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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.
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.
Why the fuck wouldn’t I buy from their store?
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.
It doesn’t make games free, so I’ll continue to think about pirating games.
Awesome! That would mean that family sharing finally works like I thought it would work. No more tears because I started a game while the kid was playing another one.
Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
This is huge! Previously it was annoying to share games become if someone was playing my game and I opened something up they would be kicked out.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
I think it’s fair. You should know if your family cheats if you share your games with them
Nah its impossible to always know if they will cheat. It could be their first time.
I don’t think it’s horrible. First, it prevents abuse, and second it adds extra social pressure to not cheat if you’re using this since you know if you get caught all your family comes with you. Sure, maybe some parent sharing with a stupid child it sucks, but I use this with my brother and we’re both adults and know it isn’t an issue for either of us. I don’t really care if this prevents more cheaters from existing. The harm will be very minimal, with pretty good upsides for the vast majority of people.
Hmmm, that’s a lot to go over in there. I have family sharing setup with, let’s say, my found family. There are a lot of improvements listed, but also many things I’m worried about.
The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive. I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc’s, It’s really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.
I understand why they’re doing the ban sharing, but it’s still funny.
The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive.
It’s slightly better than that for the person who leaves. It’s a one year period starting the moment they joined the previous one. So if you’ve been part of a family for 1+ years you can join/create a new one right away.
The slot you occupied however does stay locked for an additional year.
I also have my current setup with found family and as I live close to a country border I cannot switch over properly as I have members on both sides of the border. I understand their intent is “same household”, so I do understand why this is the case, still sucks for me though.
I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc’s, It’s really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.
After toying around in the beta, this seems to not be an issue anymore as they seem to actually go off accounts now and not hardware anymore. It was quite frustrating in the old system though.
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
That kinda sucks.
I kinda hope they grant the ability to block some games from being shared. I trust my kids not to use cheats, but I can understand being a bit paranoid from being banned from a game you really enjoy and not wanting to take a chance.
Ffs…I mean, w.e, I’m sure it’s fine. Just I literally only set up my brother to family share my library last month…
Then you’re set up for this already, silly.
