Slashdot Mirror
Valve Announces Family Sharing On Steam, Can Include Friends
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.'"
As long as Steambox allows me to play games with a keyboard and mouse, it will be a superior choice to any other console.
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.
Sorry, I think I need to go to the hospital, I think I broke something laughing so hard.
This better not force you to be on line 100% of the time even if you don't use this.
So now my girlfriend can't walk out with my steam collection and the cat. Whoop dee-doo.
Having the "family sharing" plan lock you out of your entire Steam library while a family member plays a game from your list is not family sharing. This is basically just a way to give your account to someone without having to give them your password. Also, they get to keep their achievements, whoop de doo.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm imagining you'd have to be online to actually share games, but the rest of the time, you could be in offline mode.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I agree, if a friend can't play one of your games while you play another, it's not much of a sharing system. I like your idea about one account per game. Actually, I hate it, but it's about the only way to get around Steam's policy. I'm generally pretty happy with Steam, but this ranks a big "meh".
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
online to actually share games, but will it be 100% with any drop out leading to kickoff right at the time of drop?
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 shit out of and it made sense to buy for each of us, however, for many games, its kind of silly...and if each of us could just try out games while the other isn't playing, it would likely save us a few bucks... admittedly, we are talking a total of maybe $50 a year, but, we will definitely use this.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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 things now. Hence, worthless.
About Fucking Time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Nothing like that feature, but nice try at getting your hate boner up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Can you enumerate the differences? The XBOne version allowed you to designate friends/family who could play your games, with the option for them to go ahead and buy. I don't see any difference with the Steam version.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Have anyone noticed that a lot of the news articles don't even get 100 comments? Some do and just a few pass the 200 mark.
May be I see just a few articles a day and that is what I get. Is someone keeping statistics?
The biggest problem I have with Steam are LAN parties. Or the lack of such possibility with a single account (=single copy of a game). Some games can be played via LAN in offline mode, but it's not guaranteed to work. And even if you convince all your friends to create a Steam account and buy the game, you'll spend the evening downloading N copies of the game once they come to your place. Fail.
I'd like to be able to play Civ V while someone else can play some other game in my library. Nope
> 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. Of course, but if you have a point there, I don't see it. Steam has already taken the ability to resell away from the buyer, so that loss does not occur at the point of implementing this system like it did with the Xbox plan. People using Steam have already accepted those terms.
again with formatting
> 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.
Of course, but if you have a point there, I don't see it. Steam has already taken the ability to resell away from the buyer, so that loss does not occur at the point of implementing this system like it did with the Xbox plan. People using Steam have already accepted those terms.
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.)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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 Portal.
On the Xbox, it would let you play Halo while they played Ryse. You just couldn't have both playing Ryse or both Halo at the same time.
And I presume if you have two friends sharing your Steam account, one locks out the other (you as owner have priority and will kick whoever else is using it out). The Xbox allows full sharing as if you passed the disc on.
Steam still doesn't allow selling games, though. Even if the publisher gets a cut like how the Xbox was also supposed to allow.
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.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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 needed to explain, can't be explained in 140 characters. So instead of being able to explain the entire thing calmly and completely, they leak out little bits that the internet amplifies. Of course, twitter is also far more trusted than the "official source" where the tweet came from, so whoever posts the initial tweet can easily misread something and the whole Internet gets worked up over nothing. (Which then becomes a meme as people believe it to be true).
Hell, we had it happen to McAfee yesterday, and probably dozens of other examples exist as well, like how Microsoft charges $40K to submit new revisions and stuff like that.
Perhaps what SHOULD be worrying is that Sony is unusually silent on the matter - perhaps they also charge $40K for updates (but their NDAs are better so no dev is allowed to even talk about it). Or perhaps the PS4 will have the exact same DRM requirements. Sony has not said anything about going towards how the Xbox was originally envisioned with always on DRM. (Of course, everyone assumes that the PS4 won't have it, but since Sony doesn't actually confirm it for good, they forget that it really means Sony is reserving the ability to do it later).
Ah, Steamboxen, like XBoxen.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
"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 thing that would be remotely close to being worth it monetarily would be an open market where people could trade/sell games but that won't happen. For Steam to even keep on existing it can't happen. The liability issues alone would make them never even think of implementing such a stupid idea. How could they possibly endorse a system that had no ability to cross reference the millions of transactions that would take place with every system out there to find out if that cd key had been banned from online play? VAC would be easy but that's not the only ban you would have to worry about. Do you think, even with a seven thousand page TOS, that people wouldn't be suing the crap out of Valve every time someone sold them a game that they couldn't play online? Its a PR nightmare, a litigation nightmare and would screw the rest of us that are smart enough to see that only suckers buy games at full price instead of waiting a couple of months and getting a 50-90% discount.
