Comment by serf
3 months ago
>I'm so happy to read this
it rings hollow from a company whose entire bedrock for existence is DRM procedures.
does Steam still disallow accounts from playing more than one independently owned game at a time without special procedures?
Steam DRM is weak, non intrusive and optional so complain to the devs for enabling it. I rather take steam DRM than securerom or denuvo.
The problem is for now more of principle. Any DRM means you depend on Valve/Steam to continue to legally play your purchased games. If Valve has a change of heart, or of leadership, or hits a financial rough patch they can easily become a rent seeking gatekeeper. That non-intrusive DRM is the thin line between perpetually accepting Valve's conditions or playing illegally. This isn't a Valve specific problem but they get a free pass today because of all the good things they've done and the good will they're continuously showing. If this ever runs out a lot of people will be very disappointed.
I'm not judging them "by comparison" because it's hard to look bad next to Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc. Just looking objectively at the situation, even if Valve was alone on the market.
“Not having drm” is also a “for now” thing. Everything is “for now”. A person being good, a corporation being bad, everything can be appended with “for now”. It’s not an argument. You look at historical actions and willingness to change. Valve has been doing business this way forever.
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That has nothing to do with launching more than one steam game at once not being allowed.
You can now have steam families and have two members play different games from the same library. Assuming you were using two machines you could just have a second account as a family member and play both. Or do you have a crazy beefy computer and are trying to run two different games on one machine?
Not really. It still has a library level lock. What Steam Families has enabled is to play games from each other's libraries at the same time. For example, if my account has a game A, and your has a game B, I can play the game B while you play the game A. This used to be disabled before.
You still cannot play a game C from my library while I play the game A from my own library.
The only way to be able to play any game you want would be to create a separate account for each game.
> You still cannot play a game C from my library while I play the game A from my own library.
I just tried it, and I could.
You can go offline on one of the machines (but yes, it is very annoying).
> does Steam still disallow accounts from playing more than one independently owned game at a time without special procedures?
Yes. I just tried launching one game on Steam Deck and another one on my desktop and it showed a message:
> Error - Steam: You are logged in on another computer already playing Railbound. Launching Clutchtime™: Basketball Deckbuilder here will disconnect the other session from Steam.
This is outrageous.
No. That restriction has been gone for a few years now.
I can run rimworld and quasimorph via steam at the same time, as an example.
Only if you do it on the same computer. The restriction is still there if you try to, for example, run one game on your PC and another on Steam Deck.
technically you can easily bypass it by using two accounts and use family sharing with the extra account
I agree. DRM sucks badly. I'd argue that it's a bit of a compliance thing though. Eg publisher lawyers saying DRM is needed, given that there doesn't seem to be much push from Steam for anything "draconian". At least it is for public broadcasters having online archives that also sometimes have DRM even where it isn't actually required (self-produced stuff).
However, there is still a huge difference between buying hardware that literally "jails" you and force feeds you DRM and a system where even in the marketing says you can completely tear away all of that without jailbreaks, etc. and without stuff being super fiddly.
Is going offline a special procedure?
You need to click twice
This is my number one beef with steam. It's such a big thorn on a rose.