I was referring more to the "Years of Service" badge you can find on your Steam profile, whose count begins when your account was created. It shows on the page when you look at the badge itself. Mine shows it was created on August 4, 2006.
Naw I didn't mean that, but hell yeah let's be here anyway. To me, technically the joke is that none of us probably bother to put in our real birth month and date when Steam asks us to verify our age before viewing the next game suggestion in our discovery queue or wherever; just spin that wheel for the year lol. But the wording you pointed out is the only tipoff that it's what I'm talking about, over-explaining would have made it boring, and if I go too subtle, then nobody gets it. I was genuinely thanking ye for the noticing the deliberate wording and I hope you got a chuckle :D
but by that point, whoever the inheritors of the account were have probably been paying money and adding new games to it for decades. why would valve destroy their relationship with that customer just because they might still technically have access to some hundred year old games that either don't even run on modern systems, or might even be public domain by that point?
Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code
It's cool. It's necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money
(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it'd be stupid easy to toss it in...I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it's some of my best code ever)
Devs don't generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I've recently learned are the reason everything sucks
Allowing libraries to accrue over generations is something business folk keenly care about because it impacts profits over time.
It's literally why they have rules against transferring ownership.
You can tell yourself it's for other reasons, but you'd just be lying to yourself about Valve being more benevolent than they actually are. They actually are in it to make money. Being told to do it in exchange for money is pretty much why this will happen.
Valve, at the end of the day, is still a company even if they're marginally more consumer friendly than most. (Let's not ignore that a lot of their "consumer friendly" decisions, like being able to return games, were literally because of laws saying they had to. They didn't do it out of the "goodness of their hearts," they did it because in some places they were being legally required to do so.)
But will they care if the account continues buying games? Is it easier to let it slide, or force someone to make a new account, there by pissing them off?
I dunno if it's "family sharing" or some other thing, but I can play games from my sister's library through some means that I set up a couple of years ago.
I cannot imagine they’re going to keep family sharing as is - currently a couple of buddies and I shared a family account and now we all have access to over 700 games. I only had to coordinate with one of them, we all basically chained off each other. The abuse must be massive.
I was under the impression that if someone is playing a game from your library you can't access it unless you boot them out (or you put steam in offline mode, meaning no updates or multiplayer for the duration). Is that no longer true?
Yeah but that’s only a problem if both of you want to play the same game at the exact same time. It’s like sharing a physical copy of a game with your friend but it instantly transports to their computer/console.
I replied the same thing to another comment, but I had thought it locked down the whole library rather than just the one game being played. I could have sworn I ran into that issue but it's been a long time since I tried it do I suppose I misremembered.
Come on dude…are you kidding? You and I could do a family share without any risk to each other and share our entire libraries tonight. That is not the sameas handing off to your buddies. I love the family sharing program, I am currently using it. I am not against piracy. Let’s get all that out of the way.
Surely you see the potential issue here if this is supposed to be a family sharing program?
I started elden ring from a family share recently, friend hasn't gotten the dlc so I'm just getting to experience the main game for free before deciding if I actually want to spend 80 on the game and dlc