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Steam Family Sharing

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269 pointsdanso117 comments

Valve often talks about trying to provide a service that is more convenient than pirating, and this looks like another step in that direction. If I'm playing a pirated game and want to share it with a friend, it would involve getting them to torrent/crack it, or uploading it to a file sharing host. Using Valve's new program, sharing a purchased game is as simple as sharing it with them on steam.

I'm curious as to what other kinds of convenience measures they'll be able to implement in the future - especially with hardware control via steambox on the horizon.

It seems like baby steps though. We really should have a way to loan games at the very least, and this still isn't really scratching that itch.

Why? Loaning digital bits literally makes no sense. That's nt a thing. It's not something the laws of physics allow. Loaning digital goods is a gibberish statement.

I obviously understand the appeal. Who doesn't like free shit? If you want to "borrow" a game from a friend just pirate it. That at least saves the platform holder some bandwidth costs.

You are being deliberately obtuse. Everyone understands how you might lend a game to a friend. Tokens have been around a long time [1]. Being able to lend your games to friends makes them more valuable as your token gets more play time per dollar. This is a good thing, and reduces the appeal of piracy a little bit.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_(railway_signalling)

I'm really not being obtuse.

When "loaning" digital bits the only thing that could possibly be loaned is a user license. Bits are copied, not loaned. If I "loan" you a digital game then your computer will make a copy of bits as sent by some arbitrary server possibly across the globe. You may even make a copy of different bits as your copy of the content may be for a different localization, quality setting, platform, or file format. My computer may or may not still have a copy of those bits.

It is not reasonable to expect licenses to digital bits to be infinitely transferable without limit. If licenses could be transfered without limit then there is no reason for more licenses to exist than the maximum number of concurrent users. Acquire a license when you launch a game and release the license when you shut it down. A 3rd party middle man could trivially run this exchange. Popular games sell millions of copies on Steam but only a small handful can crack even 100,000 concurrent users.

Assuming that you agree there should be a limit then it's just a matter of deciding where that line in the sand is drawn.

You are not wrong, it's just that your point is pointless. We know bits can be copied at close to zero cost. But the value of the bits can't be realized without the token (if DRM pertains) or can't legally be realized (if a single-user license pertains). The bits without the token have almost zero value. You are loaning the ability to realize the value of the bits.

You said "Loaning digital goods is a gibberish statement." This is simply not true.

I believe that the distinction between loaning digital goods and loaning a license to legally use digital goods is meaningful and important to recognize.

Yes, you are never actually buying a game, you are buying a license to play it. Even with boxed versions.

With DRM, you can "lend".

So basically, this is how DRM is useful in partially alleviating the problems introduced by DRM.

Am I going to have to write a flowchart for this similar to Inflection?

You can lend a license to use those bits in a specific way.

That's a new thing, a specific new thing defined by a license and is only synonymous to the concept of loaning a physical good, and only synonymous because the definition in the license intends to make it that way.

The fact is, lending requires scarcity. I would never in my life lend goods to a friend if I could provide an identical duplicate for basically zero cost. Why would I? I'm not bound by scarcity by choice.

Steam invents scarcity by limiting the number of "friends" to 10, and by enforcing a policy that will boot off friends ~five minutes after the owner logs in.

Real life doesn't need such machinations for the system of lending to work, which is why lending physical goods can never be the same thing as lending digital goods IMO.

It's not that new, or at least not significantly newer than the idea of intellectual property overall. Even before DRM ,most software had licenses defining how it could be used, how many computers it could be installed on and whether the license was transferable. Steam is simply doing the same thing but using technical measures to enforce the agreements.

Is your argument really that all software should always be given away for free?

Of course it's baby steps. Publishers are terrified, and loaning is only one tiny step from what they fear second most, aside from pirates- a burgeoning used game market.

what they fear second most, aside from pirates- a burgeoning used game market

I'm not sure how they fear that so much. On the rare occasions when I buy videogames they're usually used ones purchased at GameStop or on eBay.

