I bought several games in my childhood. Games that mean a lot to me personally because of how much I had to scrimp and save to be able to afford. It took me nearly a year to cobble enough money to buy Warcraft III. And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others.

Every game I’ve purchased on Steam I can play right now with one click. Obviously others offer the same thing now but Steam offered it first. They also have region specific pricing, a huge pull for me at some point.

There are other good store fronts, I’m sure. But the amount of trust they’ve built with me over the last 10+ years can’t be replicated overnight by anyone else.

>And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others.

The disadvantage is that your game is locked now to your account, I cant just gift my games to my son. I have to make sure to keep my Steam version in Offline mode before he tries to play from his PC using my Steam Account. I wish there was a way to create family accounts and share the game or even gift them to your children, you could add some rules like you can't re-gift same game for say n years or whatever.

Have you tried Steam Family Sharing? https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

It won't support every game but it should help you in your quest to share games with your son

The problem with Family Sharing is that it requires that the donor account not be playing any of its games while the recipient does. The workaround is to kill the internet connection to the donor account, then both accounts can play to their hearts' content! Er, as long as the donor doesn't mind single-player content.

Which is essentially what grandparent is already doing. Alas!

you dont have to kill your internet connection, the steam client has an "offline mode" that works as well

>the steam client has an "offline mode"

I know it's unusual for HN, but I read both the GGGP and am a user of the thing under discussion! Steam's settings in that regard aren't "sticky" enough for me. I've set myself to Offline, quit, and then found myself Online often enough under both Windows and Linux that it's just easier to write a little script to keep Steam from connecting to the internet.

Worth pointing out to others that even if offline mode fails and one intemperately starts a game while someone else is using one's library, that user will get a minute or two to save their game before Steam closes the game for them, but my cousins have found this annoying enough that I figured I'd take OS-level action.

Ensuring that the recipient also has the ability to deny Steam internet access allows my cousins to log into actually-offline Steam as me, and play single-player content, while I'm actually-online and playing multiplayer.

I never had the issue with Steam going Online without my permissions on Ubuntu.

One thing that affects me with Offline mode is this scenario,

1 the kid is playing with his friends soemthing

2 I am in Offline mode but I just found a cheap game I want to try, but I would need to go Online but this would kick my son out.

so going Offline is an ugly workaround for my scenario.

Feh, it works on your machine, eh? :D

But seriously, you need Family Sharing. Make your kid an account, then set your account to Family Share with his. Now, he can play games from your library as long as you're not playing any, even if your account is online too.

So, when you want to play some singleplayer stuff, log into your account and buy and download the game as you normally would, whilst your son plays with his friends. Now kill Steam's internet connection on your computer, and play your freshly purchased cheap singleplayer game without bothering or having bothered your son.

So we don't need sharing, I want transferring/gifting. Basically i have a ton of games , very old not this last years AAA , that I won't play again but my son will play, like Gary's mod that can import content from Half Life games and Portal if you have them installed, so I would like to create a new account for my son and completely transfer half of my library to him.

Most people don't care about privacy much, so they don't notice that if you try to use Steam in offline mode permanently it's impossible. Valve like most other big tech companies wants all their user data too.

I don't think that's the reason. Valve is too small to really achieve anything with our user data, nor do they have any impetus to collect it. The Hardware Survey is technically optional, and my recommendations are so unbelievably poor that I can't seriously believe that feature ingests any individual user data.

I suspect it's more to do with the fact that without requiring a new Steam Ticket every once in a while, I could go and install much of my library on a friend's computer (or any number of friends!), rig the OS to deny Steam internet connectivity, and thereby allow them to play games with my licenses indefinitely and undetectably! The horror!

This is already possible if you just download a cracked version in the first place, and it is technically more demanding (of the users), and more inconvenient. So what is it achieving exactly?

Can it really be that you're arguing that turning off wifi is "technically more demanding" than locating and installing a cracked version?