No I want to buy two copies of the game and have two people playing that game on seperate computers.

I think it is you that missunderstand, what do you think "Steam account are licensed for the sole use of the account holder." means?

According to that statement, what you suggest would violate the terms of the account and they could ban the account.

This is their wording not mine.

Cheers!

I should hope letting a friend play the game in your own home would constitute "fair use", but then again I'm constrained by logic and software EULA's are not. I'd ask Steam themselves, if they have a mechanism for doing so. You might want to have a lawyer handy to interpret their answer. ;)

LoL ! I'm sure your right!

I know in practice that they probably wouldn't do anything unless the system was abused, but I don't particularly want to have to create another email address and steam account just to get a second copy of the game up and running for use in my own home. It's hard enough for me to remember one set of private email details as it is!

I guess obsessed flight simmers don't fit the useage patterns of the 'average' gamer. Steam needs to get with the times!

Do you think my 6 year old son is old enough for his own steam account? COD could be his birthday present!


Cheers!

More easy for the dev to release small / large DLC packs.

Steam is a brilliant solution.

It's primarily about having multiple people logging into the same account. With the capability to play steam games offline it is possible for multiple people to share an account by playing mostly offline, and only going online to download updates and games. If it wasn't against the EULA to share log-ins between people, you could theoretically have an unlimited number of people sharing the same account, only having to pay for a single copy of each game the mob wanted to play.

Hot-seating is less of a big deal, as I understand it. That said, if someone is using your account with your knowledge, and they do something that gets your account banned, you are still held liable for it.

Yup, i know that you can turn off game updates and the client pauses downloads when you go full screen, but i still wouldn't like it being hit with a 300MB update between DF server sessions. Imagine the chaos when half the people auto-update, possibly even some servers, without the ability to roll back a patch: suddenly you can't join the server because you either disabled automatic updates and the server didn't, or vice versa, resulting in a different version being used.

Also, most flight sims usually feature large update packages over longer intervals and sometimes, due to the complexity of the product unwanted "features" can creep in.

Eventually everyone switches to the most recent version, but the way it was done in IL2 allowed everyone (from offliners to server admins) some time to actually test it and gradually make the switch to the new patch. For example, most DF servers don't upgrade to a new patch without the admins first announcing something on the respective forums, eg "the server will switch to 4.101 next monday at 16:00 GMT", which gives everyone ample time to prepare for the changes.

On the other hand Steam's system is fine if you have games with frequent but smaller patches.

In the end, this is what this whole steam debate is about. It's a good platform for certain kinds of games, but the lack of information makes many question if and how much it's properly geared towards the needs of a flight sim. I don't mind automatic updates just like i don't mind any other feature, as long as there is an option to turn it on/off.

TRUST ME you really need to read it again....

Its about stopping multiple users accessing one account that is it period, finito...

@ Skoshi Tiger:

Even if your initial question was basically answered already, I'd still like to give you another, full answer myself.

What people told you so far is correct. If you're going through with things the way you have planned, you need to buy 2 copies of the game and register them on 2 different Steam accounts to play them simultaneously. The Steam license agreement ties one copy of a game to a single Steam account that is not supposed to be shared and forbidden to be sold to other people. Even if some smartasses create a new account for every new game they buy on Steam, just to be able to hand it to others...

If you're going to run both computers over the same internet connection, you may encounter connection problems due to a hardware/software conflict. In the past there have been similar problems with other online games via Steam, where people could only play online with only one account at a time, since there was a conflict while running two similar games via Steam over one router at a time. This can be solved with a change of the right port settings on your router. I'm no expert on this myself, but if you should encounter this problem, there definitely is a solution on the official Steam forums for this.

To the topic itself:

I'm a major fan of Valve's online destribution service. I'm using Steam for many years now and it changed over time to the better, alot. Yes, it was unstable in the very beginning and the integrated Friends system was pretty unstable until late 2007, things run smoothly now and grant players like me many advantages. Yes, there are some negative points about the whole deal, too.

For some people the offline mode simply refuses to work properly. A mate of me has this problem, he couldn't find a solution for this so far and I couldn't help him out, either. I can understand people disliking Steam if this happens to them.

The other thing is the fact that you can't (or at least you're not allowed...) resell games that make use of Steam. Definitely bad for players who buy alot of games to play through once and then sell them again. For people like me who buy only a few games and play them for years Steam however is simply perfect.

Many complaints I've read on these forums however seem to be utter, excuse me please, bullshit. Don't get me started with "Steam is viruz!!" talking...

Well, thanks for your input Fritz X, it seems like you are making a balanced assessment of it.

You are one of the few people who use and like this service that actually went to the trouble to admit there are also drawbacks (as in anything else) and provide examples of them.