They said they wanted to share among their family. Your interpretation assumes more aggressive and less reasonable behavior. My guess is that while such friend sharing is a risk, it's unlikely to be from families like the poster above. In fact I doubt such sharing would widespread since many folks want trophies and trading cards in their own accounts.
This is a bit harsh if not straight offensive. I reckon you don’t have kids, you’re building your Steam library for yourself? In my opinion, I had a perfectly valid expectation that if I paid full licenses for 2 different games, I’d be able to play both of them at the same time on two PCs. You know, like in old CD/DVD days. Steam was supposed to be superior to that, not inferior?
Sure, some games can work in offline mode, but not all of them.
> they implement something that ONLY HELPS and you never want to buy from them again.
Once you make a mistake to purchase some games for kids using your existing account, you can’t go back. Family sharing doesn’t help you any more, it creates problems. I can’t buy Flight Simulator on Steam just for myself, even if it won’t be ever shared with kids. They’ll kick me out if they want unrelated game from a library.
Few days ago we had a family meeting to decide how to purchase Hogwarts Legacy, talking into consideration which kid plays which games on which accounts, should it be Steam, Epic, on kids account or mine… It felt bizare. I bought it on Epic at the end. Not that Epic is better in this regard, it’s just that kids have separate accounts there from the start. Notice that we want to play on single computer, no sharing whatsover, fully priced $59 license, but there’s still a risk it won’t work if other kid plays let’s say Among Us on another PC. Should we create a new account for new game? Will we be banned? I even wanted to buy it on DVD for these reasons but it was not an option. How is this user friendly?
This is a cautinary story for future parents, or for those whose kids will be gamers in a year or two.
Uh seriously.. what the f?
They very fact that they added library sharing is AMAZING in itself. And this has been on for like.. 10 years or something already?
It's perfectly reasonable to make it basically lock the whole library. Otherwise you could have like 5-10 friends and each buy 20% of the games but as long as you aren't playing the same ones at the same time you basically have to buy 5x less copies. And you sound exactly like the kind of person who would just take advantage of this and ruin it for the rest of us- since you are already complaining about something free.
And as others have said- the workaround is pretty easy. If you own the game and other wants to borrow, just go offline. Or worst case you have the other person log into your account and go offline. And Steam knows people do that- but they don't do anything to discourage it because it is some effort.
>Now if I'm buying a game the first thing I'm looking is if there's is a non-Steam version
Amazing.. they implement something that ONLY HELPS and you never want to buy from them again.