Publishers and Developers are gaining absolutely no revenue from you doing that. And that's their issue. They want everyone to buy new games, because then they get a cut of it.

Buying second hand props up the $60US/$90AUD new cost though. Without second hand (ie. Steam at the moment) the prices plummet very quickly, $5 for Just Cause 2 for example, do you think GameStop etc. would allow you to buy it new for that price?

No, it's the other way around. Buying second hand denies profit to the publisher, which reduces units sold, which increases the price they have to charge to make any money.

Parent makes the same point as you.

I know that, what I meant was that I'm not seeing much evidence that they're deadly afraid of it. Maybe it's a mistake to judge by console games which have reasonably strong anti-piracy protection, to the point that I've never regarded the getting a fake as a serious possibility. For PC games that's much harder to enforce, but I haven't bought a PC game in years - as I don't play games much and it's a leisure activity rather than a lifestyle, I prefer ones that I can play from the couch rather than at my desk.

How? Isn't this better than loaning? Or do you mean trading?

You can't play Game A when you've loaned your library to Friend so they can play Game B.

This is a way to avoid telling people your steam password to "borrow" your account, not borrow a single game.

This would have been very useful to me when, in University, my roommates and all played our games on the living room gaming PC.

I can imagine this being useful for siblings to share a game library mostly bought by parents, or a spouse playing a partner's library. So certainly not useless, but it isn't loaning a game to a friend for a week, unless you're not going to play games at the same time as the friend.

Hmm, you're right. I misunderstood this part:

> WHEN I AUTHORIZE A DEVICE TO LEND MY LIBRARY TO OTHERS, DO I LIMIT MY OWN ABILITY TO ACCESS AND PLAY MY GAMES? As the lender, you may always access and play your games at any time. If you decide to start playing when a friend is already playing one of your games, he/she will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.

But I missed the implications in the FAQ directly above that:

> CAN A FRIEND AND I SHARE A LIBRARY AND BOTH PLAY AT THE SAME TIME? No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time.

It sounds like this essentially loans out your entire library. If you want to play a different game in your library, the person you loaned to would get bounced out of the game.

because you can't play other games from your library while someone else is using your account on, say another computer

Most old popular games come with a .exe that you can run without installing the game. Make for some real easy sharing in Lans. Valve making it almost as easy.

Sadly this won't work for LAN party because only one person can use a library at a time. Your comment does me wonder whether this could at some point be extended to allow you to lend the multiplayer component of a game to a friend so that you can play together.

I know back in the day half my friends ended up buying copies of Starcraft because they'd done a multiplayer install at a LAN party.

When it comes to that I like how it is with xbox 360 games. I can just lend my friend the disk and he can play the game.

A PC game is not that easy, why is pirating a bigger problem on computers than consoles? Or is it so? I'm not entirely familiar with the numbers but since you can still swap used console games I'd imagine it's like that.

I am glad Valve is doing something to improve this.

I think it's mainly because a console has the DRM mechanisms integrated on a hardware and OS level. Also consoles are designed to run only programs that have been approved by the platform owner which makes it significantly easier as a general purpose OS can't tell the difference between a pirate program and a program that is legitimately DRM-free.

> trying to provide a service that is more convenient than pirating

Huh, I know the other content industries have to play that game, but here I thought the killer feature of legitimate software was "not a virus."

Oh, maybe not piracy so much as... resellers? GameStop?

... on closer inspection, it seems functionally equivalent to logging into steam on a friend's computer, except that you don't have to type in your password on their machine and you can kick them off easily.

Considering how much trouble Steam has with phishing and accounts getting hacked, it's obviously a good idea to minimize any use-case where users are allowing others to get at their passwords. This kind of feature will probably save Valve money in the long-run.

Still, doesn't match what I hoped. I was hoping to see a way to share a few games on a machine within the same house, so I could have my set-top machine and my desktop machine divvy up the console-style and pc-style games without constantly having to re-log-in.

