How do I share Steam and Epic accounts across my cafe PCs?

You cannot buy a copy of every game for every machine in the room. Nobody can. So you do what every cafe does: buy a handful of launcher accounts and share them around.

Then Saturday night happens. Two customers open the same game on the same account and the launcher throws one of them off mid-match. A staff member is reading a password out loud across the counter. Somebody wrote the logins on a sticky note eight months ago and nobody knows which of the four accounts is currently on which PC. When an account gets stuck, the fix is walking the floor and asking people.

The problem is not that you are sharing accounts. Sharing is correct. The problem is that a spreadsheet cannot enforce anything.

What a pool actually does

An account pool holds your paid launcher accounts and lends them out for the length of a session.

A customer opens a pooled game. HandyCafe picks a free account from the matching provider, hands it to that machine, marks it busy and returns it to the pool when they are done. Because an account can only be checked out once at a time, the same login is never live on two PCs. The double-login problem does not get managed better. It stops existing.

In HandyCafe this lives on the Licenses page, under the Game Accounts tab. The header shows the count that matters at a glance: total, free, busy, held.

The details that decide whether it survives a busy night

Any vendor can say "we share accounts". The difference is what happens when things go wrong, which on a Saturday is constantly.

A game crashes. The game exits but the customer is still sitting there with time on the clock. If the account went straight back to the pool, someone else would take it and your customer would lose their session. The suspension window holds their account for a set number of seconds, up to thirty minutes. A crash or a restart costs them nothing.

A PC freezes. Now the opposite risk: an account stuck as busy forever on a machine that is not coming back. The heartbeat handles it. If the client goes silent past your timeout, the account is treated as inactive and comes back to the pool on its own. Nobody has to notice.

Someone moves seats. Turn on transferring the account with the session and the borrowed login follows them to the new PC.

Something goes wrong anyway. Every busy or held account has a force release on its row. That is the 2am button.

Customers never see the password

This is the part owners underestimate. Every password read out loud is a password that walks out of the building.

The pool passes credentials to the launcher through an argument template with placeholders for the username and password. The login is injected rather than typed. The customer plays. They never see the account details. You can also flag an account to be marked for password rotation once it is released. Anything you suspect got exposed is queued for a change.

Charging for it, if you want to

An account pool can be free to use or it can be a product.

Each provider pool has a charge method: nothing, per session, per minute or per account switch. Any single account can also carry its own custom charge that overrides the pool rate, which is how you price the one premium account differently from the rest.

Reservations, for the regulars

You can promise an account to a specific member rather than leaving it to chance. Reservations can be for a chosen account or the first free one, with an expiry in hours or none at all.

The useful part is the queue. If everything is busy when a member asks, the request can wait in line instead of being refused. The next account that frees up is assigned to them automatically. Members see their reserved accounts on their own record.

And when the pool really is empty, the customer sees a message you wrote, not a launcher error.

Everything is on the record

The Events tab is the audit log for the pool and it is more useful than it sounds. It records when an account was assigned, resumed, released or held, when a suspension expired, when a password was rotated, when a reservation was made or released, when a request was denied for no capacity, when a process died, when someone forced a release, when the config changed and when accounts were imported or created.

Two questions get answered instantly with that log: which account was on which PC when something went wrong and whether you actually need to buy another account or your existing ones are just stuck. "Denied no capacity" showing up every Friday at nine is a purchase decision, not a guess.

Game Accounts and App Licenses are not the same thing

These two sit next to each other in the product and get confused constantly. Here is the honest split:

If you are sharing Steam, Epic, Battle.net or GOG accounts, you want the pool.

Setting it up

1. Open the Licenses page and pick the Game Accounts tab, then choose your provider.
2. Add your accounts or paste them in bulk with the CSV import as username,password,label. It reports what imported, what was a duplicate and what failed.
3. Set the charge method if you are billing for account use.
4. Set the suspension window and the heartbeat timeout to match how your room behaves.
5. Write the out-of-licenses message so a full pool reads like your cafe rather than an error.

Then leave it alone. The pool is one of those features that is doing the most work on the nights you are too busy to look at it, which is exactly when a sticky note would have failed you. If you are still weighing tools, the same thinking runs through how to choose internet cafe software.