Most of what I’m reading online talks about an error complaining about region, in which case you’d want to make sure you’re in the same store region.
Other main suggestion is signing into your steam account on their computer. You could probably use something like Microsoft quick assist (which should already be installed iirc) for that
Good luck, if you get a different error or run into other problems please let me know!
I don’t really know how it works but according to a lot of other people here it doesn’t work unless you are in the same region. This isn’t the only person here saying they can’t use it because they don’t live near their family.
They’re doing IP location checks, and they’re doing them badly (there’s not really a way to do them well). It’s not working for me with people in the same town, and other people are reporting it’s randomly working or not working with locations in the same neighborhood.
What is this. Because I’m pretty upset that the games I paid for can’t be played on different pc’s. My daughter wants to pay stardew valley while I’m online with family on satisfactory. I have to take the other pc and go into offline mode. This wasn’t the solution. Even with adding members I didn’t think I did it right. So does this fix it? Can my family member log into stardew online with her cousin while I’m on another lan game?
Yes, you can play Satisfactory while she is playing Stardew Valley, while both of you are online. You now have a number of copies of each game in the family. If 2 members own the same game, then two different members in the family can play both copies at the same time
Perfect. Finally. I understand needing two copies of the game to play online (one game code per user). But local split screen shouldn’t be that way and neither should playing seperate games force me into individual play sessions. Each game code should have capacity to run an individual account. Not one account to each owned game.
This has been my gripe with steam and purchased digital games vs physical games since it’s concept. It felt like I was renting play sessions with my ID license rather than owning the games I paid for.
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
It is not different from how the previous shared libraries worked. I guess it’s there to stop cheaters from buying a single copy of the game and sharing it with throwaway accounts.
Not sure I agree, how else are they meant to prevent the ocean of “It wasn’t me, it was my brother” excuses from hackers smurfing accounts?
I’d recommend (to everyone) that if you’re unsure -or have even the slightest doubt about the person you’re going to give access to your Steam account- to politely decline and play it safe.
Bro you can just make a fake account and say it was your little brother , they literally have no idea who signed up or if they lied about account details 🙄
Unless I’ve misunderstood; that’s exactly why I asked the question in my original comment. I’ll explain my / the reasoning:
I own a game on a Steam account (A) and want to hack (and evade bans) using another Steam account (B).
I share my library/game from account (A) to account (B) then hack on account B and only account B gets banned… What’s to then stop me from making Steam account C, D, E, F… etc? Absolutely nothing. Hence the double ban.
I stress that if you do share a game / your Steam library with others you trust them explicitly.
Restrict the number of accounts that can join that family group. And/or remove the ability to share the library from the main account for repeated offenses.
Or require multiple family members accounts to have to cheat before the owner account is banned.
I think it’s a great rule. If you’re sharing your library with others, don’t be am asshole and cheat. If you do you’ll be a disappointment to them too. More social pressure to not cheat is only a positive in my opinion, but also I will never cheat and I only share my library with people I’m confident won’t cheat as well. I don’t associate with people who want to ruin other’s fun. If you do then that’s on you. It’s your choice to risk getting banned.
Not sure where you’re going with this - I was implying that there are consequences for cheating, like losing access to a game library even if temporary.
I know it’s to make sure cheaters get punished. But that destroys the whole purpose of sharing your gaming library with your kids. They are prone to making mistakes. Should a parent be punished for that? I think the kid should.
15+ years ago I used an aimbot on the first Call of Duty that I got as a gift and got a PunkBuster ban. I was 13 years old and found something new and wanted to try it out. I got punished, in a single game, all by myself. My parents did not get punished, but I was crying.
I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games. That would be absolute horror. Not only for little kid me then, but also for my parent. If I would share my cureent Steam account with my kid and they’d get a VAC ban, I would lose €700 in CS skins alone.
I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games.
Well it’d be just the one game that they cheated in. That’s where you can sit the kid down and tell him that cheating has consequences. Ideally this talk would’ve happened before you share access though - I’m thinking of it as making sure the kid knows how to drive before you let them borrow the keys to your car.
Parents just have to make sure the kid understands to not cheat before sharing the account. It might sound new to us because we never grew up with this scenario, but it seems reasonable to me.
Again, it’s just making sure the kid is a safe driver before letting them borrow keys to the family van.
If the ban worries you, you can just not share the games - this is strictly an upside and there’s no penalty for maintaining the status quo and not using this feature.
The problem with that statement is that there’s a pretty common example that I already brought up that easily disproves it - letting the kid borrow keys to the car after they’ve shown they can drive safely.
There’s a lot more parental liability there than some skins in a game.
And the penalty is losing access to a fucking game, not the death of other people.
Teenage driving proves that they can learn to be responsible enough to be trusted with the lives of others. You’re saying they can’t learn to be responsible enough with your CS skins?
Yeah I hope you lose a ton of shit because you put trust in your kid, tell them to not cheat, and they cheat regardless.
This feature is meant for family sharing, but they take away the stupidness of a teenager. A kid can even be tricked into running funny.exe that randomly injects itself into memory spaces of programs, causing almost any anticheat to detect it.
