Steam Family Sharing is pretty cool. You can basically give access to your entire Steam library to someone else, who can then install and play those games as if they were their own. For example, I have family sharing set up on my Steam account with my wife, so she can easily install any game in my library on her computer. You barely even have to think about it once it’s set up, and it’s almost perfect.
The only problem I have with it is that only one user can play games from a library at a time. In other words, if my wife is playing one of my games on her computer, I can’t play any of my Steam games on my computer. I could always kick her off, because Steam gives priority to the library’s owner, but then she wouldn’t be able to play any games on my account. I usually just switch to Xbox PC games, or games from another launcher.
Now, I understand why they don’t let you play the same game at the same time, because that would cause problems related to more than one user on the same multiplayer account. It would also, of course, incentivize people to just buy a game once and share it with their friends to all play together. I’m not surprised that Valve doesn’t let you do that.
However, they could just restrict the game actually being played and leave the rest of the library open for business. This is how Xbox game sharing works. In fact, Xbox game sharing even lets you play the same game at the same time (though it does restrict you to family sharing with a single other person). On top of that, I can log in to my Xbox account on both my computer and my wife’s computer, and then we can both play any game we want (as long as it’s not the same game). Meanwhile, Steam only lets you be logged in/play on one device at a time.
At the end of the day, Steam has all sorts of consumer-friendly features. However, it would be nice if they would let multiple people play from the same library at a time, even if you could only share with one single person. It would also be nice if they would let you play on the same account on multiple devices. Even if they would only let one person play a game at a time, it would be a step in the right direction. I mean, if Microsoft can figure it out, I think Valve can too.