Your Steam games will go to the grave with you
Great, then I'll finally have some time to play them....
Your Steam games will go to the grave with you
Great, then I'll finally have some time to play them....
finally some cloud gaming
The only cloud gaming I will accept
Wait a minute... why is it so hot here? That can't be good for the... Windows Vista computer?! Where the heck am I?
If steam did allow transfers this way, I can imagine it being a new type scam where people fabricate death documents to steal steam accounts.
spoiler
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Oh for sure, but it's definitely a concern for stuff like this. It's a lot easier for valve to just expect people to pass login info down as a way to pass on an account.
Valve actually migrating purchases from one account to another risks upsetting publishers, and requires whole new policies on how to verify death and verify who should receive the account. Finally there's the risk of scams and having to resolve them. Overall it's a lot of headache for valve, I'm not surprised they're not jumping to offer it officially.
True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don't own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.
GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?
You’ve never owned your games. You owned the media they came on but legally you only ever had a license to use the software. Depending on the license agreement (the thing where most people click “I agree” without reading) you had more or fewer rights, such as transfer of license, but the way things work legally ownership of software seems to mean the more of the copyright ownership. Maybe like a book: you own your copy of the book but you don’t have the rights to print more books or make a movie based on the book.
With physical media those licenses didn't materially matter though because a contract you can't read until after a purchase is automatically void in court.
Do they check? Or can i just give my password to my homie in a letter
"Dear homie,
if you are reading this, it means that i'm on the long path to meet with master Kaio to train my ass off to death in the afterlife. Until we meet again, this is my user and pass of my steam account.
PS: i didn't bought the porno VR games. Someone gifted them to me.
Your bro in eternity,
Siegfried"
Bro, but what about the credit card receipt for porno VR games, signed by Siegfried? What about the warranty card for the porno VR games, filled out by Siegfried? What about the book "Porno VR Games and Me (This Sort of Thing is my Bag, Baby!)" by Siegfried?
Oh I didn't own my steam account it was created for my future children. it's a trust.
Lol. That's hilarious. But unfortunately you never owned the games in the first place. You rented the privilege to play the game for life?...life of the rental company or your life only? Oh man, we gotta go thru the small print on this.
When you're dead but someone has got into your steam account and is about to find all of your anime titty games
“And to my son, I bequeath my steam account - user is blah and password is blah”
Checkmate steam
The article goes into that and states password sharing is against the Eula so technically they can kick you off the service if they find out..... IF they find out wink wink
Who's notifying Valve someone with an account has died? Link the dead person's account to a steam family and enjoy the inheritance.
Assuming that the world continues to exist in a way that lets me have a steam account at the time of my natural lifespans average end (another... 46 years):
My steam library grows at a slower rate than my mass storage has, and I'm quite confident that one will be able to fit my entire steam library as it currently is on a normal and affordable drive in at most 15 years.
With those two facts in play I can remain confident in my ability to crack everything I own (assuming I even want everything) and safely store it for at-will passing down to as many people as I want.
But thanks for the reminder to not blindly trust you, Valve. Always useful to have those.
So sad I won't be able to bequeath "Fifty Shades of Fur - Gay Erotic Visual Novel 18+" to my grandchildren
They also don’t let you transfer purchases if for instance you’re being stalked
Had a friend lose a thousand games that way
Once again further diluting the meaning of the words "bought" and "sold"
Sounds ripe for a legal challenge, but neo-ownership of digital-goods is already so fragile.
I really feel like this won't/can't be enforced.
Just because it is wrong and obviously contradictory to other established precedents doesn’t at this point mean that it won’t be enforced unfortunately.
To be absolutely clear, this is not new. Steam accounts being non-transferrable and not your property has always been how Steam's terms work. It's not even the first time the death situation comes up.
Because digital ownership sucks, and that absolutely, very much includes Steam. If you can't keep an offline copy you don't own it.
But honestly, given the new family groups Steam came up with this gets weirder now. Other accounts that are more closely tied to hardware are one thing, and I do wish we had a more effective and reliable way to hand over passwords and credentials to relatives in case of emergency, but it's so weird that now your mom can have an accident and you slowly see the games she was sharing with you over that system fade away as her account gets shuttered. It's such a grim, sci-fi distopian piece of minutia. This is not a great timeline we landed on.
Rare steam L
Does this apply to developer accounts? Because if so this would be dumb as fuck.
I'd argue that it's dumb as fuck either way.
Seems like a shitty hill to die, sacrificing entire generations of family remaining on your platform over old obsolete games on a subscription service. Tell me the video game industry is stale without telling me the video game industry is stale.
I had been literally planning on putting my Steam account in the will...
This is annoying as we buy everything under my wifes account and we hook up mine with family sharing.
My family plays the games under my account now. I imagine not much will change when I'm dead.
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