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Question on Steam - play different games at same time?

L

Larries

Member
I have a steam account and have few games associated with it.

Recently, I purchased Civ5, and when installing it, it associated the Civ5 with my steam account.

Problem is, both my wife and I may play Civ5 on different PCs. In Civ4, we just install Civ4 on both PCs and whoever wants to play Civ4 just take the Civ4 CD to play with.

Now, Civ5 is associated to my steam account. When I log in to my steam account on one PC, I cannot log in to another PC.

So, can I, say, play Civ5 in one PC, and another steam game (in same account) on another PC at the same time? Like play Civ5 in offline mode and other games in online mode?
 
Computer 1 - Disable the network card and start steam in off-line mode. If you unplug the network cable, steam takes forever to start in offline mode.

Computer 2 - start as normal, or do the same thing as computer 1.

You can not be logged into your steam account, on 2 different computers and at the same time.
 
JTsyo said:
Does Steam need to be running while playing Civ5? Did you buy it through steam?
Click to expand...

Civ 5 requires Steam, even a non-Steam copy requires it.

The only solution is to run Steam in offline mode on one PC and play Civ 5 on that.

One of the many reasons why Steam sucks.
Only one game can be played from one account at anyone time while the account is connected to the internet. Just be glad you don't want to play Civ 5 online at the same time as playing a different online game which require Steam.
 
I learned early that for any big game you have to make a new steam account. Otherwise when I want to play left4dead2 my son would be playing elf bowling on another PC. It is a pain in the ass to switch games.
 
I've found recently that if you restart Steam in offline mode (from the menu option in Steam itself) that it will then ask you each time you run it whether you want to start in online or offline mode, even if connected to the internet. This means you shouldn't need to go unplugging or disabling network connections.

You should then be able to start any game from the offline Steam. You will need to make sure that each game you want to run while in offline mode has been run at least once in online mode.
 
Thanks for the replied. I have one more question...

If one day I need to log in on my offline mode PC to apply patches or download DLC, will Steam detect that I have been playing Civ5 in offline mode while logging on to Steam in another PC, and determine to ban my account?

Edit: btw, yes I bought Civ5 from store, but it needs Steam and automatically associate to my Steam account that is already logged in (after saying something like it need Steam account)...
 
Last edited:
Larries said:
Thanks for the replied. I have one more question...

If one day I need to log in on my offline mode PC to apply patches or download DLC, will Steam detect that I have been playing Civ5 in offline mode while logging on to Steam in another PC, and determine to ban my account?

Edit: btw, yes I bought Civ5 from store, but it needs Steam and automatically associate to my Steam account that is already logged in (after saying something like it need Steam account)...
Click to expand...

Nope.
 
Lonyo said:
Civ 5 requires Steam, even a non-Steam copy requires it.

The only solution is to run Steam in offline mode on one PC and play Civ 5 on that.

One of the many reasons why Steam sucks.
Only one game can be played from one account at anyone time while the account is connected to the internet. Just be glad you don't want to play Civ 5 online at the same time as playing a different online game which require Steam.
Click to expand...

yes, how dare a company try to make money off of a game by limiting the number of people that can play it at the same time 🙄

Steam is easily one of the least invasive and most preferable DRMs available, as a DRM at least you can still play most of those games in offline mode.
 
bunnyfubbles said:
yes, how dare a company try to make money off of a game by limiting the number of people that can play it at the same time 🙄

Steam is easily one of the least invasive and most preferable DRMs available, as a DRM at least you can still play most of those games in offline mode.
Click to expand...

It would be nice if you could get a Steam family account or something that would let you log in on multiple computers. You'd still be limited to running one instance of any given game at a time (unless you were to buy multiple licenses), but it would prevent you from having to use offline mode.

Steam is great if you're the only person in your household who games. It becomes inconvenient if you have more than one gamer around.
 
What they should do is let you log in as many times as you want, but make games be "checked out", so if one person is playing a game it can't also be played with another login.
 
bunnyfubbles said:
yes, how dare a company try to make money off of a game by limiting the number of people that can play it at the same time 🙄

Steam is easily one of the least invasive and most preferable DRMs available, as a DRM at least you can still play most of those games in offline mode.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's cool disabling network connections so that two different games can be used at the same time. Never had this problem getting two game boxes from my shelf.

Least invasive DRM my ass.

Even Actiblizzard is not this stupid, I can play WoW and Starcraft II at the same time from my battle.net account.
 
lord_emperor said:
Yeah it's cool disabling network connections so that two different games can be used at the same time. Never had this problem getting two game boxes from my shelf.

Least invasive DRM my ass.

Even Actiblizzard is not this stupid, I can play WoW and Starcraft II at the same time from my battle.net account.
Click to expand...

You don't have to disable the network connection, just throw steam into offline mode. Boom, done.
 
lord_emperor said:
Yeah it's cool disabling network connections so that two different games can be used at the same time. Never had this problem getting two game boxes from my shelf.

Least invasive DRM my ass.

Even Actiblizzard is not this stupid, I can play WoW and Starcraft II at the same time from my battle.net account.
Click to expand...

If you can name another DRM thats less invasive I will suck your peepee.
 
I solved this problem a few months back. Got a second STEAM account and bought the games I wanted second copies of from it. Had to make a sacrifice to avoid the hassle.

Works great 🙂
 
lord_emperor said:
Yeah it's cool disabling network connections so that two different games can be used at the same time. Never had this problem getting two game boxes from my shelf.

Least invasive DRM my ass.

Even Actiblizzard is not this stupid, I can play WoW and Starcraft II at the same time from my battle.net account.
Click to expand...

Can you do it from two different computers?

Because I can play an infinite number of steam games from the same computer too. I constantly start blackops while forgetting da is running in the background.
 
This is interesting...so if you bought a 4 pack of say L4D2, you can't have 4 PCs logged into the same Steam account playing at the same time?

Perhaps they need volume licenses for familys, roommates, etc. Or a cell phone like family plan structure, with a master account and slave accounts that use licenses in the pool.
 
Childs said:
This is interesting...so if you bought a 4 pack of say L4D2, you can't have 4 PCs logged into the same Steam account playing at the same time?

Perhaps they need volume licenses for familys, roommates, etc. Or a cell phone like family plan structure, with a master account and slave accounts that use licenses in the pool.
Click to expand...

You can't have multiple copies of a game on a single account.
If you buy a 4 pack of L4D2, you get keys which then have to be assigned to accounts.
You can gift the keys to other people who have to add them to their steam accounts. You can only have one copy of a game per account.
 
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