Submitted 1 month ago by Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/4149575031735702629
Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.
Features:
Its shit like this why I want to smack the “B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY” types who claim Steam does nothing with its 30%. Steam is one of the only companies out their in our late stage capitalist society that actually does things for its customer base without being forced to. We have digital refunds, completely remappable controllers, a linux operating system and portable computer that functions as a console when you dont want to use it as a computer, the only DRM in the world that doesnt actively suck, built in mod database/support, VR, official early access marketplace support (I know it has its issues), user game reviews with multiple sorting options, and thats everything I can currently think of. Steam is not only the only company I dont actively hate (Ok, I kind of like Costco too), vut I actually quite like Steam as a company.
Digital refunds isn’t them being good, it’s them getting sued by Australia.
They could have made it an AU only feature, though, and didn’t, to their credit.
I too hate everything that’s not completely perfect in every way
I think it’s also just generally a good thing for them. I’m way more hesitant to buy stuff from humble and fanatical because I can’t return stuff, so I rather pay a bit more to get it through steam.
And they repeatedly ignored my requests for games which didn’t work, as it was three weeks or thereabouts.
without being forced to. We have digital refunds
Small nitpick, but it’s funny that you specifically listed their refunds first. They were forced into that. Some may remember how comically awful Steam’s customer support used to be. It was genuinely horrible, with resolution turnaround times measured in days and weeks instead of minutes or hours. There was no instant messaging or ticketing system available; You had to email a sketchy email address, then wait days or weeks for them to finally respond. And chances were good that the response would basically boil down to “lul git fuckd loser, sux 2 b u”
Europe started pushing for them to be more customer friendly, because their refunds in particular were breaching some local European laws. In order to keep operating in Europe, they revamped their refund process entirely and recommitted to better customer service going forwards. But they only started the entire refund revamp in 2015 because they were going to be pushed out of European markets if they failed to comply.
I brought it up because until Steam did it NO digital game marketplace had refunds. Whether or not they got sued, Steam led the way
Don’t forget private games, it’s a win-win because customers can buy games they don’t want to show to their friends and Valve get more money because they get more people buying those embarrassing awesome games.
RIGHT! I FORGOT ABOUT THAT ONE
This stuff is great.
But ignoring all the real issues with Steam is stupid, let alone the fact it all rides on one guy at the moment. Change of hands and within a generation or two you’ve got shit.
And it’s bizarre that some of them seem to get angry when someone else points the issues out.
No ones ignoring the real issues. Steam isnt a monopoly and the 30% cut is industry standard. I’m not going to fault those who take issue with “Valve Time” or Valves shit communication. And frankly, the good stuff doesnt need to last forever, as soon as Steam enshitifies, GoG or Itch’ll be there to dethrone it, and Piracy’ll be there to get our games back if worst case scenario happens. You want better competition? Shit on Epic and EA to actually provide it
A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly.
The vast majority of games you pay for on Steam can be taken from you in a couple of clicks from a Valve employee.
1: Steam is NOT a monopoly, competition exists for it, its just that most of it is garbage, and the few that arent, GoG and Itch, Steam outcompetes
2: This is a problem of Steams competition being bad, not with Steam itself
This isn’t Steam specific; this applies to almost every digital marketplace. Yeah, it sucks, but there’s some things you just have to accept. When’s the last time you bought a physical copy of a PC game?
It’s not steam’s fault that the competition is garbage 🧐
Don’t forget Steam Link! It’s one of my favourite features. You’re not even really tethered to any particular device to play your games since so many devices support the app. I play games that are single-player “console” style games in my lounge room for comfort and Steam Link means I can use my very good PC instead of buying into yet another console generation.
Yeah I love how they pioneered marketing gambling and loot boxes to children, so visionary
CSGO cases pulled $1 billion revenue in 2023. The steam store brought in $8.5 billion in that same year. That’s a 30% cut of all sales traffic on steam vs. in-game purchases on a single FTP title.
Loot boxes pull insane numbers. And yes they exploit children and problem gamblers). Not sure why so many Valve fans are here to downvote you :/
I too love how you can make shit up on the internet
The company is called Valve.
Fair point. I interact with their storefront more than I’ve played their games, so my brain jumps to the word Steam before it does Valve.
