With Steam Family Sharing, you will be able to share your entire library with up to ten different devices, and subsequently, ten different people. According to Valve, this will let our families and friends be able to play games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs or Team Fortress 2 on their accounts, on their machines, without them having to hog up our PCs that we just spent $2000 building and then finding out someone just left a huge scratch in the case “by accident.”
Sounds Great, Right? Not so fast.
While this could potentially be a great thing for PC gamers, the program has one MAJOR flaw. You see, if you look at the official FAQ on the Steam Family Sharing Group page, you will find this little blurb:
“Can a friend and I share a library and both play at the same time?"
"No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time.”
In only two lines, the folks at Valve have essentially rendered this program almost useless. How? By restricting how many people can be accessing the same library to one, it effectively cancels out any sort of advantage it is trying to establish with Family Sharing.
For example, if I want to play Black Ops 3 and my friend wants to play Counter Strike, we can’t. Even though he own both games in his library, only one of us can use his library at a time.
There is no good reason for Steam and Gabe Newell to not have the feature of allowing a steam family share to have two people play different games in one shared library. I'd be understanding if it were not being able to play the same game, but not being able to play different games makes little to no sense.
I want to get this petition passed so that the steam community as a whole can better enjoy the steam family sharing feature by letting us play different games from one library at the same time.
