Comment by jet@hackertalks.com on Steam to remove support for legacy (international) family sharing

The new family sharing is great. I am sad I cannot share it with family who lives 30 km away but in a different steam economic zone. I think on the whole it’s a net positive though

What are the positives to the new one? I have family in a different country so this is a big loss for me.

If you own games ABC, and you share them with family. Each one of your family members could be running game a, and then game b, and game c at the same time! The only limitation is multiple people can’t play the same game at the same time. So your entire library is available for concurrent usage.

The old classic version of steam sharing simply meant that only one person could play at a time, regardless of which game they were playing

And to play two copies of the same game at the same time, any 2 members of the family could own it. So my brother and I can each buy a game, and then my mom and sister could play it while we are at work. My sister can’t work, so she has a lot of time to fill but can’t afford to buy games. We do have 5 copies of Stardew Valley, though, as that is a game for the whole family.

There was already a bunch of games my brother and I both owned before steam family was an option. But now games I’m only tangentially interested in after he played them or vice versa are much more of an option to quickly play through to see if I like it too. Before, it just wouldn’t have been worth buying it to find out. And it’s a bonus for the devs too if I do end up liking it, because then I am more likely to buy their next game so I can play it at the same time as my brother.

Gaming is inherently social. Even when we play single-player games, I’m sure most of us have a friend or sibling we talk to about them as we play.

Admittedly, that’s pretty good… but useless to families that live far from each. It’s difficult for those families to not feel robbed while everyone else now gets an even better experience.

Perhaps my experience is atypical but with the old system I’d have to sign in and reset everything every few months, so that doesn’t really seem very different for me at least. But then again I dont have much if a remote setup anymore.

Use routers that support site-to-site VPNs, that way any additional households connect to the main household, and everyone’s IP address looks like it’s coming from the same, singular household.

Note that I have no idea how the Steam client is verifying location. If they send out ARP probes and cut access if they can’t detect the other device running Steam on the same layer 2 network this probably won’t work. People use segmented subnets and vlans in their home networks though, so i would assume that it’s just a public IP thing.

The first time I opened an invite steam said I couldn’t join, but on a whim I opened it a week later and it worked. I still live in a different city so don’t know what happened.

It’s unusable for drag. Drag’s family all live in a different country. This change is transphobic.

as a trans person, can you not call everything that inconveniences you as a trans person transphobic? You’re devaluing the actual struggles we have to face with “i can’t play video game because of transphobia :(”. Besides, there are ways to go around the region lock, just Google the “transphobia” away

can you not call everything that inconveniences you as a trans person transphobic?

No. Drag is sick to death of being so far away from drag’s family. Drag is sick of a society that won’t accept drag, and only being able to find partners through discord. Cishet people have it so easy, it’s not fair. And along comes Steam, “A family is a group that lives in the same home”. No! Get your heteronormative nuclear family bullshit out of drag’s video games. Drag plays games to get away from patriarchal politics, and Steam goes shoving them into their new features and deprecating the old. They should have focus tested this change. Anyone in a long distance relationship could have told them this was a bad move. This move comes from Valve employees being brainwashed by society into seeing a family as what the white patriarchy says a family is. Drag has spent drag’s entire life, as a gay person, being excluded from the white concept of family. We barely even have equal marriage rights. This is a symbolic issue of a lifelong struggle.

drag, go touch grass. Seeing every minor inconvenience as a personal attack of the heteronormative patriarchy can’t be good for you

and again - I’m telling you this for the third time, you can go around the region lock.

So you realize that all you’re talking about can apply to cis-hetero people as well, right? Hell, it for sure applies to a bigger number of them than of any other group.

Anyone can live far or close to their family. Anyone can have a hard or easy time bonding with others. Anyone can be in a long distance relationship. Gays and people of color do have traditional families (hell, if I’m not mistaken their divorce rate is lower than heteros!)

Just because it affects you doesn’t make it anti trans or homophobic or aimed at your group.

Yes, it affects more cis people, but at a lower percentage.

and how do you know that?

you feel like a victim because society is indeed oppressive towards LGBTQ minorities, but if you see yourself as a victim all the time you’ll just end up depressed and miserable.

no, Steam is not being biased against minorities, intentionally or otherwise, they’re just not. This feature was in beta for a long time and for most of the beta anybody could join any family from any country. The choice to make it more restricted wasn’t to fuck up people who don’t live with their families - it was to prevent the abuse of the feature that must’ve come to light during the beta.

Steam wanted to improve their family share, and the did, greatly in fact. But they had to include limitations to prevent cases where someone gets financially abused online, or someone joins a stranger’s family and then gets kicked out immediately and needs to wait 6 months join any other family, or someone joins a game hoarder’s family and then never buys a game again.

That limitation can still be worked around the good old way - by logging into another person’s machine and joining their family that way, but for that you need to trust the other person to not fuck up your account - and that’s enough to discourage most of the extreme cases. They’re just not going to beam that information to the public as that’d defeat the point of establishing that limitation in the first place, and even encourage people to trust random strangers that could have malicious intent.

Maybe, it still doesn’t mean the intent is to hurt non-cis people and you can’t expect them to make an exception for people they can’t prove are part of a certain minority and you can’t expect them to make the thing free-for-all either.

your discord role play friends are not your family

Why do you say it’s transphobic? It is not based on sexuality at all. Simply on economic regions

Trans families are less likely to live in the same economic region. Statistically, this is taking features away from trans people moreso than cis people. Transphobia isn’t an intention, it’s a consequence.

Transphobia requires intention

No it doesn’t. It’s called systemic bigotry. You see it in critical race theory. The system is set up to disadvantage minorities, such that innocent decisions go on to harm minorities too.

Now that Donald Trump is the next president, you’ll see a LOT of trans people fleeing the US who leave family behind. Steam used to offer trans people fleeing persecution the ability to share games with their family at home. It’s a horrible coincidence in timing that Steam deprecates this feature on the same day many trans people realise they have to flee the country or die.

It’s a creative way to live life. More power to you.

Which gaming service will you be moving to that supports global game sharing? Actually, what other game service supports sharing at all? I think steam is alone

Since epic doesn’t allow any game sharing, it’s epic more transphobic than steam? Or less transphobic than steam? Because they’re not taking away something they never offered

I’d say it’s a stretch to call it transphobic just because of that. Unless you can actually back it up with evidence of intent from valve.

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Steam to remove support for legacy (international) family sharing(imgur.com)

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