The Massive Flaw with Steam Family Sharing that No One Has Noticed

So if you haven’t heard, the big news of the day is that Steam is getting ready to launch the beta to its new family sharing program.

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 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 Counter Strike and my girlfriend wants to play Tomb Raider, we can’t. Even though I own both games in my library, only one of us can use my library at a time.

I can do the exact same thing by logging onto my account for her.

“Wait a second!” you exclaim, “She can have her own achievements and not screw up your stats in the process!” Well, ok. However, what if she is trying to get an achievement like “play this mode x number of hours” or “defuse a bomb x amount of times”? Through this program, I would either have to wait for my turn to use my account, or login and kick her off of it, which then “encourages” her to buy the game. This could potentially lead to a not-so-good scenario for me.

Of course, the above is just a potential scenario. There are many more to be sure.

Family Sharing is almost garunteed to cause more problems than it solves… for users anyway.

I know that limiting access and then spamming ‘buy me!’ buttons is great for publishers and getting those impulse purchases. The bottom line though is that as a consumer, reading through the details Valve has posted, this program just doesn’t have enough features for me to be excited about at this point.

What do you think? Comment below.