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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.
Mqybe don't share with someone who would use cheats?
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.
Yes, especially if you can be banned for your little brother borrowing your game and swearing.
Well, it never changed for years
That's necessary, "it was my brother who cheated" is the oldest lie.
Except that lie is often used when sharing an account.
Under this system, there is no ambiguity in terms of if it was you or your brother.
Yes there is. You can just make another account for yourself and add it to the family, then use it to cheat. That's the reason why they have to ban both.
Aaah, didn't think about that. Darn! Can't have nice things.
Yeah it's unfortunate that a few bad Apples have to ruin it for everyone 😅.
Is it though? If they are not banning the whole family, what prevents me from adding a new little brother?
The price tag of the game generally
It would be great to blanket disallow games that you can get banned in. Especially VAC bans.
A thousand times this. I'd even be for a button to add whitelist for games they wanna play. I am super sensitive about Mr acc, and the last thing is having a ban on record. Especially when I had to spend 10 years with a trade probation because my dumb ass duped some items on TF2.
Or alternatively send the rest of the family detailed explanations of how the idiot in question cheated and what they did. 😈
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.
Oh man that's gonna cause so much drama lmao
So this is great except for the cheating thing. Why am I being punished as the games owner because someone else in my family was banned for cheating? Ban the cheater not the owner.
Honestly I think it's a good thing. It strongly decentivizes cheating by there being a possibility of real-world consequences for cheating.
Don't harbor cheaters 4head
So people don’t have 5 accounts they can cheat under for a single game purchase.
Do it on a 3 strikes basis. They don't ban an account in a single offense. And therefore shouldn't do that to account groups either. It's not perfect. But it's much more forgiving and fair.
you're not getting banned from steam, you're generally getting banned from participating in anti cheat secured lobbies of a single game or a group of games.
single player experience is generally not affected.
having a 3 strike system before getting banned from multiplayer just means it's 66% cheaper for a cheater to get a new copy of the game.
this is also not new and has been the case for the current family sharing system as well.
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.
The only games I've ever pirated are Sims 4 (I ain't paying 1000 bucks worth of dlc) and Starfield (I still feel robbed) just because Steam just makes buying games at reasonable prices so easy.
The other day I bought RDR2, player it for an hour, didn't enjoy it and returned it no questions asked
The only thing stopping me playing that game through again is the first part of it being unskippable.
Fuck that prologue.
Every company os speedrunning enshittification except steam. Like. Look at the other game launchers. They are all shit.
Epic didn't need any catching up tho 😎
Its better than Ubisoft connect or EA Launcher. But it sucks nontheless.
Or maybe we expect too much because of steam
Well, every one of these is a different pile of crap, but a pile of crap nonetheless.
It was supposed to be a Steam competitor, and they openly said it, but the only competition it won is the dumbest fucking ideas brought to PC gaming - and that being exclusivity. But after a few released games, I've realized it was a good thing! I could try the game for free, and wait a year when the game has those nice QoL features. For BL3, I started when the game already had tons of extra content.
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
Not necessarily. There are games on Steam that don't have DRM.
i'm away from my pc for the week but does steam not require you have it running for basically every game? even if it's a switch devs can flip it still falls under the same category imo but i am curious and don't know the full facts here
It depends on whether the game wants that or not; it must explicitly opt-in to that. If it wasn't Steam offering their extremely nonintrusive DRM, those games would likely use more intrusive DRM systems instead such as their own launchers or worse.
It also somehow doesn't feel right to call it "DRM" since it has none of the downsides of "traditional" DRM systems: It works offline, it doesn't cause performance issues and doesn't get in your way (at least it never even once got in mine).
I'd much rather launch the games through Steam anyways though. Do you manually open the games' locations and then open their executables or what? A nice GUI with favourites, friends and a big "play" button is just a lot better IMHO.
i see. as i said, i'd still consider it drm even in a case like yours where it never gives you trouble. i find performance suffers mostly in edge cases for me but it's often enough that i prefer to simply take steam out of the equation entirely.
Do you manually open the games' locations and then open their executables or what?
i just keep a folder with shortcuts to the games i play on the desktop tbh, i am a bit of a slob that way. anyway this is all very no-stakes so i'm not trying to convince anyone of anything here. if you like something and it works for you then you should use it! i will continue to pirate because that's what works best for me.
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.