
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How is this different?
I have Street Fighter I want to play with a friend. We both show up and play on the same screen. If they want to play while we are at different houses, they will need their own copy, so we can play online.
The scenario I've described is exactly the same for Steam as it is for consoles here.
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I have a feeling that "couch multiplayer" will be directly tied to the success of Steambox.
Right now, squeezing three extra people around my 24" monitor is a bit tricky (despite it actually having much better resolution than my 1080 TV ... but I digress) Getting 4 controllers wired up (wireless) and working is another hurdle. I hear XBox controllers can be made to work, but I'm currently using those for my XBox. All in all, it's more trouble than it's worth, and not very high in demand.
If Steambox sup
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I'd just be happy if I could run Steam with the /same/ account on two (or more) different computers simultaneously. Not to play the same game, but having the ability to play one game on one PC and a completely different game on another seems like something those geniuses at Valve should have figured out how to do by now.
Unless that's what this update does. They say it allows you to "authorize another device" but that does not necessarily indicate the same account can be used at the same time.
Imagine this happening with music and movies (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, I think I need to go to the hospital, I think I broke something laughing so hard.
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Plex. [plexapp.com]
Of course, you'll have to find a way to format-shift your content to a non-DRM-riddled version, so it's shareable...and good luck finding a legal way to do that [eff.org] (see section on Fair Use), even though it is technically legal for you to do so...
IMO, sharing media via Plex is no different than lending s DVD or a CD to a friend, since they don't have a local copy, it's all being streamed from your server. AFAIK, sharing purchased physical media with friends and family isn't illegal...yet.
This better not force you to be on line 100% of th (Score:2)
This better not force you to be on line 100% of the time even if you don't use this.
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online to actually share games, but will it be 100% with any drop out leading to kickoff right at the time of drop?
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Based on the announcement, either you must be online when sharing to validate that the lendee cannot play the game or your accounts titles are no longer lended when you go into offline mode. Any other solution would likely make it possible to have to copies of the game playing simultaneously, which would be a violation.
Mostly Useless (Score:2)
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De-authorize her account?
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Not family sharing, more like account borrowing (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm extremely disappointed. I was hoping for a real family sharing option, so I could play Portal in my mancave while my wife plays Gone Home up in the living room, but that's not what this is. It's almost completely useless to me. If Netflix can allow my family to stream multiple movies at once, why cant Steam allow them to play multiple games at once?
Maybe I should just make a new steam account for every game I buy? That way I can have one master account with my friends list, and everything I buy with the account will be a gift for the actual game account. That would let me actually lend games out and maybe even resell them. It would be a bit of a pain to manage, but seems better than this solution where letting someone borrow a game locks you out of every other game you own.
Re:Not family sharing, more like account borrowing (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA says the opposite, it will give your friends a few minutes to buy or save. You always get priority on your library. Not exactly an unfair policy, though I wish it were specific to that title, not to your whole library.
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Gee, I remember the good old days where there was at most one computer in a house; if someone -- such as a younger sibling -- was using it to play a game, you had to kick them off to play a different game. If you were kind, you gave them a few minutes to wrap up and save.
I don't see what's different here. Now quit whining and get off my lawn.
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you call that the good old days?
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Sounds like you were kind of a dick... by the time I was 9 (and I'm the eldest child) everybody in the family had their own PC though. I will admit to occasionally using my sister's for Total Annihilation, however, (it had more RAM; mine couldn't run 7 Islands).
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This is the biggest thing. I know that we all have 40 computers per household now, but this is trying to treat Steam as a console. If you have one console (one Steam account) with games on it, how the hell are you and your brother going to play two different games on the same machine at the same time?
People are getting angry that they aren't understanding the feature.
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When I picked up a new game for the PS3 or XBox I can take it over to a friend's house and let them play the beginning of it. I see this as essentially giving that same ability to the PC.
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Well said (Score:2)
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One account / game is the way to go if you absolutely must use Steam. It lets you do such crazy things as re-sell games (unofficially) as well...
DRM is bullshit, Steam included. GOG, HumbleBundle (the not-DRMed ones, thanks), or direct from the dev!
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Is GOG still strictly non-DRM? They've started selling current games, so do they actually say the games they sell don't have their own DRM of any sort? That would actually be pretty cool.
I have a few GOG titles, but I'm starting to look at it as a general-purpose alternative to Steam, mostly because every damn time I want to play a game on Steam, I have to wait for the steam client to patch itself with a 100MB patch. WTF Valve?
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GOG is absolutely, strictly, no DRM. Games which had DRM, they generally patch it out. Some games will still say things like "enter word 7, line 5, page 23 from the manual" but you just click OK and they go away.
It's actually really funny too; they released The Witcher 2 (CDProjekt RED owns GOG) on both Steam and GOG. The widely distributed pirated version? Steam with the DRM cracked. The completley DRM-free version, which cost the same amount, we mostly ignored for large-scale piracy. Proof enough that DRM
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One account / game is the way to go if you absolutely must use Steam. It lets you do such crazy things as re-sell games (unofficially) as well...
