Game lending coming to steam

[J T]

I need to hit JT up for games...I mean other friends.

Fastbilly, for you, I will lend. I just don't want random people I don't know seeking out profiles with lots of games to be sending me friend requests.

[fastbilly1]

I need to hit JT up for games...I mean other friends.

Fastbilly, for you, I will lend. I just don't want random people I don't know seeking out profiles with lots of games to be sending me friend requests.

I was just making a joke. Honestly the way I can see this best helping me is to treat them like they are hefty demos. Or for games I know I will not like but am told I have to play by people like Ack. The icing will be the ability to lend a copy of say L4D2 to a friend who has never really played it on the PC and wants to give it a try.

[Cronozilla]

I don't think that argument is accurate at all.

Steam has always facilitated a way to share your games through the guest pass system, I think that if sharing does show up, it will be an extension or expansion of that idea. The guest passes, also to note, did not restrict the original owner from accessing their games at all.

Also, from Microsoft's description of how sharing was going to work on Xbox One (which was one of the only positive features, I felt) you would NOT have been able to access that content from more than one place. Basically the difference is this: Steam allows a license to be given for free, under time restrictions. The sharing on Xbox One would have been extending the person use of the license. Their own description said the licensed content could only be accessed in one location at a time. That is fundamentally different from how guest passes worked and how I think game sharing would work on the platform.

I don't remember anyone being upset that you could access Xbox One games from wherever or that 10 people could also get access ... they were upset that once you buy the game that's it. You have to jump through hoops to do anything else with it if you don't want it anymore.

Currently, Steam does not

allow for you to exchange entire ownership of a game. However, it is something that Valve has brought up numerous times. Considering that the company is so small (~250 people total) and works are large scale projects and that lawyers have turned game ownership into license agreements (thanks software patents, you have always been utterly useless) it's a difficult situation to handle how digital goods can be sold, traded, or borrowed. I think now Valve might be in a position to implement something that allows it, they have license agreements for people who publish on Steam as well as the very recent user marketplace and trading, so it does look like the next step would be gaming sharing and selling or trading. And then there's the issue of how it works in other countries ... I mean it's not a simple problem, which is why I think we haven't seen it yet.

However, to argue from the stance that there's no chance it could happen and claim that the Xbox One system that was purposed is in the same boat, I think, is not accurate at all.

And outside all of this ...

there's the simple fact that Steam is not the only way to play games on computers. The proposed systems for Xbox One were the ONLY way to play things on that system. You have a lot of options when it comes to PC games, there's even services that allow you to have Steam ownership in addition to completely DRM free versions of the games. You are even free to distribute them to friends if you want. I don't think it's accurate to compare Steam to Xbox One for the simple fact that Steam doesn't represent 100% of the game ability on PC (or any computer platform) and Xbox One's proposed systems were the only way to play games on that platform.

It doesn't matter as much now, but I think it's an important distinction. But I can explain more about why I think the Steam approach is better than what Microsoft wanted to do. There's a lot of really sort of hidden implications with that proposed Xbox One system that I don't think people are cognizant of.