I have two machines with steam on it (desktop, laptop) and I get logged out of one if I use the other. Frankly I'm getting tired of it. (that and the "verifying installation..." window)

I'm hoping they will somehow figure out how to fix this soon, given this announcement. Obviously they can't let you have machines with your account all over the globe logged on at the same time, but if they let you have multiple machines logged on from the same IP address (thank you NAT) and still prevent you from playing a game on two machines at the same time, that should do it...

Personally, I have a desktop and an HTPC, which would seem like an obvious use-case they would want to target, given Big Picture mode! We're so close, what with remote libraries (on my NAS).

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - constrain it to a single IP and no sharing individual games. That would go a long way. Then again, you know some dedicated pirates will just VPN the damned thing.

Or at the very least give us a way to avoid keying in the password over and over again - I already logged in here, you can lock the steam account for use-from-elsewhere without forcing me to key in a password to unlock it. I might be annoyed that I can't share my library between my two machines at the same time, but at the very least I don't have to keep keying in PWs.

Perhaps the logical protocol is store the password at all times, but demand the end user type it in 10 times. After that, if he's still not reacted by changing the password, simply start using the memorized password without demanding login info.

Obviously it would be stupid to actually store the password locally for security reasons, but the actual implementation of asking the steam servers for a token of some sort and then presenting the token in place of the password would work just as well. May as well time limit the token and demand you log in every six months.

Worse still, I use auto-generated PWs from my password safe and they are not memorable. Mix that with the fact that I have a Win8 desktop and Mac laptop AND the fact that the Mac steam client DOES NOT ALLOW PASTING. You get the idea.

Alternatively, only allow one game to be played at a time. Not ideal- I can't have family play one game on one computer, and myself play another game on another computer- but a step.

On a fairly frequent basis, I have two machines in my house attempting to login to Steam from different IPs; My laptop is often connected to work VPN. Simply limiting it to public IP address is a good step, but doesn't solve all use cases.

The problem is that then large groups of people could route their traffic through a vpn and spoof Steam into thinking that everyone's on the same home network.

You can always launch Steam in offline mode.

> it seems functionally equivalent to logging into steam on a friend's computer

Honestly, separate achievements is the part that gets me excited. Maybe I'm odd, but I'm pretty particular about my achievements being mine.

I just wish my SO could play The Sims 3 on the laptop in the living room while I'm playing Civ 5 on my desktop in my home office. I ended up having to buy her a copy on Origin so we could game at the same time.

Steam has an offline mode, you could have enabled it on the laptop.

"Can a friend and I share a library and both play at the same time? No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time."

So, if one of my friend play on my game, I can play none of my games? Or am I reading this wrong?

"As the lender, you may always access and play your games at any time. If you decide to start playing when a friend is already playing one of your games, he/she will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing."

So I can authorise a person to use my account. I can then, at any time, play my own games. But if that other person is playing a game it will kick them off.

I am really excited about this feature. Around the time Portal 2 came out my partner and I lamented the fact that we had to buy two copies if we each wanted to play on our own account, considering how account sharing is against the TOS. I'm sure the people who do account share to get around this will be very happy to know that they don't have to go over and log in their significant other whenever they wish to play a game the other owns.

But note that this still doesn't allow you and a friend to play a game with each other unless you both own a copy.

Which is a pretty reasonable restriction. If you're going to both get the simultaneous value out of a game, you should probably both pay for it.

I don't think it is a reasonable restriction at all. Besides the most devoted fans, I don't believe many families would purchase multiple licenses to a lot of games just to be able to play them simultaneously. These kinds of terms don't really increase revenue but they unnecessarily damage the experience at the same time. This is exactly the sort of stuff that makes pirating more convenient. As I've mentioned in another comment, the Mac and iOS App Stores don't really have these limitations.

What do you suggest then, Valve should give you unlimited copies of the game when you purchase one?

Valve are not giving away a single copy of anything, they are licensing intellectual property with specific terms. I'm advocating licensing terms that allow licensees to simultaneously install and use licensed items on all computers owned by them. The terms of the Mac App Store already allow this.