Keep your stupid perfectionism out of the equitation. Kids aren’t perfect.
Yeah I hope you lose a ton of shit because you put trust in your kid, tell them to not cheat, and they cheat regardless.
And I hope your child is trusted enough to drive at some point, because you invested the time and effort to trust them behind the wheel.
I’ve had my steam account forever, so I might be overlooking something I did early on and forgot about, But I think the problem with anything along the lines of what you’re proposing is that they don’t have the time or ability to confirm that each steam account does belong to a different individual. This would either result in super intrusive amounts of data collecting, or risk someone saying “oops, look at that, my 15th child just got banned for hacking!” And then adding yet another “family member”?
Where do you draw the line in the above scenario? At least the current policy is clear.
My assumption is that steams main goal is to provide paying users with good service by minimizing hackers, and second to that, provide QOL features like family share.
Do you agree with that assumption? If not, what do you think the priorities are?
If you do agree with the assumption, what would you have done differently to accommodate both those priorities and your complaint?
You’re trying to use nice words within your assumption, but one can only assume that yes, this is to minimize hackers. Whether this is a good service, does not belong to that assumption. This service is demolished by the constant need to protect every single aspect against hackers. It’s on par with kernel anticheats. A few cheaters ruin it for the rest of us.
The main priority should be family sharing, which is literally what it’s called. It’s not my job to provide a good service. But I do know when a service is prone to bullshit that’ll just punish people for actually trying to be nice and share stuff within their family.
Valve could have just banned the account that was actually cheating, send a mail to the owner, and let them disable the sharing. Punish after.
God you’re annoying. This is a useless discussion that doesn’t have any power over Valve whatsoever. Nor do I even have to be the one to come up with a plan. I actually even already gave a simple plan and you ignored it.
Your arguments that hackers are more important than a parent with a kid are selfish and stupid. You encounter a hacker online and instead of going “oh well, I’m sure that kid will learn sometime” you go “fuck that hacker!!! boohoo!!! valve fix this omfg!!! boohoo”. And force Valve to ruin it for the rest of us.
Valve has a stupid rule here which should be revised and improved for actual families, instead of trying to babyproof the whole goddamn thing. Parents shouldn’t have to babysit their kid when it comes to videogames. It’s actually bad parent and many teenagers would even choose to cheat just to rebel.
How come these concepts are too high for you to grasp?
Nor do I even have to be the one to come up with a plan.
People that just complain without a better improvement in mind didn’t actually care to change anything, because they’ve haven’t shown that there’s a reasonable alternative. They just want to “speak to the manager” and complain. “It’s not my job to fix it! Fix it!”. If that’s quote captures your stance, just lmk and it will save us both some time.
I actually even already gave a simple plan and you ignored it.
I didn’t ignore it, I asked how it would deal with a fundamental enforcement of rules that steam has always done and you’ve ignored that, lol. Are you here to just complain or do you actually want to see if there’s a better way forward? What’s a feasible alternative to handle hackers and provide quality of life improvements like family sharing?
Your arguments that hackers are more important than a parent with a kid are selfish and stupid.
I’d argue that hackers are more important to valve because they implemented VAC bans almost 20 years ago. They just now announced a family sharing feature and you’re pretending that steam was meant to be designed around the family to start, which is an uphill battle to argue.
And force Valve to ruin it for the rest of us.
First of all, it’s already implemented this way. You’re the one arguing for an alternative that could increase the number of hackers - if anyone is trying to force valve to ruin it “for the rest of us”, it’s you, since you’re arguing to change the status quo.
Finally, don’t want valve to “ruin” it for you? Don’t use the brand new opt in feature. You have lost absolutely nothing - nothing has been “ruined”.
People that just complain without a better improvement in mind
As I said, you ignored it once, and twice.
I’d argue that hackers are more important to valve
They aren’t more important to Valve; they are more important to people like you. And Valve just tries to figure out the best for everybody. Albeit badly.
They just now announced a family sharing feature
Go do some research before claiming such things. It has been a thing for many many years. And as far as I know, they simply reinforced their ruling on bans. My argument already existed for many years, but is now even more true.
You’re the one arguing for an alternative that could increase the number of hackers
Hackers buy and sell accounts for a few euros. On top of their €20/month cheats this is nothing. Most people getting VAC bans are the stupid ones trying out free hacks. Which mostly are kids. Who would have thought?
VAC is meaningless for the real hackers. And an account being used for hackers is easily spotted compared to an account from a parent sharing it to their kid. You keep asking for my solution, but my solutions are so obvious it would take a stupid person to not think of them. Hey here’s one: “investigate the main accounts manually”. I thought such ideas would not require a triple digit IQ to be considered obvious.
You have lost absolutely nothing - nothing has been “ruined”.
They already had family sharing where a ban upon the main account could have been contested. You could at least ask them to consider the age or stupidity of the person or family member using your library.
Most people getting VAC bans are the stupid ones trying out free hacks.
Are the ones using free hacks not hackers? Seems like bans on them for hacking makes sense.
You keep asking for my solution, but my solutions are so obvious it would take a stupid person to not think of them. Hey here’s one: “investigate the main accounts manually”. I thought such ideas would not require a triple digit IQ to be considered obvious.
