I don't understand - why don't your kids just switch on the PC, start Steam, and play whatever they want on your account?

I dont boycot steam but I do prefer gog.
If its on gog, no matter the sale, I dont want it from steam.

Steam does have a lot of good games not on gog though,
so in the end about half my games I have are on steam.

Because Valve will not allow different games to be played on different computers at the same time.
For the first 4 years they did, then they changed the code and the subscriber agreement to force you to only have one computer active at a time.

Just Using 1 account

Son starts played Red Alert 3
A few minutes later Daughter starts Civ5, Red Alert 3 will be terminated

Son gets annoyed and restarts Red Alert 3, Civ5 gets terminated, daughter goes ape shit, screaming shouting all kinds of nastiness. And that's only with 2 children, we have 5 and two adults that's also game.

The only option is to keep Steam in offline mode. which assumes the impatient child will always click "Keep offline", which they don't.

A few years back Valve introduced the ironically named Steam Family Sharing (SFS).

A person can lend their games to up to 5 borrowers, and this is how it works

If lender is playing, borrowers can not use the games. It doesn't matter if they want to play completely different games, they are blocked. I play Tomb Raider, daughter can not play Civ5.

If one borrower is playing, none of the other borrowers can play, again regardless if they are playing different games.
Daughter plays Civ5, son can't play Dawn of War.

If lender starts a game while borrower is playing, they get a 5 minute warning before the game gets terminated. So I start TombRaider, daughter will be down stairs in 5 minutes screaming she's just been booted out of her 5 hour long hosted Civ5 game.

Its worth noting, SFS is really good for getting free games from strangers living in different countries. While they play your games your at work or sleeping and vice a versa. In fact the official, valve created and moderated forum is full of people openly abusing the system. It near useless for people living under the same roof.

As I've said. Steam works great for a certain stereotype. Single players that does not share their life or games with anyone.

For a family that treats games like a shared resource (the same as books or DVD's) steam is unusable, which is why I actively boycott steam and fight so hard for releases on GoG.

EDIT:
Just noticed you said "The PC", we have more computers that people in the house.

its the 21st century, most household will have more than 1 computer. Except Valve acts like this is unheard of.

I guess Valve is afraid that too much data is send and that it looks then like a Ddos attack. Steam has been ddosed in the past. It's a very paranoid reaction from their side. Ddos, which stands for distributed denial of service, is a method to get access to a server by using several computers and sending a mass of data to that server.
Valve went for the most cheap solution and decide just to allow 1 pc for each account, meaning that accounts can't be shared. That would mean you have to setup an account for each person. It's not user friendly.

There is something I've noticed over the years.
The insane level at which people will go to justify Valves actions. Valve is held with religious fervour

DDOS works by having tens of thousands (even millions) of bots making thousands of requests per second. It is not used gain access, rather floods a system so it can not respond to legitimate queries. The additional traffic from a working family sharing system in no way could ever get to that level. Ever.

You are making an excuse rather than face the truth.

9 years ago Valve locked down Steam both with code and contact. They created a system wher games are linked to an individual and bound to their subscription. Then through the subscription service removed all but the most basic usage rights. They have then spent the time enforcing this ideal. They don't want to allow fair sharing, because that opens the door to further rights.

To be 100% honest I don't believe Valve intended to make SFS, it was an unwanted side effect from trying to mke the Steam-MAchines multi-user. Once they realised the genie was out of the bottle they PR spun it into SFS.

<UNSNIP> Keeping in offline mode is another hoop I don't need to jump through with GoG

I boycott about 90 percent of them barring free ones. I mostly focus on the ones that can be played without the client and can be moved around.

I don't justify the actions of Valve. You jump too soon in conclusions and assume i defend them. If there is something which i don't like is that people put words in my mouth which i haven't said nor intended.
That is something which i notified, that people don't read anymore and only read that what they want to read and to see. They are triggered by a few words and bam; there comes a whole post about how wrong you are, that you don't know anything, that they speak the only truth and such. If only people would take the time to read and understand what there is said, then other's won't have to defend themself and that you get bad words all over.

About Ddos; yes, it floods the system cause of the mass of data which is send. It has the purpose to gain access to the server however. Often cause they want to get the data there and sometimes just to upset the whole system. At the current olympic wintergames there was a ddos attack with purpose just to upset the system. The attacks to which the group Anonymous had done was to gain data.

Truth you say.Which truth and who's truth.

My appolgises, its a highly comon event that people make excuses for Valve with out addressing the issue.

However my logic still stands, there is simply no way the amount of traffic created from a working sharing system could in anyway cause a Denial of Service.

Part of the reason I jumped on this, is I am equally guilty of doing it myself.

During the SFS Beta, I argued that the number of database queries would cripple Steam and thats why it was designed such. Once I released I was just making excuses I looked at the actual numbers, the traffic is tiny and there is absolutely no way Valve doesn't have the infrastructure to handle it.


As for "The Truth"

The truth is Valve implemented a Family sharing system with serious design flaws which leaves it near useless for actual cohabiting families.

There is simply no reason, none, why SFS works as it does other than "Valve wanted it such".

There are no technological limitations, no legal restraint, they've not been told to do this by publishers and so on.

Every single excuse I've ever heard falls apart with the most cursory investigations.

You may not be conciously defending Valve, but the DDOS argument is flimsy reasoning. And you should have been able to dismiss it yourself.

The restrictions on SFS are purposeful, not something included because of something outside Valve's control.

The "Why" behind Valves choice to release a crippled system can only be guessed at. As I said, my belief is they didn't intend for a sharing system.

I've heard people say the Library lock was added to stop people abusing the system. Spend a day on the SFS forum and you'll have absolute proof it does not work and that Valve does not care about people abusing the system.

Every few months I check the Steam stats and there is another million people more using Steam (whatever this means). I guess a big part of it are people running the Steam client in background or playing some funny action game mod I wouldn't be interested in.

Anyway didn't buy a single game from Steam in 2017 and didn't even run the client. No need.

just out of curiosity Mechmouse have you tried running Steam on the different computers, for the games that are not multiplayer, in "offline" mode? it shouldn't prevent the other games from terminating due to the steam online policies.

deleted

Already suggested above by amok, apparently mechmouse's kids are too impatient. They're old enough to play Red Alert 3 and Civ V, but not capable of switching Steam to offline mode before they do so.

If they could just do that one simple thing, all of his extensive complaints become invalid, as far as I can see.

Well I would consider to use Steam... if I could by Manhunt (2) a few hundred metres from where I live (which I actually can) and play it at home.
With all the regional locks thing that is going on on GOG, and which I hate (although they're really just adhering to law). At least they don't enforce it in "predisposed obedience". Which Steam does. Like handing the crippled versions of games (even HL2) to German customers, although they weren't even banned.