- Download Game Again If Bought Separately After Family Share Steam Download
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Valve will be adding a new service entitled Family Sharing to Steam, allowing users to share a game with household members across multiple accounts. Here's how it works: One person authorises a.
In the feedback for How to Publish a Game, one element stood out.
Family Sharing,Can't Access Library? It tell's me it belongs to him and I can either request access to his library or buy the game myself. I've already had his games working before but for some reason it stopped working all of a sudden. Play it manually without Steam? Or does this game have something you absolutely need. Steam Family sharing - Overlapping shared libraries. Now logic would say that if one of my friend (A) is playing this game, the Family Sharing system would make the switch and allow me to use my second friend's library (B's). Steam family sharing shows “buy” instead of “play”.
I had suggested that it made sense for a developer making PC games to work hard to get on all the distribution platforms. Not just Steam, but GamersGate, Metaboli, Direct2Drive and so on.
Bollocks came the resounding response.
No-one wanted to be quoted. But Steam seems to account for by far the majority of the revenue of every single company who came back to me. People were suggesting that Steam outsold, by a factor of 10 or more, all of the other sites combined.
All kudos for Valve for building this service organically to be so dominant, but this is terrible news for the PC games industry.
We’ve sleepwalked into letting Valve be the dominant platform holder for core PC games. And they did it without having to provide the marketing muscle, financial support and hardware innovation that Microsoft and Sony needed to give us to get their consoles of their ground.
In short, Valve is becoming a dangerous monopoly.
Why does that matter?
In a free market, innovation and improvements are encouraged by competition. The problem occurs when one company is so far-and-away ahead that no-one else can catch up. Think of Google. Think of Facebook. And now we should be thinking of Steam in the same way.
I keep hearing that is getting harder and harder to get onto Steam, and if you don’t, then your game won’t sell. The PC has always been an open platform on which it is easy to distribute games. If Steam becomes a de facto monopoly, Valve decides which games we see. A bit too competitive to Half-Life? No distribution. We don’t like Match-3 games? No distribution. We’re not sure that anyone will want a game based on farming? No distribution.
Helping the little guys is hard. When you’re big, and profitable, and important, it’s easy to prioritise the big publishers over the little guys. The little guys are already struggling on the console (although PSN provides one route to market), but the PC has been their lifeblood. A megalithic monopoly could rationally decide that it is no longer cost-effective to support the little guys.
Retailers won’t work with indies: it’s not worth their while and, more importantly, indies don’t give them marketing support.
What if that becomes true of Steam? Valve is in a position to say “your game won’t sell without us. We want a bigger cut, or upfront marketing commitment, or some form of guarantee.”
For all their weaknesses, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo spend a lot of money promoting and improving their platforms. Steam doesn’t improve the PC as a gaming device. I am a lot more comfortable about oligopolies when there is something in it for the consumer (like subsidised home consoles, for example).
To be clear, I’m not saying that Valve is doing any of these things right now. They are a great developer that has created, from scratch, a dominant digital distribution platform, mainly through making it so damned good that consumers don’t want to use anything else.
I am pointing out the risks of letting one company completely dominate a market.
Sure. As PC games disappear almost entirely from High Street stores, Steam is an incredibly valuable distribution platform. It may, in fact, be the only thing stopping the PC games market from abrupt extinction.
Elsewhere, social and online games (i.e. service games, not product games) are not dependent on Steam in the slightest. In fact, they pose a great threat to Steam, as gamers start playing free-to-play MMOs monetized with virtual goods, rather than spending £29.99 on a game in a virtual box from Steam.
So we’re in this weird place. Steam’s dominance is, in my view, bad for the industry. Yet the emergence of new service-based business models is a terminal threat to Steam.
How Valve chooses to react to that threat will show whether they are PC gaming’s saviour or its monopolistic exploiter.
Which do you think?
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About Nicholas Lovell
Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.comGot a game in your Steam library that you no longer play and just want gone? Maybe you bought something that turned out to be awful and you just don’t want to see it ever again. No problem: You can now easily remove games from your Steam library for good.
The news comes via user Enter the Dragon Punch on the NeoGAF forums, who came across the new perma-delete feature while visiting Steam’s tech support section. The newfound ability to permanently delete a game is a vast improvement over the old state of affairs, as PCGamer notes, which required you to get in touch with Steam’s support team.
Download Game Again If Bought Separately After Family Share Steam Download
How to permanently remove games from your library
Here’s how to do the deed. Visit the Steam support site, then log in with your account information. Click Games, Software, etc., then select the game you want to delete (you may need to search for it). Next, select I want to permanently remove this game from my account. Follow the prompts, and the game will be removed from your Steam library for good.
Alternately, you can open the Steam client on your PC then select a game from library while in Details view (if in Icon view, click Details). Select Support from Links column located along the right-hand side, then click I want to permanently remove this game from my account.
Steam advises that you uninstall the game you want to delete from within the Steam app before removing it from your account: If you don’t, you’ll have find the game on your hard drive and uninstall it manually. With that in mind, the first removal option is probably your best bet.
There are some catches, though: As PCGamer points out, you can’t delete bundle items you unlocked using a single product key using this method. Still, it’s a small price to pay for being able to manage your account more effectively.