This isn't something that's on Valve, but games should bring back LAN play.

I'm kind of surprised that game companies now expect you to pay for a game twice to play through a two-player co-op campaign. Remember when local multiplayer was a thing? When you'd buy a game, and several people would sit around a TV getting "simultaneous value out of it" for the cost of that one purchase, because that was the game's value proposition to begin with?

Well, consider offline mode-- you share your own library with a friend, then go into offline mode. Potentially, your friend can play any game he or she wants from your library, and you still are able to play single player (or non-Steam multiplayer) games yourself.

That's assuming sharing doesn't handle this case. I'm guessing Valve has thought about things like this.

Well, they essentially have to allow it-- especially in the case you disconnect from the internet entirely. There's always a way around it, and offline mode is likely going to be allowed.

You're probably right. I just have the sense that their engineers though this through far more than anyone here.

I am trying to imagine some Valve engineer hits his head to wall and saying "Damn, we forgot about the offline mode"

"Can I share specific games, or do I have to share my whole library? Libraries are shared and borrowed in their entirety."

Looks like you're right. It's one less step than just giving someone your username and password.

The way I read it, basically yes. Except if you're the owner of the games being shared you get priority and the person you shared to will get kicked off in a few minutes if they are playing one of the games in the shared library:

"When I authorize a device to lend my library to others, do I limit my own ability to access and play my games? As the lender, you may always access and play your games at any time. If you decide to start playing when a friend is already playing one of your games, he/she will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing."

I really wish they would fix this. Why should I not be able to have two separate games of mine running at once?

Because otherwise you could co-ordinate which games to buy with your friends so you can all share a single game library for single player games.

There's probably some kind of "social network graph" hack that could be applied. Like you could share any game from a family member... but only one singular family member, and you can only change your singular family member "link" on the 1st of January or perhaps the anniversary of when you signed up with Steam. That seems fair.

So my HTPC and my kids desktops can each sign up to share Dad's personal library... but they're both stuck to me, and me only, for a year. In a way I kind of like the idea of my kids not being able to "borrow" some ridiculous 17+ rated gorefest from the other side of the internet or a kid at school... I know they're stuck on my account, or at least I have a vague idea what they're doing.

How would you enforce people not creating accounts merely to share one dudes library? Could make it terribly slow or inconvenient perhaps?

Another interesting option is creating tiered accounts to prevent widespread pirating-type operations. So you can either be a sharer or a borrower and never switch between. Or as per above, switch as many times as you want, once per year.

I'm sure there's some moronic and expensive patents out there to prevent the whole thing from ever getting off the ground.

Well, you can't create an account for the sole purpose of being the borrower without buying at least 1 game on Steam, because you can't add a friend without making a purchase.

So, just like physical titles.

Yeah, which I'm thinking is what they want to avoid.

I think an element of this is the part where when you get kicked off it will prompt you to buy the game or quit. As a nice solution to lack of demos most games have. That's the thought my friends and I immediately jumped to.

Except that with physical titles it's pretty inconvenient to pass around disks all the time, so there's a natural limit to sharing. With the new kind of sharing, you could share your library with someone on the other side of the country without having to ship disks around. That is a subtle point lost in this debate and the debate around the Xbox One.

If multiple users could be playing your game, you could also avoid all buying the same game for multiplayer. That seems reasonable for them to want to avoid.

I think the request is that one person plays Game A while the other plays Game B, not two people playing Game A.

Until someone gets your account banned.

Create a new steam account for every game you buy, have each account share it's library with all of your friends.

How/why do you play on two computers at once? Seems difficult.

Purchase all my games on steam. Son/daugher/parents/cousin wants to play a game I own, but I am currently playing a different game I own. Only one person can play a game at a time, even though licenses have been purchased for both.

if you had the foresight, you could potentially just created 1 steam account per game purchase. This, in fact, solves all problems related to steam that i have.

Sounds like it. The whole library is on one machine at a time.

You could do this before by logging into Steam from a buddy's computer... but that's got risks associated with it.