This is actually a pretty good idea. If you make a new Steam account for each game you buy you can sell individual accounts if you want, therefore selling the digital game. You can also share individual accounts with your friends. But most importantly, you share the individual accounts with your own main account. That way you don't need to log out and back in to different accounts to play different games. You get the benefit of separate games and accounts with the benefit of playing them from one account. T
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You are missing the point. They are trying to emulate the home console, and game swapping (as best they can). Not give 10 of your friends free copies of all of your games.
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No. If it were "as best they can" then I could hand my roommate a virtual copy of game X to play while I play game Y, just like I can do with real games. It's not like there's some technical reason they can't do this. When I share a copy of a game with a friend, I temporarily lose access to that copy of that game. I don't lose access to my entire library (for the pedantic: I don't have to kick him off if I want to play something else from my library, which amounts to losing access because I am not a dick to
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No, because when you own a console, only one person can play it at a time.
This is to replace that, so you can have a single computer, that everyone can use, and they can all use their own Steam account, but play each others games.
But they go even a little further, as it is not tied to a single computer.
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Someone give you some points, this message is being missed a lot.
This isn't the holy grail of DRM freedoms, but this is a pretty HUGE step forward.
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No, if you want to play ANY game in your library it kicks them out.
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It's not unclear; it's well established that if you play any game on your account, it kicks them off, regardless of what game they were playing. Only one person can access any given person's library at a time. This isn't sharing games at all... more like sharing a single account with multiple passwords. Nothign to see here, DRM still sucks.
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Brilliant idea (Score:2)
Even though the first posters all respond like they've been touched in a bad place, I think it's a great idea. There are several games I don't really play and some of my friends would like to try. Or vice versa. Brilliant.
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The only issue is that you can't play while your friend plays. Proof! [puu.sh]
And no, I don't think I'm misunderstanding as it doessay library instead of game.
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Okay - so my next games will be purchased on different accounts. Problem solved.
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They added a feature. Despite the whiners, it's not taking anything away, and if someone doesn't like it, they don't have to use it.
I would like to see resale (or at least trading) of games, but this isn't a bad feature and certainly has its uses. Going on vacation or something? Let a friend play your stuff. Etc.
Kick friends out of games at random. How fun! (Score:2)
If you play any one game from your library it kicks the person you're sharing with from your library. A library is an all at once or nothing share. So my wife can't play Skyrim from my account while I'm playing Borderlands 2. Without being able to share individual games, the feature is pretty worthless. Step in the right direction, sure, but barely. I still have to make sure I'm not in my account (or go offline) if my wife wants to play one of my games. It's pretty much no change from how we have to do
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So they added functionality, but it's not the functionality you wanted, so the entire feature is worthless?
Christ.
Re:Kick friends out of games at random. How fun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Steam must be for hard-core gamers only, and just because they may not use this feature, it's now "barely added functionality"?
I'm glad I can let my brother play my games without having to worry about him mucking up my profile, market, inventory, friends, CC# info, etc. I guess I'm sad that I cannot let 10 of my friends play free games off my account at the same time while I'm also using my games and account?
It's really grasping for straws to shake angrily at Valve here.
AFT (Score:2)
About Fucking Time.
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is sorta cool.
Oddly, this ties closely to the main barrier for me with Steam games: Steam's DRM, while very open in a large number of ways, is more restrictive than any other DRM system I've ever seen in one key way, which is that all Steam games on an account are subject to the same simultaneous usage requirement. Many of the games I play are turn-based games which I might well leave up and running for hours at a time, returning to them occasionally. Some are little fidgets I might play for brief windows. And with Steam's system, although I can have games installed on two machines, I can't play games on two machines at once.
Yes, I am aware of the "offline mode" option. I have asked Valve, and they have stated that it is specifically forbidden to use offline mode to run games from the same library on two machines at once, no matter what. So if I have two adjacent computers, and I want to play Game A on one machine, and Game B on another, I can't do that if I got them through Steam. This is sort of weird to me, because even the most restrictive of other DRM systems I'm aware of allow you to install one game on one machine, and a different game on another machine, and run them at the same time.
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This eliminates many of the conveniences of Steam (background updates for all your games, friends list, cross-game perks, no need to "swap CDs" (swap accounts, in this case), plus it adds the hassle of needing to create new accounts all the time. I think it's also forbidden by their TOS, but I could be wrong (most online services prohibit this, but not all). However, it is in fact the only way to use Steam with paid games without getting shafted by their DRM.
Me? I just don't buy shit on Steam anymore.
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What if you have one shared computer and you want to let your little sister play some of your games without also giving her full access to your account, friends, profile, and CC information?
Oh wait I mean YEAH FUCK VALVE.
'Friends' not 'Family' (Score:3)
There are some games that my neighbor plays that he won't even let his kids watch, much less play on their own. I remember that there was one where the (at the time) 9 year old was able to download the demo for free, which he only knew about because his dad & uncle played the game.
If this were truly a 'family' plan, you'd be able to set which games a specific account is allowed to have access to.
Baby step (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't as good as I'd hoped. But its not "bad". Its not taking anything away we didn't have before, and it gives us options we didn't used to have.
I am happy about this feature, but not satisfied with it.
