As my little ones have gotten older it is a little annoying my kid can’t play a game on the steam deck hooked up to the TV downstairs while I want to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my main PC. I own both games, what the heck?
Buy a $20 USB C dock with an HDMI port, start "Offline mode" on the steam deck, child plugs into TV and plays game just fine, you go upstairs and play game just fine.
Alternatively, turn off internet on your personal computer and play game, and let the little one use wireless streaming to your TV.
Basically, one of them has to be in offline mode. That is a stupid thing, but valve intends for "offline mode" to be a day to day use case of the Steam Deck
As in like multiplayer? No, you cannot play multiple multiplayer games on one steam account at the same time. This is not different from other platforms, where I don't think you can use the same Xbox account on multiple systems to play online games at the same time.
The simple answer is any game you can play without a wifi connection can be played in offline mode.
well, i mean any games that require online access even if they are not multiplayer.
i am just trying to understand how that would work.
as far as i can tell there is really no reason for this not to work as long as those games don't use steam services that require an active steam login.
i can run multiple steam multiplayer games in parallel on the same machine, so why shouldn't i be able to do this on multiple machines? the same as if i buy multiple games independently. steam, and any other platform is a game license manager. as steam allows me to use one license for a game on multiple machines, it should not be a licensing problem to play a different game on a different machine on the same account.
i don't have steam on multiple machines so i can't test it, but what i could test is that games are able to access the network even if steam is offline.
what doesn't work in offline mode is logging into games that use the steam account as identification, or that connect the game account to the steam account. but even those do seem to continue to work if the steam client goes offline after logging in. games that do not use the steam account should allow logging in even from offline mode.
so in summary: any game that does not depend on the steam client being online during play should be ok.
Maybe you can't play the same game (I haven't tried) but it is definitely possible to let your kid play other games. I have this very setup with my son and it works. An other advantage to this setup is that you can select which of your games to let your kid play.
I don't know, we've been doing it for years. Maybe it's a regional thing? One account for me and one for my kid. I authorize the use of my games for his account on his machine (I need to login with my account on his machine to authorize his machine, I did it just the other day as the machine authorization only seems to last for a while). Then he can install and play any game of mine I allow (or all) once he logs back in with his account.
I don't want to defend this in any way, but in my mind it plays out like this: You have a SNES and a dozen cartridges and so it's the same, as you only have one console.
On the other hand, multiple Game Boy consoles in the same household were more common.
So yeah, it should be better now that the physical limitation is broken. You have several games and should be able to play them at the same time.
But I literally have two computers? Why would Bethesda care that I’m playing Starfield while my kid is playing Stardew Valley? ConcernedApe certainly doesn’t care. If I’m trying to play Starfield in two places at once sure, I get why that wouldn’t be allowed.
I guess I just don’t get the business reasons for it.
