The family sharing works okay but the old school way is good too.
I dunno if it’s “family sharing” or some other thing, but I can play games from my sister’s library through some means that I set up a couple of years ago.
I think they might start getting suspicious when the account age is double the average human lifespan and is still in use.
I was referring more to the “Years of Service” badge you can find on your Steam profile, whose count begins when your account was created. It shows on the page when you look at the badge itself. Mine shows it was created on August 4, 2006.
Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code
It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money
(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)
Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks
I was told to do it in exchange for money
and most of the time neither do the business folk
Allowing libraries to accrue over generations is something business folk keenly care about because it impacts profits over time.
It’s literally why they have rules against transferring ownership.
You can tell yourself it’s for other reasons, but you’d just be lying to yourself about Valve being more benevolent than they actually are. They actually are in it to make money. Being told to do it in exchange for money is pretty much why this will happen.
Valve, at the end of the day, is still a company even if they’re marginally more consumer friendly than most. (Let’s not ignore that a lot of their “consumer friendly” decisions, like being able to return games, were literally because of laws saying they had to. They didn’t do it out of the “goodness of their hearts,” they did it because in some places they were being legally required to do so.)
but by that point, whoever the inheritors of the account were have probably been paying money and adding new games to it for decades. why would valve destroy their relationship with that customer just because they might still technically have access to some hundred year old games that either don’t even run on modern systems, or might even be public domain by that point?
I cannot imagine they’re going to keep family sharing as is - currently a couple of buddies and I shared a family account and now we all have access to over 700 games. I only had to coordinate with one of them, we all basically chained off each other. The abuse must be massive.
How is that abuse? Imagine how many viruses you’ll be avoiding by legitimately sharing games with your friends.
Come on dude…are you kidding? You and I could do a family share without any risk to each other and share our entire libraries tonight. That is not the sameas handing off to your buddies. I love the family sharing program, I am currently using it. I am not against piracy. Let’s get all that out of the way.
Surely you see the potential issue here if this is supposed to be a family sharing program?
I was under the impression that if someone is playing a game from your library you can’t access it unless you boot them out (or you put steam in offline mode, meaning no updates or multiplayer for the duration). Is that no longer true?
You can just play another one of the 700. If you want to play together then you need multiple copies.
Yeah but that’s only a problem if both of you want to play the same game at the exact same time. It’s like sharing a physical copy of a game with your friend but it instantly transports to their computer/console.
Yeah my kids basically took over my steam account already on the family gaming computer. Alas.
Your gaming alias now is a generational family name. All hail the House of Sparkles.
Mind asking your future connection to fire up Stanley Parable for me?
Let’s see what fuckery they baked in.
Another example of a company making clear that we don’t truly own the games we play on their platform.
Where did they say this?
In response to a customer support message. https://www.resetera.com/threads/to-anyone-who-is-curious-no-you-cannot-transfer-your-steam-account-via-a-will-you-can-only-take-your-games-to-your-graves.875634/
I think this is more of a defence against scammers honestly, with a convincing enough scam you could make valve belive an account holder was dead and you’re a family member wanting to transfer their account to yours.
Hell, I saw my dead friend’s account message me in Russian, contacted support about it, and all they could do was remove the hacker’s access, not even lock or delete that account.
And how could they? Unless you have your full name, address, and other identifying information somewhere on your account (strongly ill-advised, obviously) Valve can’t cross check it with a death certificate and take action, for all they know you could be cooperating with the hacker or submitting fake information to “prank” your friend by getting their account removed.
Allowing account transfers would open a whole new can of worms.
Just write down the password and login if you know you’re going to go. I don’t think Valve under Gabe would have issues with that. Though I do worry for its future
