Wish they could go with something like what B&N does with the Nook. You get a limited number of lends. I would think 3-5 lends would be plenty. I can’t imagine many of us ever had a physical copy of a game we lent out more than a couple of times.
Ideally I would like to be able to set borrower priority so then I could pit my kids against each other. Didn’t do your chores? Other kid gets to bump you off for the next week. Steamdome: 2 kids enter, 1 kid screams.
Sure, but they weren’t for the common masses in every town, all over kind of thing. You’re talking one of kind kind of books, not mass publishing, and the widespread creation of and the use libraries alongside mass publishing did not destroy the creators. They ALWAYS try to claim that it will though.
figured this was as good as any place, but Steam seems to be having some issues now. Downloading a 75 Mb patch takes forever, and I’m constantly thrown off when I look at download speed. From the Steam forums it seems this is a common issue right now.
Maybe some high popularity release? You can change the download location to other region, that sometimes help.
It’s also a system that is not well understood. Most the people on my team at work were so excited about sharing their games with families until i told them the whole library thing and one person in the library at a time. Their faces fell pretty quick after that. Since a lot of people might not understand the limitation, I am sure Valve is not hearing as much disappointment as they should be hearing. They will when people try to use it and start calling… oh wait, i forgot about the whole customer no service thing.
Sorry, hold it, is it the whole library or specific games? I am getting confused reading the responses here.
What I expect is that I can be logged into my Steam account and playing FEZ while my son is upstairs on his Steam account. I have loaned/shared him Defense Grid so he can play that game because we have set up that trust between the accounts.
If it is the whole library, then there is no point. That is no different than me logging of and logging him in upstairs.
Derek
I think this answers it pretty much:
When I authorize a device to lend my library to others, do I limit my own ability to access and play my games?
As the lender, you may always access and play your games at any time. If you decide to start playing when a friend is already playing one of your games, he/she will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.
This is basically exactly what people already do by sharing steam passwords, but doesn’t require actually sending security credentials around the internet. So it probably lowers the amount of Valve accounts being compromised and other customer service nightmares. It also makes people way more likely to share. A small step but certainly a nice step forward.
So then who wants to organize a Qt3 steam sharing group? :) Infinite backlogs!
My backlog is already infinite! :P
Got into the Steam sharing beta. Haven’t actually used it yet, but here’s the quick rundown of how it works.
Step 1, change your password to some shit and disable Steam Guard
Step 2, sign off Steam and give your friend your login and password
Step 3, friend signs on your Steam account on his computer, goes to your account settings, marks his PC as a shared machine, signs out and gives you a message to get on
Step 4, you sign on your account, friend signs on his
Step 5, friend tries to launch anything in your library (Which should show up for him as "Shared) which will send an email to your email address, you ok it
Step 6, friend now has access to your shared library
Obviously this means anyone you let in sees your email, can fuck with your Steam account, has access to any Steam wallet funds you have, and theoretically has access to any payment methods you have set remembered in Steam. Also anyone you gave your info to could totally steal your account if they wanted. Changing email address requires password confirmation so even with a junk temporary password they can do that, and then changing password requires confirmation from email. So if they do email first, then password, they’ve got your account. If they’re dumb and only go straight to password it doesn’t work.
TLDR: Only share with family, real life friends so you can enter all your shit yourself, or super trusted internet pals.
Haven’t actually tested it in the wild yet. Trying to wrangle one of my internet buddies but one doesn’t want to mess with it and the other’s off getting drunk.
The site says:
Which I guess actually makes sense with what you said. Seems like it really is only intended for shared computers.
Yeah, before I got the expanded FAQ/how-to/whatever for the beta I assumed it was something along the lines of just marking Steam friends as share-buddies or something. It’s a lot more arcane, fiddly, and uncomfortable than that. I would assume by design to reduce casual sharing of games with internet friends, so you only share with people you trust pretty well.
Seems weird though. For sharing in your own house it makes more sense to have the other machines using the same account but in offline mode. Online mode but with multiple accounts gives you fewer options since the owner boots any borrowers off of games if the owner launches anything, so it’s not like you could play online games together with a shared account. To do LAN co-op with Left 4 Dead or something you’d still have to do offline mode as before.
Be careful who you share it with, and who they let play your games.
This part of the FAQ was recently changed:
Will I be punished for any cheating or fraud conducted by other users while playing my games?
Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if your library is used by others to conduct cheating or fraud. We recommend you only authorize familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.
What does Steam consider to fraud?
It’s beta. There’s still time for them to reconsider making you jump through all those hoops.
Finally convinced one of my internet buddies this wasn’t some elaborate scheme to get his information so I could axe murder him and got him to log on to my account to activate his machine. Quick rundown on what I’ve learned from him using it so far. Non-Steam games launched through Steam do NOT count as the owner playing a game in his library, so borrowers can continue playing. If I launch a library game, buddy says he gets a little popup that says “Hey, Squee needs this game. You have 4 minutes to play!” and if I quit before he gets booted it pops up and says “Hooray! Squee quit! you can continue to play his games!”. On top of that, in my (Owner’s) library it tells you “Library in use by: Person” where it tells you your time played information. It doesn’t give you any popups or warnings about someone else playing your games if you launch a game, that’s for the borrower to worry about. It does look like it broke the time played listing on the library page (If you’re using the details-style library it would tell you your name played near the play button, now it only shows for this current Steam session) but on your Steam friends profile your time played is as normal.
Seems cool so far. We’re going to mess with some more oddities and see what happens. Like if he gets a game from my library (Say, Dishonored) he owns and has played himself, but doesn’t own the DLC but I do, will Steam load his cloud saves and then he can play my borrowed copy with the DLC on his non-DLC saves.
Edit: It appears he can only see games that I’ve got that he doesn’t. So Bioshock Infinite, Dishonored, Dungeons of Dredmor, etc etc etc don’t show up on my shared list on his account. It makes sense but that’s a minor bummer. I guess understandable though since that might cause all sorts of save issues if you go from DLC to not to back.
Edit 2: Borrowers CAN go to offline mode and play borrowed games they’ve downloaded/installed! Obviously they won’t get achievements or cloud saves like that because you don’t get them in offline mode, but that means they can still play shit whenever. Even if the owner is playing. Huuuuuge!
Edit 3: Naturally, large chunks of games that use third party DRM like Stardock and Ubisoft aren’t listed.
When my kids get old enough to play games properly, this is going to be huge for me. Thanks for the info Squee.
No problem, I was really curious about how it handled a lot of this so I’ve just been posting things as I figure them out.
Here’s what it looks like in your library if a borrower is playing something:
It doesn’t specify the game, that just shows up when you click on any installed game in your library. If you look at the person borrowing a game it doesn’t list anywhere on their profile that they’re playing a loaned game, just says “In-game: Game” as normal and lists played time and achievements as normal. It doesn’t increase the games count on their Steam profile however, so it functions sort of like a free weekend game.
And here’s what the authorized devices window looks like:
My computer is authorized but not used since my account is the only Steam account being used here. Second one is my friend’s PC. Gives you the Steam account that last used something from that machine (Since you authorize machines instead of Steam accounts I assume if you authorized a machine that someone used multiple accounts on, all accounts on that machine would see your shared library) and last time it was accessed. Device name is whatever you want to type in when you authorize it.
One more thing I learned, people sharing your account can see your CD keys for applicable games. The one I tested it out on was Blood Bowl, and when he checked the CD key it was the same as on my account.