Sigh… I’m getting tired of the Valve apologetics in every thread. They make good products, yes. They alsp abuse their market share to implement anticompetitive policies. The first doesn’t absolve them of the second.
Truth is, no one has any idea what it would look like if there were actual competition among the PC games platforms. Steam may be the best possible world, or maybe we don’t know what we’re missing.
Anyone who wants to learn more about Steam’s anticompetitive practices:
Epic gives me free games and I still don’t like them… The “problem” is Valve is Steam-rolling the competition because people want to give them money.
Valve can be attributed with saving PC gaming. When people were terrified of buying “digital only” games on this fugly client called Steam—which only had Valve games and a few no name indies—the PC gaming shelves in places like Walmart and EB Games looked like a clearance section. Just a hodgepodge of games in no particular order, worn out looking boxes of new games picked up and put back down, meanwhile the PlayStation and Xbox walls flourished and even GameCube got more love from a merchandising standpoint.
Now we trust Valve with our digital libraries the way we’d trust a bank with our money. They’ve earned that trust, and I can’t say the same for Sony or Nintendo which are happy to charge you repeatedly for the same game. Microsoft actually does a pretty good job of making your old games still playable in some form, so Kudos to them.
So will we be surprised when Epic Games Store goes tits up? No. Will we care when we lose all our games? No, they were all free. Should we support Valve as long as they continue to be the champions of PC gaming? You better if you care about where it goes.
100% These idiots shit on Valve like the PC marketplace wouldnt be infinitely worse without them. If you truly care about the PC sphere getting better, shit on Valves lack of competition, dont try to tear down the best example we have. That being said I’m hesitant to say ONLY option as at this point GoG and Itch are passable competition, even if what they provide is TINY compared to what Valve has brought the PC Gaming Sphere
who claim Steam does nothing with its 30%
I don’t think that’s the argument against it. Just that it’s inordinately high. But Valve is a corporation so not unexpected.
The 30% it’s always been the standard though, so not just Valve. That figure comes from retail, where 30-50% is still standard practice. You could argue that retail has higher costs, therefore needs the higher cut, but when Valve created Steam, they probably went with what worked.
What I really hate about Steam and all online shops, is that you can’t resell something you purchased second hand. If I can resell my physical copy of a game or movie, I should be able to do the same with the digital version. Also the fact that they can remove access to the product you bought whenever they want. In my opinion, we need a law that specifies that what you buy is yours, and you get to do whatever you want with it, even if the manufacturer doesn’t like it.
Also catalog filtering. I wish GoG had a search filter half as good as Steam’s!
Out there*
My adult children will be ecstatic for my new ability to set their playtime limits.
but mooooom im 35
This is pretty fantastic. I have two kids that I share with, and when one plays any game from my library currently, my entire library gets locked out from the other kid. Changing this to a game by game basis makes so much more sense.
My account has been locked up because my daughter has three separate BG3 games going with friends. Last week my son said we need to put a time limit on her because nobody else can play on Steam.
You can avoid this by bringing one of them off the Internet but it’s a real pain. It’s not so bad on the Steam Deck but bringing a desktop offline intentionally seems crippling. No Streaming music, no email alerts.
Either way I’m excited for the change. It makes way more sense.
There’s no reason Pajama Sam from 1997 can’t be played at the same time as Stardew Valley on 2 separate PCs.
Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.
There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.
We’ve discovered this relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.
And from you! Glad this has finally been amended.
Yeah I’m excited. My wife and I don’t buy two copies of games, so it’s been hard to play games the other has
Omg I was just complaining about this in another thread. I wish it hadn’t taken them so long, but I’m stoked it’s happening!
Doesn’t the offline mode solve this?
Only the parent can play while being online. Their two kids must be logged in.
Achievements don’t track in offline mode, so not a perfect solution.
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.
This is going to be hilarious. Can’t wait to see the whining online.
Isn’t that exactly the same as how it worked before?
There may have been a brief moment where that didn’t happen, and then people discovered they could make cheat accounts, share their own games with them and get only the cheat accounts banned, and then make new ones and repeat.
It is. My vac ban is currently 4990 days old.
