this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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Same household only? Why can't they just allow a certain number of people in your "family" use it? I have no kids, but I'd like to allow my siblings or in-laws use my games. They live in different cities.
I really doubt they've got an IP lock in place; just set up a Family and invite your siblings and in-laws.
Edit: tried it with a buddy, and it is in fact IP locked; he was unable to join until I set up a VPN for him to connect through. After initial setup, you don't need the same IP address.
They do point out that they will be monitoring how it's used, and could adjust things later.
Sounds like corporate-speak for "if people abuse this, we'll lock it down harder."
Even if people are using it to share with actual family around the country, they may get caught up in future updates that remove that feature. Also note that any publisher can opt out of the sharing. If EA or Ubi or some other big company doesn't like the lack of limits, they may be able to force Valve's hand in changing the policy.
The idea is wonderful, but there are a ton sof ways this could end up worse than the old system.
This is technical but you could set up a wireguard vpn server and let your friends connect to your computer. Then you all look like you are sitting in your home network from the steam servers point of view.
Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.
Your friends will have a bit of lag though since all their connections have to go through your computer to the steam network. But I believe it may not be noticeable.
Free for 100 devices! You can legit install it on every device virtual and physical device in your home and maybe run out of devices for the free plan. Right now I use it to secure the connection between my VPS proxy and my Minecraft server, as duct tape fixing some network fuckery, and as my primary means of connecting to services inside and outside of my LAN
That's very generous of them. I thought it was just 3. :)
I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they'd have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn't the case so they upped the free accounts
Bait and switch. Stay tuned for enshittification.
Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be "get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses" and they're in the "establish growth" phase so I think there's a few years before enshitification begins.
There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven't tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper
Thanks for the Netbird link, wasn't aware of it.
If I'm not badly mistaken it's also possible to self host Tailscale. For example:
https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
I haven't tried either. Probably should at some point, but I haven't really found a use case yet.
By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering