Even in offline mode?

Well, that's pretty fuckin useless without setting up for it in advance...

Yes

It's all about DRM. Any way you slice it, it sucks. They are so scared of pirates, that they are willing to screw legit customers. As with most companies with an effective monopoly, they are too big to care.

N/A

Steam does make a decent IM client.   If you play on the same account, and one is offline, I think that works.

Family sharing is probably different, and I can see why you wouldn't want you kid using your account.

Yea, I hope you're right.

Yea, I don't expect anyone at SD to say anything negative about Steam. Biting the hand that feeds you, and such.

I was just hoping I could play SD games without being limited by their draconian Family Share restrictions.

It depends on how many people are using the family option.

Like this doesn't affect me at all.

So, you're saying that my situation is very unusual, like I'm a Fringe user of Steam?

I have the exact same problem as the OP.  Except I have 4 computers and 4 children wanting to use them at the same time.   I am so sick of switching steam from online to offline and then fighting with it to work...

I wish I could transfer the games to their individual accounts, but of course I can't, I have to re-buy them.   

Despite all this, family sharing is much better than the previous options which was same account open everywhere.

I don't believe it's ever been mentioned that it was made to play games from 1 library at the same time by multiple people. To me, it sounds like you want it to be something different than it is and are blaming Valve that it isn't. *shrug*

Do you see where publishers/developers would lose money if everybody just started sharing accounts and nobody was paying for the games they played anymore?

Well look, if Steam doesn't give at least a little ground, then it's back to the good old days of physical media which you can actually play in whatever machine you like.

Nobody is denying that digital distribution is a big step forward, but it also has the potential to shoot itself in the foot if contending with disc checks is an easier thing than letting a family play games as a family.  It's not like they're getting away with the old 'one disc between four machines' trick if they all want to multiplayer.

I'm all for developers earning a living, but needing to have two game licenses when only one player is playing at a time seems a tad bit overkill.  Can you even do that?  Have two licenses for a game in one Steam library?  No?  Then maybe that's something to consider.

Is it working?

Fascinating legal issue (although I'm sure there is something about it in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that says users have no rights whatsoever about anything anywhere). I wonder if me reading book1 from shelf3 prevents another household occupant from reading book7 from shelf2, simply because they are in the same library? Are we heading in Digital Age tyranny?

How are two occupants of the same household, playing two different - paid for - games (from the same account\library), hurting publishers/developers? Are they hurting publishers/developers because they didn't buy multiple copies for household occupant #1, #2, and #3? When did it become normal to buy multiple copies of - insert entertainment product (e.g. Book, Movie, Board game, Toy, etc.) - for the same household? Doesn't anybody share with their family members anymore? How does a "Family Share" option promotes sharing when they lock you out of your account if somebody from your household is playing a different game than the one you want to play? Wouldn't it make more sense to allow multiple accesses to the same account\library if said accesses share the same physical address (or credit card, or IP, or something along those lines)? I find it hard to believe that there isn't a more reasonable solution than locking out the original owner of the account. I also find the almighty dollar argument unconvincing and somewhat vile in this context.

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