Currently each steam account is given a unique steam id number which is how most steam games identify the player and when you family share you are just associating that new steamid with your steamid so you can share certain purchases with if the developer allows it. Since each account is unique if I ban one it doesn’t ban the other. In the past you could use the steam public web API to query a steamid to see if it was a family shared and it would respond with the parent account and you could compare that to your ban list and then ban the new account. A few years ago steam removed that capability for privacy protection and moved it to the game developers partner only access so a game developer could implement that same check but very few did and older or abandoned games are rife with cheaters now.
Now it would steam they are automagically making that check now or instead of a steam id it’s a family id, I have no idea but if it prevents account whack-a-mole and brings back automation I’m all for it.
It’s the only way I can see it working. Otherwise, you could just make infinite cheat accounts.
i mean theoretically they could just make it count as a strike, and if your account gets 3 strikes this way then your account is out as well
Well, 5 cheat accounts a year.
Oh no
BuT wHy iS eVeRyOnE RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK? ThEy aRe A mOnOpOlY!!11!!!
- Some fuckwits
To be fair, a lot of monopolies are great in the beginning. It’s the inevitable power-tripping downslide that sucks.
I still love Steam and Valve though.
The only reason this hasnt happened with valve is because it’s a private company. Publically traded companies are the cancer of ou society tbh
I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.
It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.
I suspect we’ll be fine until Gabe dies. Then, it depends on who ends up with the company and what they do with it.
Optimist me: Steam looking into curating the next generation of customers.
Pessimist me: child protection laws made it too much of a headache for Steam to monetize the kids.
Both!
Also, 2 weeks ago Last Epoch disabled family account sharing because it was being abused for real money trading:
We have unfortunately had to disable family sharing on Steam for Last Epoch.
This feature enabled the use of significant RMT (Real Money Trading) and Botting options, and was removing our ability to ban/remove accounts, faster than they could share them with their entire networks.
I don’t think any one specific thing is responsible for this change, but the 5 account limit seems like it would certainily be a welcome change for the Last Epoch devs.
The 5 account limit was always there.
Who can be in a Steam Family?
While we know that families come in many shapes and sizes, Steam Families is intended for a household of up to 6 close family members.
To that end, as we monitor the usage of this feature, we may adjust the requirements for participating in a Steam Family or the number of members over time to keep usage in line with this intent.
This sounds like they are going to limit usage to geo-locational. Or that’s just supposition by me but I don’t see any other things this would target.
This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. My son is 13 and we share a Steam library. It’s not usually an issue but sometimes he does want to play something that requires online connection at the same time as me. Now that problem should be permanently in the past.
Even if he moves out in who knows how many years he can still take all his games with him. This is why I never feel guilty about spending money on Steam/Valve; I know that as long as GabeN lives, I won’t get stabbed in the back.
While it’s perhaps morbid, could there ever be a feature of Steam Inheritance? Eg, a person owns many thousands of dollars in games, passes away, and has a family that might like access to them.
Has some legal difficulties where you’d need to verify identity and have contact with lawyers to execute it, so it’s not exactly a software problem.
Sadly it doesn’t seem to add the possibility of whitelisting/blacklisting games. I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
This is so amazing I’m wondering how on earth they got publishers on board with this.
This is good
and
I wish it was easier to manage multiple steam account on a single computer because some of us have more family than devices
Can a familt have more than two adults?
time limits are a super cool way to maximize addiction
Ok now this is exciting news!!
game sharing
Do family members have to be in the same residence, or can they be in different locations?
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 1 month ago
Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.
blueday@lemmy.world 1 month ago
For REAL!! Not playing same game with one copy makes sense. But the one instance per library was harsh. This is tremendous, and honestly, I’ll probably buy even more games knowing my kids can play them and I can stick to my same old same old if I don’t like it.
Lev_Astov@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Seriously, it’s great to see Valve digging deeper into my heart with improvements to services like this.
Molecular0079@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No kidding. This solves a major issue with the Steam Deck as well, because now someone else can be playing on the Deck while you use your main PC for another game.
A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I have issues with this even with 3rd party applications. Wanna play PokeMMO, an emulator that doesn’t even exist on Steam, on your Steam Deck while you’re waiting to respawn in Trouble in Terrorist Town? Fuck you, you’re disconnected from that server now.
Guess I’ll just use my phone then, jfc
Neato@ttrpg.network 1 month ago
Yeah. Right now Family Sharing locks down an entire library instead of individual games so this wasn’t possible.