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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

Why not just disable Family Share instead?

If you grant someone Family Sharing access, and then revoke it, you can't grant it again for 90 days. This is presumably to prevent it from becoming Friend Sharing.

The issue is without family sharing, you can't share games. But with it enabled if you both own a certain game, it gets confused and only 1 of you can play it at a time.

Specifically, if I own game X and you own game Y, then with sharing I can play your Y while you play my X at the same time.

But if I buy game Y, and play it, steam will then prevent you from playing my game X at the same time.

Wait, this scenario is real and they haven’t fixed it yet?

Well, grujicd considers Steam Family Share to be so broken that he no longer wants to buy games on Steam. That’s fair. What doesn’t make any sense is why he just doesn’t disable it if he hates it so much?

I guess I hate it because I believed marketing term "family sharing" and did not realize it's "family sharing with caveats and significant limitations". With that incorrect belief I bought a number of games for both kids and myself before I realized full impact of these limitations.

What's worse, even with hindsight I'm not sure how a parent should organize 2-3 accounts to allow all what "family sharing" implies. And consider that kid now plays some Mario game but in a year or two would play Wolfenstein, so it's not easy to separate by "my" and "their" games.

Family share doesn’t work for your family though, and it makes you miserable. Why extend the torture?

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