I dunno if it’s “family sharing” or some other thing, but I can play games from my sister’s library through some means that I set up a couple of years ago.
I was referring more to the “Years of Service” badge you can find on your Steam profile, whose count begins when your account was created. It shows on the page when you look at the badge itself. Mine shows it was created on August 4, 2006.
Naw I didn’t mean that, but hell yeah let’s be here anyway. To me, technically the joke is that none of us probably bother to put in our real birth month and date when Steam asks us to verify our age before viewing the next game suggestion in our discovery queue or wherever; just spin that wheel for the year lol. But the wording you pointed out is the only tipoff that it’s what I’m talking about, over-explaining would have made it boring, and if I go too subtle, then nobody gets it. I was genuinely thanking ye for the noticing the deliberate wording and I hope you got a chuckle :D
Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code
It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money
(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)
Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks
Allowing libraries to accrue over generations is something business folk keenly care about because it impacts profits over time.
It’s literally why they have rules against transferring ownership.
You can tell yourself it’s for other reasons, but you’d just be lying to yourself about Valve being more benevolent than they actually are. They actually are in it to make money. Being told to do it in exchange for money is pretty much why this will happen.
Valve, at the end of the day, is still a company even if they’re marginally more consumer friendly than most. (Let’s not ignore that a lot of their “consumer friendly” decisions, like being able to return games, were literally because of laws saying they had to. They didn’t do it out of the “goodness of their hearts,” they did it because in some places they were being legally required to do so.)
But will they care if the account continues buying games? Is it easier to let it slide, or force someone to make a new account, there by pissing them off?
but by that point, whoever the inheritors of the account were have probably been paying money and adding new games to it for decades. why would valve destroy their relationship with that customer just because they might still technically have access to some hundred year old games that either don’t even run on modern systems, or might even be public domain by that point?
I cannot imagine they’re going to keep family sharing as is - currently a couple of buddies and I shared a family account and now we all have access to over 700 games. I only had to coordinate with one of them, we all basically chained off each other. The abuse must be massive.
Come on dude…are you kidding? You and I could do a family share without any risk to each other and share our entire libraries tonight. That is not the sameas handing off to your buddies. I love the family sharing program, I am currently using it. I am not against piracy. Let’s get all that out of the way.
Surely you see the potential issue here if this is supposed to be a family sharing program?
I was under the impression that if someone is playing a game from your library you can’t access it unless you boot them out (or you put steam in offline mode, meaning no updates or multiplayer for the duration). Is that no longer true?
Yeah but that’s only a problem if both of you want to play the same game at the exact same time. It’s like sharing a physical copy of a game with your friend but it instantly transports to their computer/console.
I replied the same thing to another comment, but I had thought it locked down the whole library rather than just the one game being played. I could have sworn I ran into that issue but it’s been a long time since I tried it do I suppose I misremembered.
I started elden ring from a family share recently, friend hasn’t gotten the dlc so I’m just getting to experience the main game for free before deciding if I actually want to spend 80 on the game and dlc
I think this is more of a defence against scammers honestly, with a convincing enough scam you could make valve belive an account holder was dead and you’re a family member wanting to transfer their account to yours.
Hell, I saw my dead friend’s account message me in Russian, contacted support about it, and all they could do was remove the hacker’s access, not even lock or delete that account.
And how could they? Unless you have your full name, address, and other identifying information somewhere on your account (strongly ill-advised, obviously) Valve can’t cross check it with a death certificate and take action, for all they know you could be cooperating with the hacker or submitting fake information to “prank” your friend by getting their account removed.
Allowing account transfers would open a whole new can of worms.
Just write down the password and login if you know you’re going to go. I don’t think Valve under Gabe would have issues with that. Though I do worry for its future
Why would you trust steam? Valve famously invented lootboxes and tried to do the NFT market thing before NFTs were big. They are the strongest DRM on the market. What makes you think they’re not just as greedy?
LMAO you have got to be shitting me. It is the bare minimum for DRM, it’s weak as fuck and games protected by Steamworks DRM are cracked almost immediately by casuals
Valve didn’t invent lootboxes. The concept has physically existed for decades, they’re called trading card packs or kinder eggs or gashapon. The latter is the inspiration for what became known as lootboxes. The first “lootbox” was actually in the Japanese version of MapleStory in 2004 and it spread in eastern markets (because pay to win is more normalized there) and in mobile games. It wasn’t until 2009 when EA added card packs to FIFA. Hard to say if they were inspired by the lootboxes from the east of the insane football trading card market in the west, or by both. It was only after a year and a half later in 2010 when Valve added loot boxes to TF2. So Valve definitely didn’t invent lootboxes, they weren’t even the first in the west to use them. You could argue that they popularized loot boxes but even there is an argument to be made that Overwatch was a much bigger cultural hit than TF2 or CSGO or EAs FIFA games and normalized lootboxes.
I don’t mind the “Valve is bad” narrative, but at least keep your facts straight. The “strongest DRM” is also BS but others have already somewhat covered that part.
Not right now. But in the future if companies keep getting away with everything they may introduce some kind of bio-identification: eye scan, face id or fingerprint. And lock your account only to that. Preventing from every form of sharing.
I mean, it’s still against it. But I can’t see how they’d enforce it, unless valve starts demanding IDs. I’m afraid for a post-gaben era where Valve might just do that…
This policy is literally against the law in the EU… Wait… double checks notes In the… US? huh… normally it’s the European Union protecting us from big tech bullshit