Depends on the situation really. If I know I'm going to be slapped upside the head by my wife shortly after starting a game then I'm going to be effectively locked out while she's in a game.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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...
Different platforms users have different expectations basically. As a PC gamer, I expect my computer to always be connected. Console owners tend to expect they can play games wherever they take their console. They also expect to be able to lend and trade their games with friends. Something PC gamers also don't generally expect.
Microsoft tried to do something different and clearly people didn't like it. I think they went too far pulling back though, an offline mode like steam has would have worked (and when you were offline, your friends couldn't share your games).
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.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The reason it's done this way is because it's a lot easier to get a lot of people paying $40 each for a game than one person paying $20 million for a game then letting it be free to everyone else.
However, now that we have financial methods like kickstarter we really could have the best of both worlds. Everyone interested could pay the up front costs and, assuming it gets funded, once production is done, it can be free. Whether or not this will become a popular way to do things is TBD.
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.
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).
"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.
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 to finish reading the page they are on before the book is magically yanked from their hands and put back in your library.
Imagine the freedom! The things we own* will finally be able to shared with others! With the almost complete absence of annoyingly restrictive limitations!
Valve, I really can't explain how appreciative I am of the fact that you are allowing me to do what I want with the things I own*. Truly a great day for openness and freedom.
* Yes, I keep using the word own. When they use the word "Buy" rather than "Rent" or "Lease", that should imply ownership.
So they added functionality, but it's not the functionality you wanted, so the entire feature is worthless?
Christ.
Microsoft: Dial home every hour or the game is nixed within 24.
Valve: Dial home when you want to share the game.
the brother can't play quake 3 in the next room if I am playing anything in this room
It's barely added functionality. If you use your steam account on anything approaching a regular basis the feature is useless. For a collection of casual gamers who play half an hour here or there some utility exists. However, a core component of Steam’s audience: hard core gamers with large libraries, will often be using their accounts and therefore be ineligible to share. For the hard core gamer, Steam's bread and butter, this feature is a carrot followed by a punch in the face.
Apple’s policy of five authorized machines is more sensible and actually enables family sharing across multiple computers and family members. Something more akin to that, but with a division of accounts, would be truly useful.
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.
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.
I mean at the beginning of the year there was supposed to be all these big things coming out of Valve, like the Steambox, but then it all kind of just fizzled into water vapor.
Then I also remembered that Valve is a company that takes 6 years to release anything. So we might see the Steambox in 2020, just in time to compete with the Nokiabox Two, PlaySamsung 5 and Nintendo's WiiilUPleezeBiiMii.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
From the announcement:
“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,”
No, this is like giving your family or friends exclusive use of all your books, DVDs and other physical media. Nobody can read The Two Towers while someone reads The Hobbit, while the owner of the library reads Snowcrash.
Think of Steam as sharing your Xbox, not as sharing each individual game on your Xbox.
This is just a case of not reading (or willfully misunderstanding) the feature.
I have to disagree. I'm not looking to give free stuff to friends.
Without steam, I can buy 2 games and play one one my computer while my son plays the other on the family computer. I cannot do that with this 'sharing' plan.
It is not useful to me. Steam is still a pain when making purchases for the household.
Well, technically this is still beta, so I'm wondering if maybe they'll be tweaking it to allow multiple users playing different games on the same library simultaneously. (Although I'm not going to hold my breath.) One way off the top of my head is maybe just checking the ip address of the two computers trying to access the library at the same time and if they are on the same internal network (in your home or whatnot) they can play concurrently. That way it can be shared in the household but not just a pool of games for your 10 friends across the world.
That said, this is cool for letting your siblings or kids play while you're at work or something or trying to get your friends hooked on a game (so they'll buy a copy to play with you) when the demo (or lack of one) doesn't cut it. I hope they also allow some personal settings tweaking for it. I'd like to set an automatic time frame when the library will be accessible to family and automatically kick them off (after warnings of course). That way I can let them play when I'm at work and boot them before I get home so I can hop on right away.
For what it's worth I pretty much only buy games on Steam these days, but this plan just sucks. It's both mostly useless and a slap in the face to people who have been asking for a family account option for years now. You know, like Netflix does, or iTunes.
I read the internet for the articles.
How does the disc-based version help? Most disc-based PC games these days come with a code that has to be redeemed on Steam or a similar service (Origin, uPlay, whatever) and ties it to that account forever.
All the disc does is save you some time downloading the game.
No no, there would be no litigation nightmare.
It's in the TOS that you can't sue Steam, remember?
