Can I create one steam account per game?

It doesn't cost nothing - it costs time and convenience to create different accounts and log in to them all separately when you want to change which account you are using.

I searched through the User Agreement. I think you're correct in that this is not specifically prohibited. Similarly, using multiple accounts to purchase multiple copies of the same game and multibox is not specifically prohibited (to my knowledge).

If you are the kind of person that would actually want to play different games at the same time, it does make sense. However, I cannot think of a legitimate reason to actually want to play multiple different Steam games at once. I have a hard enough time being good at any 1 game I'm playing.

Should you be doing this? In my opinion, no. I use the community-oriented features of Steam all the time and the Cons you list would affect me greatly. Having multiple accounts would be a tremendous inconvenience for me, and I don't care about any of the Pros you list.

Exceptions: There may be some games where it would make sense to have a separate account for just that game. I hear you do a lot of sitting around in games like Eve Online; perhaps you would want to play Bejeweled while you wait for something to happen?

Personally, no I have never done this. For me there are a few things you should take into consideration.

• If you are running a game from Steam you want friends to be able to see what game you are in. This of course would mean your friends would have to know every account you had for every game. This seems like it would be trouble for both you, and your friends.

• Every game you install in steam has a manual path you can go to on the computer. If you want to run more than one game at a time, you might be able to through the manual executable (Test your game and see). The majority of the time I do not even run games through Steam, I simply have them installed by steam. Just go to your steamapp folder and manually run your executable to test.

• One of the main advantages of Steam for me is that I can at any time re download the game from one account. Meaning, if I delete the game because I am tired of it, I can simply re download it again one year later when I feel like playing it again. This becomes extremely confusing if you want to try what you are suggesting. (If it is even possible.)

I personally suggest one account, and if you want to run more than one game at a time, then see if the game requires Steam to run.

The only true advantage of account/email per game is that you can sell it when you are done - the game/email/account. If all your games are linked to one account/email then you cannot do this. One of the biggest reasons behind the steam model (and why console games are more and more coming with "online" codes) is to eliminate used game sales. Personally, I never sale old PC games cause I don't want to have to help people install/setup, but for someone who just wants to play and beat a game then move on this is one way to do it.

And yes, as long as you have unique emails address you can do this...

There are other reasons to do this:

In my house, we started off with one steam account. As my son got older, he enjoys playing games on the account, but that prevents me from playing ANY of my games on my other computer while he is doing so. Why should I be prevented from playing Civilization 5, Skyrim, or Fallout 3 just because he wants to play Half-Life 2?

So I started making new accounts so that we could both access Steam's library. (Personally, I think it's ridiculous that I'm forced to do so, considering they are different games.)

I like the simplicity of how they run things, but you can see how it would be a real problem for someone like me.

You dont need multiple accounts to play different games on the same computer. I have access to two computers, both of which have steam on them; so somtimes when i have a friend over and we both want to play one of my steam games one of us will log onto steam and then go into offline mode, the nthe other will log on and voila. Two steam games at the same time.

It seems it does make sense to do to prevent losing a 1000+ USD worth of games account and is not as cumbersome as one might think if you use Keepass to store the different email/password/game combinations.

Steam might suspend your account and will not reactivate it if you used VPN to buy a game in another country because it was cheaper. But imagine you use a VPN for security and privacy reason, forget to turn it off, buy a game on Steam and boom your account is gone. Or maybe your account gets hacked. Or your email. Another case might be you bought a Gaming Magazine with a Steam code for a game. Steam obviously gave permission to the Magazine but say they forgot about it and decide it was a fraudulent use of a Steam key published on the internet.

Steam has many more reasons (it's written on their website) they could suspend your account inluding when you execute your consumer rights e.g. using credit card chargeback. Another reason for suspending your account might be creating a false online identity which again you might want to do in order to protect your privacy.

Finally someone might just steal your Steam account.

Considering all this I would not want to spend 1000 USD on games only to realize one day I permanently lost access to all my games.

It therefore seems reasonable to create a new email and steam account for each new game you buy. It does not create much overhead if you use a program like Keepass. It's a database of passwords. Just put the name of the game in the note for each user/pass entry. You can then search it and find the right account easily. You can even display the list of all your games on one screen just as in the steam client.