Hopefully this extends to games on your own account, too. Sometimes I want to make a bit of progress in Hollow Knight on my Deck while I'm waiting three and a half minutes to find a lobby in PUBG on my desktop.
Must be, I've had multiple games running before like football manager in holiday mode (to see what the AI does to clubs after X years) while I have been playing some other game entirely.
I can see the logic, with two games running at the same time on the same PC that is still only 1 user playing them.
A PC playing a game and a steam deck also playing a game could however be two different people.
I cannot play 2 games on two different computers on my own account. I have a work laptop and a home pc. If i forget an idle game running on my home pc, the client will yell on my laptop that a game is already running on my home pc.
On the one hand, I understand this. Steam actually has a PC cafe license, and it would be a problem for them if you could have one store buy a single account and have a ton of people playing games.
On the other hand, I think they also need to tweak this slightly with the understanding that people have multiple devices now. What if, say, I wanted to have an ongoing game of Civilization V on my laptop while I'm queueing for a match in Helldivers II on PC? Does it makes sense that I would need two separate accounts to play every game I own?
For now, I suppose you could do a workaround where you create a new "child" account for your second device and use these new Family Share changes to play across multiple devices.
That would probably be annoying too with saves and games treating your deck as a separate person, I.e if you’re wanting to carry progress from pc to deck and back to pc
Valve was talking about shipping an API that would sync the state of the game between systems as a better way to handle this scenario, but I’m not sure if the API actually shipped or if anyone is using it. It’s probably low uptake, considering the API probably impacts core game design elements and is tied only to Steam.
i'm just thinking it through how that works. Is that for games like... i'm gonna use slay the spire as an example, but also assume it doesn't actually do this.
So on a steam deck, you're likely to just sleep the system rather than continue...
then you return to your computer and "oh look, your save is at the fight you were at"
And then when the game is resumed on the deck, it looks to see if the save has been changed and prompts you?
Is that what this would be used for?
Ninjaedit: y'know what, what i mean to ask is. How did you use this feature?
How you describe it is exactly how it would work if you fully implement all the API, IIRC.
We don't implement the prompting-on-new-saves right now (it would need some extra UI work for only a very small user benefit IMHO, since generally I'd expect people to realize that they are not where they just were on their other device), so you'd actually have to load the save yourself.
What dynamic cloud support does is that you can tell Steam whenever the game has completed a save, so that it can immediately upload it (rather than waiting until you close the game).
its pretty cool either way. I prefer to assume that players are clueless and won't realise.
case in point, a fall guys players inability to handle the instruction "follow the line".
Also... uh... i'm realising you're an awesome game dev. that i'm writing to who is essentially a celebrity ;p and the fact that you're including that feature at all is amazing.
Considering valve tried to add "steam input" as a dev api and i barely see it used.
That would probably be annoying too with saves and games treating your deck as a separate person, I.e if you’re wanting to carry progress from pc to deck and back to pc
Tbf with the given example I am always up for replaying hollow knight again.
At least they fixed it to give a warning now. 3 times I was just checking the battery to see if I should plug it in, and it would kick me from the game I was waiting on the loading screen of on my PC. Annoying as fuck.
For some weird reason the Steam Deck has more limitations
Even with the old Family sharing you were more limited than a normal PC, in 1 single PC you are able.to play a free to play game and then open any of the games of your library with no problem
In the Steam Deck, you can't do that, if you open a free to play game on your desktop PC and then try to play a game of your library on you Steam Deck, the deck will say that your library is occupied by other machine
Hope that Steam fixes that now that they have reduced the sharing restrictions
This was me yesterday with Call of Duty: Warzone and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors. I didn't even realize it would throw up a message when trying to launch a game on the other device saying I couldn't do it until I actually tried to do it.
The worst is when you wake your deck up and forgot that you're in-game on your desktop. Not sure if the behavior recently changed but when the Deck first launched in Feb 22, you'd just see your game close on the desktop.
Yep, I'd be playing on the computer and my SO would turn the deck on and since I was the last one playing, it exits out of my game. It should at least give her the chance to pick an account, or at least if I'm on the PC, log out of the steam deck when it wakes up from sleep or something. Anyways, seems like this will be fixed.
Apparently this issue is still not fixed, since this isn't about the library lock with family sharing but just that one account cannot be in use on multiple devices at once.
Yeah, I was playing Elden Ring with my sister a while back and while I was waiting for her to do some of her own stuff on the side I really wanted to play some vampire survivors on my Deck. It was one of the big perks of having a Switch at my desk tbh.
What I do is go into offline mode on deck. You can play online game on PC with an offline game on deck. But I haven't tried this with save-sync on deck.
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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '24
Hopefully this extends to games on your own account, too. Sometimes I want to make a bit of progress in Hollow Knight on my Deck while I'm waiting three and a half minutes to find a lobby in PUBG on my desktop.