The xbox one hasn't been released yet, there is no 'original'.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Maybe if one brave soul lights a candle, we'll be able to see that the sky will not fall if we share a piece of copyrighted material with a friend. Hopefully other interests will follow suit.
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. What's stopping that?
I have Street Fighter I want to play with a friend. We both show up and play on the same screen. [...] The scenario I've described is exactly the same for Steam as it is for consoles here.
The alleged difference is that a randomly chosen multiplayer console game is more likely to support Street Fighter-style local multiplayer than a randomly chosen multiplayer Steam game.
Back when I still played Tetris, the Super NES supported playing Tetris and Dr. Mario at the same time.
How about a much more real and everyday scenario: multiple devices for a single account.
I've a desktop and a laptop; not unusual amongst gamers. If I want to download my steam library into my laptop, I've to stop playing on my desktop. This actually happened to me recently: I had a plane trip some hours later, I could either play a game (desktop), or download one for the trip(laptop), not both!
Your Steam account here is like your Xbox, you cannot both be playing different games on the same Xbox.
While the technical ability to play two different games on one Steam account exists, this feature is not intended to be used in the way you describe. Steam is not making it any more of "a pain" to make purchases for the household than Microsoft is by charging me $300 for two xboxes to play two different games at once.
Stop conflating what you want with what this feature is offering.
it turns out you make the most money following the lowest common denominator.
The lowest common denominator is one PC in a house, and not all gamers live alone.
There is no real set standard on how to support additional players.
One standard has existed since 1998 when Windows 98 added USB gamepad drivers: DirectInput. Another has existed since 2005 when the Xbox 360 came out: XInput.
From a game design perspective, the LCD is the game designer has no restrictions beyond the hardware. But if you tell a game designer to design a game with local multiplayer, that is a restrict beyond the hardware, which wouldn't need to be addressed if you just let them turn it to online multiplayer.
But if you tell a game designer to design a game with online multiplayer, that is a restrict beyond the hardware, which wouldn't need to be addressed if you just let them turn it to local multiplayer. It is a restrict because it requires the user to move to an area where wired broadband Internet access is affordable and/or buy an additional PC and an additional copy of the game for each additional player.
Simple example: poker. How can you ensure each player can only see his own hand, and nobody else's?
I see your point about games with intentionally limited information. But there also exist games with intentionally unlimited information that must propagate instantly. Simple example: karate. How can you ensure each player sees each punch and kick as it is thrown, and not 200 ms later? How can you ensure each player owns a gaming PC, as opposed to a PC with integrated graphics more suited for word processing and Facebook, and a wired broadband connection, as opposed to satellite or cellular broadband or dial-up because the user lives in an area without cable or DSL or fiber?
Board games are relatively cheap to make, so you can still money making and selling them (and thanks to wear and tear, there's a market to sell the same old game over and over). Video games do not share that luxury.
By "video games" do you mean AAA games or indie games? I was under the impression that an indie game could be developed and brought to market on not much more than a board game budget.
And that one PC, as I said, only has 1 keyboard,1 mouse, and 0 gamepads
Single player would work with the keyboard that ships with the computer and would give the player enough of a taste of the game to see whether to buy a gamepad. The same is true of console games.
and again as I said, is placed outside the living room
A second PC purchased for home theater use would already be placed in the living room. A laptop would be easy to carry into the room with the big TV. Even a primary desktop PC purchased for uses other than home theater uses would have a 21-24" 1080p monitor, which is still physically larger than the 13-19" bedroom TVs common in the era of GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64.
Most games support keyboard control as a minimum
A game's single player mode would support the keyboard, and gamepads would be required only for multiplayer. Compare to any game console, which includes only enough controllers for one player, and controllers for other players are sold separately. I don't remember seeing more than one controller bundled with a console since the early Super NES era.
If you look at the game box, they'll tell you how fast of a connection you need, right next to CPU, RAM, hard disk, etc. Those are the system or hardware requirements.
Likewise in the requirements on the box of a PC game supporting local multiplayer.
Requires 1 controller per player
Supported controllers: Keyboard (player 1 only), Xbox 360 controller, USB HID joysticks
The first computer that ran pong wouldn't be able to give you sub-200 ms response times on a modern (or even not-so modern) karate game
True, first-generation consoles (Odyssey, Pong, and the like) couldn't run a fighting game. By the late second generation (ColecoVision, MSX, Commodore 64), I estimate that the hardware was there, even though the genre wasn't refined until mid-fourth generation. But still, both PC and console hardware became able to guarantee sub-200 ms response several years before ISPs became able to guarantee sub-200 ms response.
and how can you ensure each player will have his own gamepad or joystick?
You can't ensure that even on consoles. But you'll have to admit that it's a lot cheaper for someone to buy three gamepads than to buy three extra PCs and three extra video cards.