"Though simultaneous usage of an account is prohibited..."
If you think about it, the way Valve implemented this feature makes it almost pointless for families that live together. If Dad's playing Skyrim, and Timmy wants to play Scribblenauts Unlimited, he has to wait till Dad's done, or vice versa. This feature changes nothing in that regard, the way I understand it.
If you want your family to have access to your games, just give them your account info. Unless you don't trust them...
I think Valve should give us control of our individual games. Let Timmy play Scribblenauts while Dad plays Skyrim, but only one person playing your individual games at a time. That way, you can't just share your games with everyone, then no one has to buy it.
Unless it's changed as such, this feature really won't be of much use to my family. I'm sure it will be helpful to some people, especially family in different time-zones, but It's nothing they can't do already.
The last big thing that claimed to offload computation to the cloud was SimCity, and that just turned out to be an anti-piracy measure. I get the feeling it's the same here.
@SkamArtist @pensive101 But if they don't accept the free copy, they won't be able to tell their friends about how good it is (assuming it is, in fact good). The more people that know your painting exists, the bigger chance of people who can afford your painting taking notice.
What you should then do, is add online services to your painting. Something that meshes well with the painting that people will enjoy even more. That will encourage the people who accepted a free copy of your painting to buy one from you when they can afford it.
Piracy can't be stopped. Instead, we should to adjust our business models around it instead. We're so used to the old system, where when you sell something, you lose it. That's not the way it works for digital items. Companies need to learn to adapt to a 21st century business model.
@SkamArtist Now imagine if 9 of the 10 people in the room weren't capable of paying the high cost of the painting. The one person capable of paying for the picture copies it, and gives the copies away for free. You the artist didn't lose $90, because that $90 dollars didn't exist in the first place.
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