It lets me create steam accounts for my kids and let them use my library. This is good -- now my friends won't message them, invite them to play games, etc. Now they can each have their own steam-cloud save files, and their own acheivements, etc.
Up until now I've just logged in for them, told them they aren't allowed to buy anything, and to ignore any messages or invites. And they've been good about it but this still makes it better.
But the big problem I had (and still have) with steam is the complete lock on the entire library. If my kids were playing on my account before, I couldn't play. I couldn't play the same game (and I was fine with that) but I also couldn't play a different game -- if my son is playing scribblenauts I can't play Left 4 Dead. And I have always disagreed with that.
As it stands now, the situation there hasn't changed. If my son is logged in to his account, playing a game on my library I still can't play a different game. So for me, although this feature is a step forward it still falls short.
Well Thank You So Very Much Valve (Score:2)
Thank you so very much for this awesome new feature Valve. I feel so grateful that you have graciously allowed me to share my purchases from your company with my friends and family.
In other news, book publishers are going to be providing us with the same fantastically free and open benefits.
From now on, you will be able to share your books with other people. The only catch is that if you have loaned a book to a friend and want to read a different book, your friend will be notified and have a few minutes
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Actually, this will save me a small amount of money each year, because at least a couple of times a year either my wife or I gets a game and its "cheap enough" to get for both of us because the other shows interest, and then quickly looses it.
Few games (like fallout 3) we both have played the s
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I'd like to be able to play Civ V while someone else can play some other game in my library. Nope
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"I want to give 10 of my friends free copies of the games I'm not playing this very second."
While this would be nice (and 100% possible in the physical world), the trade off here comes with the fact that ANYONE IN THE WORLD can play your games at any time you're not playing them.
That's a bit different than say, giving your brother a copy of quake 3 to go play in the next room.
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Yes and if everyone you're sharing your steam account with lived under the same roof as you, then this would be pretty bad. All the negative reaction people are having boils down to: "I cannot give my friends free copies of games, bullshit."
This is sharing a Steam account like you'd share your physical Xbox. This isn't sharing per-game. This makes people angry for some reason, getting "shafted" on something they didn't know existed 30 seconds ago.
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"Wake me when I can buy/sell games 2nd hand over Steam. THAT would actually make me happy.. =)"
That's a nonsense reason to be mad at Steam. Every penny that you think you would be getting is more than made up for by being able to buy at steep discounts. I got Black Ops 2 for half price shortly after it was released. It's still going for 50 bucks pre-owned at Game Stop on 360. Even following a trade in process like that I would be at the same place monetarily but no longer the owner of the game. The only thi
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Nothing like that feature, but nice try at getting your hate boner up.
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The Steam version is an all-or-nothing - once a friend decides to play a game, if you want to play ANY game in your library, it kicks them out. So if your friend is playing Portal and you want to play Portal 2, you can start playing Portal 2 and your friend will have a few minutes to quit or buy
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No, it's a lamer version of it.
Of course, Microsoft's problem is twofold.
1) They're Microsoft. Everything they do incites hate. See: Apple. They can cure cancer or world poverty or hunger and people will still hate them.
2) Microsoft also has a communication problem (this is a bigger issue). They just cannot communicate with the public well. And a lot of what they ne
Re:Microsoft wanted to do this (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, Microsoft was going to do *much* better than this: they would allow two people to use the same account *AT THE SAME TIME* which Steam (still) does not allow. Two different people could play different games that were both purchased on the same account. Steam doesn't even let two people use the same account at the same time at all.
The always-online thing was, I think, a bigger deal than the first-sale issue; Steam has *never* respected the doctrine of first sale, and people sing its praises all the time. All DRM (including both Steam and downloaded games on the Xbox) on so-called "purchases" can go die in a fire, along with everybody pushing it.
(I'm OK with DRM on things that are explicitly rentals, like Netflix, so long as they're reimburse me if it doesn't work for me because of the DRM.)
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The switchoff would be the XBone calls home every hour, the Steam client may not (we don't know how often it will phone home during this).
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As much as I hated a lot of the initial Xbox One launch ideas (especially the limit on how long you could play offline, which was just asinine), this was an idea they were trying to do, from what I understood of their press releases. I'm glad that Valve's doing it, it's a great idea, but I guarantee some of the people singing its praises are the same ones who hated the idea from Microsoft because it interfered with first sale.
Some? I'd be willing to bet its virtually all of them.
That hypocrisy has been pointed out to death, though -- people didn't flip out that Steam games can't be resold, nor will people flip out when the addition of sharing in Steam carries with it online requirements. Oh wait, of course, Steam DOES require the Internet.
A noisy bunch of morons made a mess of Microsoft's plans, and the same noisy bunch of morons are going to be bouncing up and down at how "innovative" this is...
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Wouldn't creating a game-backup from within Steam; sharing it over the network (or sneakernet) and restore it for each pc be faster ?
That way you only need to download it once, and frankly, chances are already at least one person will have it installed... with a bit of luck even already backed up to a share or external medium like an usb-stick or drive.
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Seems like a lot of effort to replace what is a one-time few minute wait for a download if you have broadband.