Right now, gaming has become more important than ever right next to working from home. With school not being completely in session, or whatever the reason that has you stuck at home, people still need an outlet. When sharing a household of gamers, things get a bit more tedious and difficult. Is there really a good way to share your systems when everyone wants to play, and companies are releasing whatever they can to keep everyone occupied?
From our side of things in this household, the answer is, no. Not really. Usually sharing is always top priority and we take turns with our screen time. So, what if you share computers? For example, getting games on Steam, especially if you use one account, is a bit complicated. Everyone wants to play their games, sometimes at the same time. If you don’t have separate accounts this can cause absolute chaos. Once I loaded up my game, the other computer mirrored everything I did. After figuring out how to change that setting, all seemed right in the world. Then the complaints started that only one of us at a time could play our games (and no we could not play together). Eventually, the settings were changed again to playing offline (super important). Then, finally, everything worked out.
When sharing a household with others, sometimes buying duplicates of games for every computer in the house isn’t feasible. Now imagine only having one Nintendo Switch in the group. As most people know, once Animal Crossing New Horizons released in March, I basically took over everything. This left my husband to not play (sorry). We shared back and forth as much as we could. Eventually we broke down and got another Switch. Sadly, the problem came up again that we couldn’t move our games so that they were split and on the right systems.
Luckily, for me anyway, Animal Crossing is getting another new update which includes being able to transfer save data. You don’t even have to call Nintendo now. Once that happens, the two of us might have a chance at restoring balance in our gaming world. He can have his Switch with his games, and I will mostly just stick to the one. It would be nice however, for platforms such as Steam, to consider these things now that the demand for gaming is so high in these difficult times.
If Steam had a way to allow some sort of sharing games between people, this would clear up a lot. For example, if an account holder listed two people as trusted players, then only those people could share games between them. This sounds a bit far-fetched, but what if more places offered the save data transferring as well? Some people may be extreme gamers, but admittedly, this must be one of the times where more people are escaping to a digital world than ever.