Steam now warns you if a game you're about to buy is already owned by someone in your Steam Family.
wonder if it's going to rat someone out by saying something along the lines of
A member of your Steam Family already owns Horny Hentai Ladies: Stupidly huge dongs GOTY
I'm still not 100% trusting that. Any time a dev comes up with a new feature like this one, they might forget to implement a check if the game is privated (or do the check and mess up properly hiding it).
Exactly. This is like someone I knew who was a CSR blowing off steam at difficult customers by hitting mute and cussing them out. Like you realize that mechanisms fail all the time, right? This dude wouldn't entertain the idea that a mute button could fail. I tried.
I did that when I worked customer support. The only way I could retain the little bit of sanity I had left. But to be honest, we were so understaffed that even if I slipped, they wouldn't have fired me. There was one guy who was so angry with a customer that he wrote their number down, and then over his break called the customer with his private phone to argue with them. Still didn't get fired, lol.
Lol holy shit. I'm sure it's a very frustrating job at times. This guy was a parent and needed his job. I don't think they would've had all that much trouble replacing him
In my case, the only reason they'd fire people is if they refused to work overtime, hah.
damn, i had exactly this happen to me.
i'm very happy to be a) not working with costumers anymore and b) much more chill than i was 20 years ago.
Honestly that’s a great analogy.
I worked briefly as a CSR and during training they made a point of telling us that people had been fired because of doing exactly that when the mute button failed. That was over a decade ago, but I wouldn’t expect increased reliability today.
More recently, a friend who is a CSR told me that their software mute buttons only prevent the audio from going to the customer, but it’s still recorded and can be grounds for termination if the call was audited. I introduced her to a microphone with a physical mute button but made sure she knew that it could also fail (or most likely, that she might be using a different connected mic, in case the hardware mute would do nothing).
Office conferencing software also has a really bad record with their software mutes. I’ve had experiences with Teams, Zoom, and Webex where I’ve clicked mute, but wasn’t muted.
The mute button should be thought of as a feature for the person on the other line / the other people on the call - you’re reducing the noise so the focus can be on the conversation - not as a feature for your privacy. You can treat Private Games similarly - it’s so you don’t subject your friends to the thought of you playing sexually themed games, not so you’re guaranteed to be saved the embarrassment of people knowing that you’re playing them.
ah, right. that's a thing.
Goes to show how little I have needed it (or how little shame I have) :P
You'd notice that when you join their steam family because it would show up in your library
I keep seeing people talking about sexual games on steam. I've yet to see one. I'm sure they exist .. but how common are they? Do people actually play those? Even if I wanted to do so, I would instantly assume because it's on steam there's a chance my friends could see me playing it no matter my settings, and that would be a no-go. It's just awkward.
It'd be like jerking off with the shades open because "well no one is supposed to be in my backyard". Okay but what if some kids are there to get their ball or something? You have to assume unexpected things will happen in life.
I’ve yet to see one.
Your preferences are probably set to not display games with nudity and sexual themes. They give quite a bit of fine tuned control over this, actually - you can limit only nudity, or only sexual themes, or only outright pornographic games.
For my part, even when I enabled all content, they would only show at most a couple NSFW games throughout the entire front page, but it probably suggests more if you buy them (just like how I got innundated with suggestions of card games after buying Slay The Spire, bleh)
If Steam or Valve ever goes public and IPOs, I'm gonna fucking kill myself.
They seem to be the only ones who aren't like going through an enshitification cycle right now.
I'm glad that it seems like he's extended the longevity of his life by losing a lot of weight. Have you seen him now? Looks amazing for his age. I think if he continued where he was, he might've passed away at some point or be in a worse condition.
He needs as much time as possible to decide what he's going to do after he's gone.
That's a little dramatic.
I don't think they'll ever become an IPO.
But it's more likely that if Gabe doesn't have someone or something in mind that keeps Steam on track, there's few companies that can buy it. Microsoft could acquire it. Sony could acquire it. Epic games could acquire it.
Companies that would have no care or clue in how to keep Steam as is.
Safest option would be to turn Valve into a foundation, similar to Zeiss: The company owns itself thus can't be bought out, statutory stipulations go along the lines of "Make sure we don't go bankrupt, do great optics, funnel some money to the University of Jena as well as less well off workers in the city". No grand charitable aspirations besides being a good citizen as per 1846 bourgeois values (though that'd be Gabe's choice), otherwise just continue as they've been doing. Make sure all stakeholders (incl. gamers, or at least Valve customers) have standing to enforce those statutes.
That's... a great idea. Could even have some kind of chairmen election system with popular vote (but have the popular vote be dialed way down in weight, obviously).
That would be nice. Just keep in mind that they already have an arbitration clause, so that seems to piss on (but not all over and certainly not shit on) gamers who have standing to enforce those values.
And this boys is why we choose to give money to valve, and as a bonus steam sales are amazing. Valve really knows how to keep a steady income of profit and just dont fck with what works
Valve knows when they have it good and not be greedy. They are essentially a monopoly but choose not to abuse it.
valve makes more money by being decent company than many others combined who actively try to exploit users.
It needs warnings for of a game requires you to be connected to the internet to play, and if the developer has ever deactivated usage rights to their games.
Good guy steam. Their family sharing beta is currently a game changer for people like me whose friends have diverse gaming interests and thus, we can try out each other’s games without the need to buy them.
I believe it's the decky plugin for SteamOS
https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-plugin-database/pull/605
I might be wrong, hut this is at least a way to do it.
Has the Steam Family update launched yet? The one that lifted the limitation on playing different games from the same account at the same time. I feel like last I saw it was in beta.
Was also wondering if anyone has a good sense on how they're policing Family Libraries. Does it work to share with close friends or am I going to want to be sure I'm sharing only with household members?
You can opt into the Family Sharing beta and get the features. You can only join one family per year so choose wisely as they say.
Okay good to know. I'll be using it to try to entice a few friends at least half way away from their Playstations to Steam Decks.
The one that lifted the limitation on playing different games from the same account at the same time.
That should never have been a limitation in the first place. If I have two games installed outside of Steam there's nothing stopping me from playing both at the same time, so WTF does Valve think ever justified it?
Agreed it was a chincy restriction. I'm glad they're righting that with the new Family Sharing.
I'm in the beta with my wife and cousin. It works great so far. I was able to try out dragons dogma 2 from the cousins account, remember why I hated dd1, and promptly un-installed it.
Ha I actually thought I liked DD1 after I played it for about 45 minutes. But that was years ago and I haven't touched it again soo
something tell me the publishers are not gonna be happy about this and will try to sabotage it.
I appreciate this, and now I'm just waiting for it to show me family library games when browsing the store. I have games on my wishlist that another family member owns. A flag that says "family library" would be appreciated - similar to "in library" and "on wishlist."