I’m going to propose that this would probably take an infeasible number of hours when you scale it up to the full customer base for steam, which looks like 132 million monthly active users.. Otherwise, like you said, it’s so obvious, what else would prevent them from thinking of it and implementing it?
They already had family sharing where a ban upon the main account could have been contested. You could at least ask them to consider the age or stupidity of the person or family member using your library.
EDIT: here’s a proposed change that I like. It’s better than a blanket “you get 1 excused VAC ban”, because with that solution what happens when you have two unruly teenagers? n+1, children, for that matter. However this would still potentially double the amount of hackers, since they could get their first strike for free before truly losing access to the game, so it really falls to how much steam wants to weigh keeping hackers out of games vs allowing folks to share libraries.
I only see selfishness because you obviously get butthurt over hackers.
You’re projecting a lot of the preferences and priorities onto me when I’ve shown that steam has chosen to operate this way for nearly a decade. It’s not what I want - it’s what steam wants.
Steams job is to provide people with a good gaming experience, my guess is that hackers ruin that for others so they don’t like it and prioritize banning hackers.
It also stops people from buying a game, sharing it to themselves on an alt account and using cheats. Then just spinning up a new alt account at no cost when the first one gets banned.
My question is, when there are 5 people with 5 copies of a multiplayer game in the pool, and the 6th member without a copy gets banned, which of the other 5 members gets banned?
Best guess? Whichever account gave account 6 permission to play their game.
Either account 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 will be the user that gives 6 the permission to play their game, so it follows they’re the one that (I’m assuming) will get banned also. It’s a good question you raise and I’d be interested to know for sure myself.
Nobody is giving anybody permission any more than anyone else though. Account 6 creates a family and 5 accounts with a game join the family. There are now 5 copies of the game in the family pool. Account 6 can play and get banned. In this situation nobody even invited account 6 to the family.
I mean, someone should get banned from cheating. I can see why this happen though, since the account playing does not own the game the account which has the game linked gets banned instead. If the account cheating has the game they are instead playing on their copy and that gets banned instead (i assume).
However the ban should be linked to the account and not the copy of the game. I do not understand why this isnt the case. Maybe because someone could just make a new account and link that to play on instead, therefor never having to buy more than one copy of the game while cheating.
Yeah, it’s most likely to prevent someone from using the family feature to get away with cheating.
As it stands now, if you get caught cheating you must create a new account and repurchase the game. So the main deterrent is the full cost of a game.
With the steam family function you could potentially create 5 new accounts per year, and simply remove them when they get caught cheating. The only deterrent would be the wait period.
So I agree with their decision. The downside is that you must trust someone before adding them to your family. If your cheating son gets you kicked off counterstrike, then just remove him from your family. They’re never too old to drop off at the fire station.
This is indeed the appropriate reaction to being banned on counter strike. Joke aside you could just lock the entire functionality of adding an account to your family if someone got caught cheating though.
I’m not sure that would be the best solution. A cheater could still get caught cheating 6 times before requiring a repurchase, and it’s still a pretty harsh penalty for someone who didn’t cheat. You keep your game, but you can no longer share your library if your family situation changes.
‘Sorry, son, you can’t play my games on your computer because daddy made a bad decision when he was 21.’
The ultimate solution is probably an online identity when playing any game. Imagine if cheating got you banned from all online games for 5 years.
So how do I create a Steam Family? I can’t see an option to do so anywhere but I am most likely just missing it… or it hasn’t been rolled out to the UK yet
edit: found it! For anyone else who is lost like me, go to the top right and click on your use name and then Account Details. From there, Family Management is on the left and it’s obvious
Between my wife’s enormous Steam library and Whisky/Crossover on my M2 MacBook, I’ve been playing more games than ever since the beta of this popped up. It’s actually quite impressive how many games just work - albeit with some compromises in places.
If you’re using an M-series Mac, download the Windows Steam installer and Whisky. Install Steam through Whisky then simply install games through Steam as normal.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, but /r/MacGaming on Reddit is a useful resource.
There are some that simply won’t work because the hardware won’t run them (Red Dead 2 is the most disappointing one for me), but have a play and see what works.
This is a lot easier to manage than the old library sharing where I was always going between machines, changing accounts and sharing libraries with people with multiple desktop logins on multiple machines. Changed the family over today. I am concerned this new system will get abused by groups of independent adults like Netflix was and publishers will withdraw games or prices will increase. Just pirate please and don’t ruin a good thing because for parents with dependent kids at home the cost of living is rough.
Being able to remotely manage parental controls from my login for younger kids is also awesome. It feels like it was made by an actual parent instead of a single 20 something tech bro like some other parental control systems. It is fucking abysmal that so many streaming apps make it hard to find age appropriate content or set sensible access controls. Like seriously Crunchyroll - you are owned by a fucking filthy rich media megacorp Sony and you cant provide search by age, content ratings or helpful labeling.
How is Railroad Tycoon not included in the sale? Luckily, I already have Railroad Tycoon 2, so I’m good on that one. I might pick up Station to Station though.
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