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Posted on Mar 17, 2011 in Games PR

Steam Announces Steam Guard

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Gamers familiar with Steam know it as both a retail outlet as well as game publisher, DRM service, and online game storage service.  Gamers who purchase games through Steam or register existing games through Steam have access to all of their games on any computer.  Simply by logging into a computer and downloading the game allows the gamer to play any game he owns on any PC or PS3.  The catch, of course, is that only one login can be active at any time. 

The advantage of this scheme is clear:  gamers need not lug all their gaming disks  and gaming rig around with them.  Logging into their account from home, they can play all their games.  Log off the home account and head back to their parents for the weekend, it’s easy to log into their computer (after everyone else has gone to bed, of course).  There they can download any games registered on Steam and play them.  Heading over to an old friend’s house, you can log in there, download a game, and show your buddy how great it is.

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Obviously Steam was designed from the ground up to make it easy to access a library of games from any computer.  Up until now, however, the only security on that Steam account was a gamer’s login and password.  If someone were to steal that information, accessing the library would be simple.

So today Steam has announced it is offering a free new level of security called Steam Guard.  Simply put, whenever you attempt to login to your Steam account from an unverified computer, Steam will send an email to you requesting validation. 

Full details on the service can be found here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8232-WSGZ-8021&snr=1_41_4__42&l=english

1 Comment

  1. Once you purchase a Steam game there is no avenue for you to sell it or give it away once you are done with it. Once you activate the game on Steam it is forever linked to your Steam account. The only way was to allow the next person to access the game thru your Steam account name and password. Otherwise you are stuck with a game you have finished and don’t intend to play again. Of course this is just what Steam wants. They don’t want you selling your used game to someone else. They want that someone else to buy a new game from them. In effect, you don’t really own the game at all, you are just allowed access to it by Steam. This all seem a bit Big Brotherish to me. To not allow me to sell something that I BOUGHT is outright anti-capitalistic. Obviously, Steam caught on to the fact that people were selling their games on Ebay and the like, and so have added this extra level of “security”, which is nothing more than another roadblock to the freedom to trade and sell games that you bought and paid for.