This just lets you loan out your whole library without risking your steam account.

Yes this seems to be true, it's in essence providing users a easy approved way to share their steam logins, which happens a lot already.

Well, I still need 2 copies of Civ 5 to play multiplayer with my son:

  > CAN A FRIEND AND I SHARE A LIBRARY AND BOTH PLAY AT THE SAME TIME?
  >
  > No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time.

Now, I was (and still am) fine with that since it has provided so much entertainment, but for many games that would not be true...

Or (if you use Macs) you can just buy it on the Mac App Store which doesn't have such limitations so you would only need to pay for it once. The Mac App Store has other shortcomings but it proves that these very restrictive licensing terms are mostly unnecessary.

However, in the case of Borderlands at least, the app store version would limit you from playing multiplayer with anyone with the Steam version.

A brilliant move would be to offer discounts on purchasing a game if the lender kicks you off while you are playing. "Sorry we have to kick you off while you are playing, it looks like the owner wants to play game X right now. Purchase the game for yourself at 10% off and keep playing immediately!"

so a 10% markup on everything, which people have to circumvent by intentionally trying to play the game at the same time just in order to get the 'discount'?

Because Steam sales have driven the prices of games up by 50%. Oh wait, no, AAA games are still $60, but now Steam offers them at a reasonable discount after a few months to undercut the used-games market.

Getting kicked out is a point of friction, where a user could either start torrenting, or buy the game legitimately. If they can prove that a small discount improves conversions, I don't see why they wouldn't offer it. Steam is all about removing friction by offering discounts.

That's really just a slimy marketing tactic with the slime pawned off on someone you know. Which, funnily enough, is no less slimy.

Define "slimy". Offering someone something which you have a very good reason to think they'd want seems like about the best that marketing can ever be.

There's lots of slimy marketing tactics. Here's one.

Give someone something for free, without telling them its a trial, then have it break down in some predictable manner shortly, then sell them something very expensive to fix it.

Example. You buy a printer for really cheap, you're happy with your purchase, you print off some pages and then after the 8th page, your printer runs out of ink. You go back to the store to see ink for your printer is exorbitantly marked up.

That is a slimy marketing tactic. It relies on common weaknesses in reasoning we humans have, in this case, a sunk cost. You've invested time and money badly, and you are unwilling to see what lies ahead as a worse option as backing out and getting something else.

Can you see parallels with this tactic in what steam is doing?

If I am not wrong, this is what Xbox One wanted to do initially.

The Xbox One was originally to have applied digital distribution restrictions to physically distributed media. That is the problem that people had with it.

Had Microsoft simply restricted their program to their digitally distributed games -- which they are likely to loop back on -- I doubt anyone would have taken issue with it.

... Except that's what a lot of Steam-distributed physical games do anyway. Quite a few games just come with a Steam Key and then you can install over the internet or use the disks as installation media into Steam.

... Which is exactly what the Xbox One proposed.

I seem to remember Half-Life 2 having similar distribution scheme.

digital distribution restrictions and benefits. That's what's annoying about the walkback Micosoft did. They would have had you being able to electronically lend your friends games you owned on physical media. But then when they canned that feature, they seem to have canned the entire family sharing facility.

I was really excited about this, but then I read the limitations...in particular:

>No, due to technical limitations, some Steam games may be unavailable for sharing. For example, titles that require an additional third-party key, account, or subscription in order to play cannot be shared between accounts.

Damn. Probably should have expected this.

But, all in all, seems like a positive step forward!

Somehow, I ended up with 2 steam accounts, and wanted to merge them. This is expressly prevented by Steam ((https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1558-QYA...).

Now, with these changes, I at least have a way around this problem.

Sounds great for a hypothetical Steam Box

Seems similar to the way current consoles handle accounts.

Yeah, it's very similar to how XBox Live accounts and digital games work (though, interestingly, it is dramatically inferior to the model Microsoft had proposed for XBox One before everyone got angry and forced them to backpedal - that model had dramatically superior sharing features)

How so? The plan for xbox one was to have up to 10 family members be able to play the same game on any console. Steams plan now enables up to 10 family members to play a game on any computer. In both cases, not on the same time. I don't see the difference.

