Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families, available today in the Steam Beta Client. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play. Create a Steam Family To get started, you can create a Steam Family and then invite up to 5 family members.
It’s stuff like this that makes me not even think about pirating games. Imagine a company that literally just improves features and makes it easier for me and my family to enjoy the media they sell. Why the fuck wouldn’t I buy from their store?
Why streaming services don’t understand this, I’ll never know. Seems like the games industry is riding purely on Steam’s usability while the film/TV industry is speedrunning enshittification.
I have a large library of games I’ve never played on stream. a couple months back I wanted to play a game I had installed a while ago and guess what, forced always online. not from steam, but from the shitty team behind doom (don’t remember which version it was), which just happened to be at the time I had a multi hour internet outage.
afterwards I figured out I had to explicitly block some network traffic to stop it from trying to force me to sign up for an account with the developer.
while steam certainly has DRM options, they are configurable by developers and afaik can’t enforce an always online requirement with just steam, only though custom logic in the game or third party DRM. developers are also free to not use steam DRM.
DRM, as usual, harms the legitimate buyers.
that being said, steam still does bring a lot of value, such as their hardware developments, their work on better Linux gaming support, the update distribution through a trusted source, and various others.
It’s stuff like this that makes me not even think about pirating games. Imagine a company that literally just improves features and makes it easier for me and my family to enjoy the media they sell. Why the fuck wouldn’t I buy from their store?
Why streaming services don’t understand this, I’ll never know. Seems like the games industry is riding purely on Steam’s usability while the film/TV industry is speedrunning enshittification.
bc it’s functionally always-on DRM? i mean feel free to spend money how you will but there are tons of good reasons to avoid steam
I have a large library of games I’ve never played on stream. a couple months back I wanted to play a game I had installed a while ago and guess what, forced always online. not from steam, but from the shitty team behind doom (don’t remember which version it was), which just happened to be at the time I had a multi hour internet outage.
afterwards I figured out I had to explicitly block some network traffic to stop it from trying to force me to sign up for an account with the developer.
while steam certainly has DRM options, they are configurable by developers and afaik can’t enforce an always online requirement with just steam, only though custom logic in the game or third party DRM. developers are also free to not use steam DRM.
DRM, as usual, harms the legitimate buyers.
that being said, steam still does bring a lot of value, such as their hardware developments, their work on better Linux gaming support, the update distribution through a trusted source, and various others.
DRM-free is even better for this, but comparing to storefronts that require logging in: absolutely.
GOG is pretty amazing, too, is what I’m saying.
It doesn’t make games free, so I’ll continue to think about pirating games.