I’ve been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I’ve got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I’m cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just… easy.
That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck plugged into the TV downstairs.
I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV… and that’s where everything breaks down. If she’s playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that “someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off” or some nonsense like that.
I’m suddenly face to face with the fact that I don’t actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren’t spent on what I expected. It’s… enraging to put it gently.
I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that’s bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware is not ok.
@thedaemon @warmaster Same issue here.
Creating Steam accounts for my kids requires creating and managing e-mail addresses for them.
E-mail and Steam are social network and terms of service do not allow people below 13 yo to have an account.
So I don’t that Family share is a solution.
Create your own 2nd/3rd account, and use the same emails but with the + option. https://www.streak.com/post/gmail-plus-addressing-trick (This works with more than just Gmail) So your main account is main@whatever.com, then your second account would be main+1stKid@whatever.com. This way you don’t have many different emails to manage, but Steam (last I checked) will see these all as different so everything can be managed by you.