As my little ones have gotten older it is a little annoying my kid can’t play a game on the steam deck hooked up to the TV downstairs while I want to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my main PC. I own both games, what the heck?
Buy a $20 USB C dock with an HDMI port, start "Offline mode" on the steam deck, child plugs into TV and plays game just fine, you go upstairs and play game just fine.
Alternatively, turn off internet on your personal computer and play game, and let the little one use wireless streaming to your TV.
Basically, one of them has to be in offline mode. That is a stupid thing, but valve intends for "offline mode" to be a day to day use case of the Steam Deck
The simple answer is any game you can play without a wifi connection can be played in offline mode.
i am just trying to understand how that would work.
as far as i can tell there is really no reason for this not to work as long as those games don't use steam services that require an active steam login.
i can run multiple steam multiplayer games in parallel on the same machine, so why shouldn't i be able to do this on multiple machines? the same as if i buy multiple games independently. steam, and any other platform is a game license manager. as steam allows me to use one license for a game on multiple machines, it should not be a licensing problem to play a different game on a different machine on the same account.
i don't have steam on multiple machines so i can't test it, but what i could test is that games are able to access the network even if steam is offline.
what doesn't work in offline mode is logging into games that use the steam account as identification, or that connect the game account to the steam account. but even those do seem to continue to work if the steam client goes offline after logging in. games that do not use the steam account should allow logging in even from offline mode.
On the other hand, multiple Game Boy consoles in the same household were more common.
So yeah, it should be better now that the physical limitation is broken. You have several games and should be able to play them at the same time.
I guess I just don’t get the business reasons for it.