Steam Game Sharing Begins Limited Beta Soon
- Thread starter roseofbattle
- Start date
Sarcasm?Shamanic Rhythm said:
I popped over to the community page and it looked like someone at Valve stated that you could borrow games indefinitely. There was no word about how Offline Mode would work although which is the first issue I have with it. The second is that my brother is going to start nagging me to share my library with him when he hears about this.
I have like 250+ games on Steam, so I'd pretty much never think about giving out my account info to someone. I like my (much) younger brother who lives with Mom, but I'm not trusting him to not get my account banned. This plan is perfect for that situation. He can play whatever he wants in my entire library without having to check in with me first with no threat to my account (except losing the ability to share), and I can still play whenever I want. As long as the borrower gets a reasonable amount of time to save their game, it streamlines that process. Before, you'd have to check in with the "borrower" to make sure kicking them out of Steam wasn't a problem.Strazdas said:
On a side-note, it's interesting how different areas of the internet react to this. The response here has been pretty positive. On Ars Technica the comments read like Valve declared a Family Decapitation plan or something. This "Family Sharing" plan has some clear advantages for very specific problems, but doesn't deliver the Sharing Nirvana that some people want that will almost certainly never exist.
Well, you don't have to be nagged much, right? I mean, there's really no reason to not share your library with someone unless you have a hard time picking which 10 people to share with. As far as I can tell, there's not disadvantage to the owner of the library in sharing the games.Ed130 said:
Hmm, well, unless you think your brother will then constantly bug you get off your account or not kick him out of a game. Yeah, actually that does sound both likely and very annoying ...
Andrew_C said:
Except, from all indicators, Microsoft didn't get there first.FizzyIzze said:
Putting aside that Steam is going to implement this feature before the Xbox One, the concept of library sharing appeared at virtually the same time as the Xbox One reveal in a beta update for Steam. Some intrepid code-junkies scanned some of the update files and saw several "shared library" command lines.
Now, which company thought of the idea first is debatable, but in either case it's clear Valve was working on the feature well before Microsoft revealed their plans for it.
As is explained in the FAQ, this feature will work with any game that doesn't require access to an external service (Uplay, Origin, etc) or requires any external CD keys, authentication codes, or 3rd party subscriptions.Andrew_C said:
As excited as I was by the prospect of this feature, sadly the (current) implementation isn't very useful. As it stands, one can only lend out their entire games library at once. Now on a one-PC home for sharing between siblings/parents, it's fine. It means everyone can play each other's games (saying that, it's not like they couldn't before with the owner logged in. The only difference now is that they can play the game with their own login, which isn't in itself a particularly valuable feature).
Considering I'm generally logged in the majority of the time, I can't lend out my library. A better system would be the ability to "check out" a game from my library (making it temporarily unavailable to me) and allowing a friend or relative to "check in" the title. This behaves like lending someone my physical copy and doesn't prevent me from playing something else from my library like this system does.
Anyway, points to Valve for trying to do something positive, but sadly none for the finished article. Hopefully the Beta will demonstrate that lending individual games is really the way to go. As it is, a useless feature for me, but at least it's a positive useless feature.
Considering I'm generally logged in the majority of the time, I can't lend out my library. A better system would be the ability to "check out" a game from my library (making it temporarily unavailable to me) and allowing a friend or relative to "check in" the title. This behaves like lending someone my physical copy and doesn't prevent me from playing something else from my library like this system does.
Anyway, points to Valve for trying to do something positive, but sadly none for the finished article. Hopefully the Beta will demonstrate that lending individual games is really the way to go. As it is, a useless feature for me, but at least it's a positive useless feature.
So mostly only SteamWorks games and older titles, then.Vigormortis said:
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea, but I wonder how useful it will turn out in the long run. I would prefer it if Valve made it easier to transfer and swap games on Steam.
EDIT: Also I think KingsGambit's idea above of "checking out" single titles is a much better idea than what Valve are going with. They could easily limit it to say 10 titles at a time (and even have a time limit) to prevent abuse.
It's also worth noting, aside from what you've mentioned, that the XBone version looked to be a Peter Molyneux deal. That is, despite being advertised s game sharing, the more we learned the less it seemed like it resembled the original, loft promises.Vigormortis said:
Fair point. Though given we haven't had any detailed specifics on the feature, it's mostly conjecture on how it would have worked on the Xbox One.Zachary Amaranth said:
Still, my point was that, though Microsoft was the first to "officially" bring the concept to the public eye, it's become clear that a number of corporations have been working on similar features for some time.