Sins and Steam Woes, Part 2

Published on May 10, 2009 By Animesh Karna In PC Gaming

First, thanks to everyone that advised me. Regarding my battleshield cap in Sins of a Solar Empire: all I can say is "duh". I thought I had researched that second level, but I hadn't.

As for Steam . . .

The premise behind how Steam handles DRM is that you can install Steam and all the games on your account on multiple systems, but that you can only log on to Steam on one system. This makes perfect sense: my license says one user can run the game. In other words, if my son is playing Plants vs. Zombies on one system, it's fine to restrict me from playing Plants vs. Zombies on another system at the same time. The problem I had is that this restricts ALL the games I have purchased using Steam. If my son is playing Plants vs. Zombies, I can't play Empire: Total War at the same time. This makes no sense.

It turns out that this isn't quite so bad. I ran an experiment where I started up Plants vs. Zombies on one system and then started up Steam on another. On the first system, I got the message box saying Steam was disconnected. But, I noticed that Plants vs. Zombies was still there, minimized. I was able to happily continue playing Plants vs. Zombies after that. Cool!

This does bring something to mind: because this involves Steam logging off, does this mean that I can't run, say, Left 4 Dead on one system while one of my sons is playing Team Fortress 2 on another? This warrants an experiment, another time.

Comments

Airforce

on May 10, 2009

does this mean that I can't run, say, Left 4 Dead on one system while one of my sons is playing Team Fortress 2 on another?

Nope , you definitely cant play L4D on one PC and TF2 on other with 1 steam account, they use Steam as matchmaking, so you need to stay online. For offline games you can use steam´s offline mod...

Thrawn2787

on May 10, 2009

Airforce

reply 1

does this mean that I can't run, say, Left 4 Dead on one system while one of my sons is playing Team Fortress 2 on another?

Nope , you definitely cant play L4D on one PC and TF2 on other with 1 steam account, they use Steam as matchmaking, so you need to stay online. For offline games you can use steam´s offline mod...

But both said games are multiplayer so only one of the PCs could be multiplayer, the other would have to be in offline mode

DeadlyShoe

on May 10, 2009

Any purely singleplayer game you could run on a large number of computers by using offline mode. However, this can get clumsy after a while. And eventually of course your son would want his own Steam account anyway (for Friends/Community even if he shares your taste in games), so buying 'his' games on your account is problematic in that respect.

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!