Steam Family Sharing Available to All Users Now

[-CraZed-]

Zkuq said:

-CraZed- said:

Zkuq said:

Oh, but I think you're confusing what it's supposed to be and what you want it to be. I don't think it's in publishers' interests to let you loan your games to your friends, thus the feature isn't supposed to allow that. And like it or not, the benefit I said for Family Sharing as-is is a benefit. Maybe it's not relevant to you but it's a benefit nevertheless. Things could be better for us consumers but at least this is something - and again, they'd call it something else if it wasn't supposed to do what I said it's supposed to do.

*BOLD* Then what exactly in your estimation is Valve allowing us to share if not the games?

Of course it isn't relevant to me and dare I say it most other Steam users either. As I already stated to another poster just take a look in the Steam community discussions about this very subject and you'll see a whole lot of other Steam users who feel the same way I do. Which is, 'so what, we have been sharing our games for 10 years now without a formal, restrictive sharing plan. It's called Offline mode thank you very much.' :)

If you were allowed to loan games freely to anyone, who would buy games anymore unless they wanted to play the game at launch? One person could buy the game, play it at launch, then loan it to their friends afterwards. Why would those people borrowing the game want to pay for it? The current system pretty much eliminates this problem by being so strict.

I know many people aren't happy about this, I'm not even trying to argue about it. I understand those people. But I also understand publishers in this case, because in an online world, free loaning would have a huge effect compared to loaning in a more traditional world. Nowadays, allowing free loaning would make it possible for you to loan the game to anyone in the world, as many people as you want, without any risk to the game you paid for. I don't think it's even in the spirit of being able to loan your possessions to other people because it's so broad. It would be beneficial for us, consumers, though.

This can already be done whether on PC via Steam (offline mode) or on a console with a physical disc and even digitally (PS3 can share between two systems at a time regardless who is logged in). And yet the games are doing just fine.

This idea that people will stop buying games if they can share is ludicrous. If they wanted to bring sharing on Steam above board they needed only to allow anyone in your registered circle of friends/family to play any game that is not being played at the same time. Otherwise people will just continue to use offline mode and not even bother using the family share feature as it is pretty much useless.

Not to mention offline line mode has the added benefit of not forcing you to stop playing Skyrim in the middle of a game because the main account has decided to play Portal 2.