Edit: Ah, it seems steam only shares the whole library, not single games. A pity, and that might very well be a difference.

"Steams plan now enables up to 10 family members to play a game on any computer."

I've been thinking a better system would be number of shares = number of owned games. Or number of shares per game = retail cost of game divided by total retail value of all games on the entire account. Then I could share out "FTL" dozens of times, but some goofball who opened a fake account containing only one copy of "XYZ" could only share it out precisely once.

This follows the obvious customer service goal of making your best paying customers the happiest.

So my brother and I can't play the same game together if we share a steam account? Am I reading that right? Not much changes for me then…

exactly. This doesn't solve any of my problems with steam as it is.

This isn't any different from sharing the password with your family members (who you should trust anyway, right?). Why not make it more useful and allow the person you share with to play games from your library at the same time you're playing?

(but different games. if I want to play TF2 and the family member wants to play Dragon Age, I don't see why that shouldn't be possible!)

Heck, you can already play single/multi player games simultaneously just by sharing passwords and using offline mode. Color me unexcited.

Here's even a quick config file change you can make so that your Steam always starts in offline mode and doesn't force-logout the other person already logged in. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25474... (tried this with my dad and it works great as long as he doesn't need to patch).

There's much lamenting about how people can't play the same game together on a shared account.

The much bigger issue to me is that a shared device can't play any of your games if you're playing a game. So if you're playing Borderlands 2, your brother can't play Borderlands 1. This seems nearly useless, if true.

Some people see this as pointless because "lending" digital goods is impossible.

Really, it's about ease of use. If a person can "borrow" a game easily, and get their fulfillment from it they are less likely to download it illegally or even try to steal it from valve by exploiting the "borrowing" system.

I hope this leads to more game sharing. I think letting people play a multiplayer game together when only one person owns the game would be great for the consumer, and lead to higher sales of the game.

I have skipped some co-op games because I knew my friends wouldn't buy it, but they would have played with me if they could.

Ok, this much closer to allowing me to have my desktop and my HTPC logged in to Steam at the same time...

This has been a rumored coming feature forever but I can't for the life of me figure out how this benefits steam, or even how they convinced publishers to take part in this.

Whats their motivation? Did they go over the publishers heads with this? I'm curious to see how this pans out.

> Whats their motivation?

Probably the amount of customer-service time they have to spend on stolen accounts. Users can presently share an account with a friend... by using their own credentials on their friend's machine, which is a bad idea for like a bazillion reasons.

This lets you do that without risking your credentials.

Probably the part where when your friend decides to play the game you are borrowing from him you get a notice to buy the game or be forced to quit within a few minutes.

Edit: It actually looks even more restrictive in that if your friend decides to play any game on their steam library then you will be booted.

I don't think it'd work that way around - the owner of the library can kick out friends who are borrowing their games, but not vice versa.

Pre-Steam games weren't tied to an account, so this is just bringing that capability back.

'Pre-Steam'... My god, that makes 2003 seem that much longer ago... How can I be 23 and still feel like an old man? Makes one nostalgic for the days when games still came in boxes...

Last I checked (less than a minute ago), new games can still come in boxes.

Well, I'll head right over to CompUSA and buy... oh wait.

Maybe I can buy a boxed game from Amazon?

I bought Portal in a box. I put the CD-ROM in and it prompted me to download Steam.

Yes, Amazon sells them. You can also walk into a Walmart and find boxes of console games.

Attn: Spotify, plz implement this too, thx

You could always share steam accounts by giving somebody your password! The only thing this does is allow you to gain your own achievements which is just Valve's way of getting you addicted to your steam account. Stop treating this like a good thing or even a service it only benefits Valve.

<s>Yes, sharing your password is really secure</s>; not to mention that you can only login to one Steam client with the same account. While it's not perfect, Steam Sharing is a step up.

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