Steam

Go do some research before claiming such things. It has been a thing for many many years.

So that's the thing... The bans have also worked this way for that long, which further solidifies the idea that valve prioritizes banning hackers over being forgiving of cheating relatives...

Most people getting VAC bans are the stupid ones trying out free hacks.

Are the ones using free hacks not hackers? Seems like bans on them for hacking makes sense.

You keep asking for my solution, but my solutions are so obvious it would take a stupid person to not think of them. Hey here's one: "investigate the main accounts manually". I thought such ideas would not require a triple digit IQ to be considered obvious.

I'm going to propose that this would probably take an infeasible number of hours when you scale it up to the full customer base for steam, which looks like 132 million monthly active users.. Otherwise, like you said, it's so obvious, what else would prevent them from thinking of it and implementing it?

They already had family sharing where a ban upon the main account could have been contested. You could at least ask them to consider the age or stupidity of the person or family member using your library.

Hmm, I might be misunderstanding what you're saying, but it doesn't seem like the case. If a borrower got the main account banned, it was up to the borrower to successfully appeal.

EDIT: here's a proposed change that I like. It's better than a blanket "you get 1 excused VAC ban", because with that solution what happens when you have two unruly teenagers? n+1, children, for that matter. However this would still potentially double the amount of hackers, since they could get their first strike for free before truly losing access to the game, so it really falls to how much steam wants to weigh keeping hackers out of games vs allowing folks to share libraries.