Please explain how game sharing works?

@OculusSupport will you please weigh in on this? It seems wildly unfair to parents who bought multiple devices for families with multiple children. We’ve wasted so many days since Xmas trying to figure this out on our devices to no avail. Please advise on how we can do this within our families. We can do it on Spotify, Apple, etc. How do we do it on Oculus?  

My wife says that you can share your library with one other account.  If you do this, then the games you purchased on *your* Oculus account are also visible on the other account.  But you can't play the same game at the same time, she says.

We have 4 people in our family and 3 Oculus devices.  I just re-purchased Demeos so we could play as a family tonight with all 3 devices.

It's not quite as bad as Steam (Steam allows sharing your library but if anyone is using ANY SINGLE GAME the entire library is locked from sharing with anyone else).  Sounds like Oculus lets 2 people share a library.  This isn't very helpful if you have two parents with children.

No, Each device who shares with primary will be able to start new data on that game and save data separately on all 3 different devices

As of now.. you can at most play the same game at the same time like co-op or versus each other is two devices. In order to do that, both oculus devices should aim to have two accounts (main and alt). Both devices need to main the one with all the games library and at least one of them needs to turn app sharing on (very important step. I'm going to use elven assassin as an example. To play together on EA, one device hops on the main account and the other device hops on the alt but (app sharing is on for this one). This will allow both users to play together with each other at the same time because it reads it as two different profiles playing the game.

I also have 3 oculus quest and kind of got screwed over when the developers updated (nerfed) switched it so you can't have 4 accounts logged in at the same time (2 max). There is some possible workarounds but not worth the hassle. Because app sharing is limited to one other device, the third device can't use the main account without double dipping the main profile. If you do this, in EA and other games you'll get a pop-up saying multiple devices can't be play this game at the same time. My work around it is pressing the oculus home button when it comes up every 1-2 minutes and it works but very annoying. I limit my quest purchases now every since quest update and nerf this feature, I get it was an experimental feature but kind of false advertisement to give us a feature that was nice and then nerf it for money reasons lol.

So bottom line, until oculus reconsider bringing back the more improved version of app sharing/family sharing the most you can play shared games at the same time is 2 devices (limited to the 1 max capacity of app sharing enabled), without getting constant pop-ups of multi devices unable to play at the same time. So at least for now you can save some money and treat this as buy one get one free when sharing it with one other family member. But yeah we bought 3, so our only real option is to buy the game on two user profile to play 3 at the same time (up to 4 if you enable app sharing for the other profile that buys the game). I hope that helps..

Trying to follow all of this gives me a headache.

What I want to do is have any of 4 family members log into any of 3 oculus devices and play any game that my family has bought.

Trying to keep track of which device is shared with which other device, who has the game you want to play, and who is logged in to the device is maddening. 

I'm so frustrated with this stuff I don't even want to play with it.

OK, let's see if I have this right.

If I have ONE Oculus device, then you can have ONE Admin account and add up to TWO other accounts on that device.  And whoever is wearing the device can play any game on that device owned by the Admin.  Is that right?

But if I have THREE Oculus devices, with the SAME ADMIN on all three devices, then the Admin can share their games with ONE other device.

So if I have TWO admins, Admin 1 for device 1 and 2, and, and Admin 2 for device 3, then in theory I should have to buy each game twice so that all 3 devices can play.

Is that right?

We really aren't interested in being able to share games on the same device.  We bought 3 devices so we can all play together/simultaneously.  I mean, there are 4 of us but we bought 3 oculus devices so at 3 of us can play together at a time.  But it seems like if one headset owns the game, then only one other headset can share it.

Oculus just needs to understand that these things are family toys.  When I buy a board game I only have to buy it once for everyone in the family to play it.  Oculus should be the same way.

We ended up making bogus accounts to get some semblence of functionality.  But game sharing still sucks and I think we ended up buying multiples of some games so that we could play (which is what they want you to do - keep milking the consumer!)   However by now the shine has worn off of the VR and I don't think I've used it in 6 months or more.  My son and wife play occasionally.  My daughter never got into it.

For me, the biggest turnoff for VR games is they are just too much physical work compared to a traditional computer game.  I play computer games to relax, not for a workout.