this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Steam Deck
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This is a problem that Steam Family Share exists to solve.
It doesnt solve this in the slightest. Steam and game publishers can always take your games away without prior notice.
You're being needlessly pedantic for the sake of outrage. It solves OP's problem of playing their library in multiple rooms simultaneously.
You never own any game, unless you code it yourself. You might hold a CD in your hands, but the game is still owned by someone else. You only have the right to use it as noted in the license you agreed by purchasing it.
It’s true. Every book, movie, game or piece of software you’ve ever used (unless you made it yourself) has been subject to some kind of licence, that can be revoked.
Sure but no one is going to come in to my home and take my physical books away in the same way that can happen with online digital services.
You can reverse this logic though. If you lose or damage your physical copy it’s gone forever, digital copies can mostly be redownloaded/recovered anytime.
I had never thought about this but this is a great argument in favor of digital vs physical.
Still I prefer owning my games when given the choice.
One issue is that, unless you (can) back them up yourself, digital goods can be changed. If I bought The Twits on Kindle, it literally wouldn't be the same book that I read as a child because they decided that words like "ugly" are too much for children. Even if I bought it before they censored it - it would be "updated".
Good argument too.
I guess they’re adavantages and inconvenients in every situation.
What you’re talking about could even happen on a physical game receiving an online update.
It's a great argument for backups. I don't think clod/DRM based services are the best backup - certainly they're not a complete backup system.
If you have a local system and/or communication failure, or bandwidth limitation; how long to restore the backup?
A backup on a local storage should be possible to plug into another computer and access fairly easily.
Ideally your backup system will give some resilience against many types of risk scenario, especialy for the data you care most about or can't go for a long time without. The fact that it's harder to backup DRM stuff is a limitation - so I'd avoid DRM unless i don't care about the thing.
You have no idea what you are talking about. You can own and resell any physical piece of game media. If you have a gameboy cartridge, nobody can take that game away from you. Also if you have DRM free game files from gog, nobody can take that away from you.
The only case where this disgusting lincense shit is possible, is when games require being online and logging in to unlock the DRM.
Your physical media will degrade over time and you will eventually lose access to the game you bought physically. There’s no correct answer in this, unfortunately, and is fully your opinion. You can own and resell your physical media until it no longer functions and then where are you? You’re in the same boat as the person who bought digitally and lost access to their license. Even DRM free games from gog are only around until they stop hosting your download. If they stop hosting it and the hardware you own with your copy on it fails, you will again own nothing.
This argument applies to almost anything that's possible to own, though. What happens when your bike degrades to the point that it's not usable as a bike anymore?
1000% it does. But if your tires wear out you can buy new tires. If a chip wears out in your game boy color cartridge, are you going to replace it? Is there a shop you can bring your old PS2 disc to that can restore lost data?
Edit: I think a bike is a flawed analogy because you can repair a bike. You can’t repair an old physical game if it breaks. You can buy a replacement in both cases, until there are no longer bikes or no longer copies of old games still functioning and I’ve got a hunch that bikes are going to be around a lot longer than any physical media.
Although, at least with DRM-free games you're given all the tools to preserve the game yourself if you want to.
You’re totally correct. The reason you’re getting downvoted is because that seems tangential to the problem you mentioned (an account can only play one thing at a time), which already has a solution (Family Sharing).
But yes, the world needs strong digital ownership laws yesterday.
Technically: Yes. Legally: Doubtful.
Publishers can choose to no longer run servers but to remove games from the accounts without compensation, would be legal trouble.
When Sony axed Concord, all buyers got a full refund for a reason and that reason isn't that Sony is such a caring company.
There is no doubt. Sony is actually a great example because they were the ones who tried to remove purchases from Discovery. They faced zero legal consequences. There wasn't even any discussion of legal consequences because it's perfectly legal. Ultimately Sony worked it out with Discovery to restore those purchases but they did not do that out of legality or out of kindness. They did it for their reputation. If Sony starts removing your streaming purchases, the same purchases you can make any a dozen other platforms, are you going to continue purchasing from them? Hail nah.
Concord was a bit different in that the content was only available for ~2 weeks so I'd imagine that would fall into some sort of legal grey area and they'd end up being sued or worse. As of yet, I don't think "how long must 'purchases' be available?" has been tested in court.
Yes, but that problem has literally nothing to do with the Steam Deck.
Fair, with steam i think most people got into it years ago before "ownership" was even a concern, back before online games were so frequently shutdown soon after release. Its a good thing GOG and Sailing the 7 Seas are an option for preservation, not that it helps with online only games.
Now i still invest in steam because of its convenience. As soon as it becomes more cumbersome to use, i am done. Tbh if 3rd party app stores/secondary drm become more common on the store i will probably stop investing in steam. Its already a big issue that stops me from buying games...(Think denuvo)
Consoles are already to the point where its near impossible to own your game. Xbox overpriced their consoles so we dont buy them and just invest in gamepass. Not to mention their consoles dont work without online accnt. Playstation requires online activation for a disc drive to work with their new consoles. Nintendo doesnt even put 3rd party switch 2 games on the cartridge anymore.
I feel you, but steam is definitely the lesser of the evils here letting you use it on almost any hardware you want, even if you cant avoid the drm(for most games)
I don't see how family share solves anything, I looked it up a few years ago, and it seemed pretty useless.
What exactly does family share do that is actually useful?
Edit:
We have tried it now, and yes now you can actually play games owned by other family members.
I'm pretty sure that the current functionality wasn't available last I read about it on Steam.
Now it does what you'd expect from the name.
It lets you play a game on your account while someone else plays a different game from your account. Its literally the solution for ops issue.
I just enabled family share with my wife, but none of us has the games of the other?
And there is no hint of why?
Sorry, there apparently was a second mail the joining party needed to confirm, works now! 👍 😎 😋
They updated it in September:
They changed it recently where you can have two members of a family able to play two different games at ones (or rather number of copies of the game at once).
But that requires different accounts even if one account owns all the games.
Can we just declare us family members and then have access to each others libraries?
Yes
With a caveat - you need to share an ip address with the user at some point. A friend of mine logged into Steam on a pc in my house to get around that issue but my brother (who’s 1400 miles away) joined my family with no issues because we lived together at some point a decade ago.
Yes, but there are limitations on switching, iirc something like 6 months between being able to join a different family and so on. They don't really matter for actual families, but does if you just want to share games with a bunch of friends.
Sounds fair enough, and not a problem here.
I have a family set up with my brother, two childhood friends, and one of the friends wife. They don't check anything, just have to be invited to join.
And atm, ive been playing Oblivion at the same time as my friend, just have to go offline before starting the game.
OK sounds like we should try it out.
Funny you mention Oblivion, because that's one of the games I don't have, but my wife does.