WoodenSaucer

Dweller said I have had some success with putting Steam into Offline mode so family can play something from my library on another at the same time I am playing something. Not all games will run that way but it seems that most do just fine. I wondered if that would work.

SentaiBrad said With the same analogy though, you can't play the same disc or cart on two consoles either. :P That doesn't include different games though, you are right there. Which is why I don't have a problem with them blocking the same game being played on two PCs. But they shouldn't block your whole library. I should be able to play Trine on one PC and Skyrim on another using a different shared account. I doubt if it's ever going to change, though.

Man, guys. I was wrong. I just tested it out a little bit ago. If you're playing a game from your shared library, no one can play any of the other games in your library. That's a load of crap. Really sucks. I can understand them not wanting you to play the same game on two computers at once, but to not even let you play any games is ridiculous. If I bought physical discs on a console, I can play them on any console. Sorry for the misinformation. I guess the only real benefit is having your game saves separated on the games that support that.

It's true that the same account will only work on one computer at a time. But I'm almost sure we've played different shared games on different computers at the same time. I know you can't play the same game at the same time on shared accounts, though. If you try it, it gives whoever is not the owner 5 minutes to either buy the game again or quit playing. I'll test it out later when I get a chance to verify whether you can play different games at the same time, though. But even if you can't, there are still benefits. For one, having the games shared on separate accounts separates your saved game files. That's a big bonus right there. Some games, like Skyrim, won't support that, though. With Skyrim, you can only have one game going, no matter how many profiles you have.

Jason Carr said CriticalCid said The only real downside is that only one person at the same time can use the game library. If one of your friends or family members plays a game of yours and you want to play yourself (it doesn’t matter if it’s the same game or a completely different one) they would have to exit the game. And of course games which need a second launcher (like Uplay) won’t work either without sharing your account information’s. Yeah, I thought Steam was 100% perfect and wonderful until I had kids. Now I hate the heck out of it. Think about it, I own hundreds of games. And now my kids can't play ANY of them while I'm playing a different one? Or vice versa? When I found that out I felt pretty robbed. That's not true. You just can't have the same game playing on two computers. You can play two different shared games at the same time on different computers, though, if they're shared with Family accounts. We do that all the time.

Haha. That's a great idea. That's exactly what I'll try out. Thanks, man! :)

Thank you. I'll go ahead and send the feedback because even if I could figure out a hack, it would be really nice to have it made easy for people. It might work rescanning Steam with my son's personal url. The only problem would be differentiating the launchers so we would know which is which. Thanks again.

Yeah, I just downloaded it and tried it out. It's pretty awesome, but I just have one issue. We have Steam set up with my main account, and then several other accounts for the members of my family, using Steam's Family Sharing feature. This way, we can keep our game saves separate. But when I launch from Launchbox, it seems like it defaults to my main account's game saves. Is there any way to choose a separate local Steam account from Launchbox so we can use our separate saves?

Launchbox looks like it could be exactly what I'm looking for, but the description is unclear how it works with modern Windows games. Right now, I have games spread out over Steam, Uplay, and Origin, and it's a pain having to deal with 3 different clients. I'd love to compile them all into one user interface. So can anyone confirm that Launchbox can import and work with games from all three clients, Steam, Uplay, and Origin?