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?
You got Vista? I got Windows ME!
That’s what heathens like yourselves deserve for living lives full of sin. True servants of God like myself have been rewarded with the almighty TempleOS
I’ve been playing Hades, we got this.
Ah, so that’s what they use in a cremation chamber nowadays…
It’s just Diablo… the new fully-immersive experience.
Only if you have broadband in the grave with you.
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.
While this may be a concern I highly doubt it’s a primary motivating factor
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.
I don’t really think they need to allow folks to migrate your purchases. I think they should allow you to pass on your account however.
Transferring ownership of the account also transfers the game license owned by the account. Still upset publisher
I get that, I’m just saying that should be how it is.
Still applicable
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.
Copyright is automatically applied rather you want it or not. Licenses are granting you permissions to use the media without violating their Copyright. Having a physical copy simply means a publisher cant restrict access to your copy because they turned off their servers… (atleast before the age of zero day patches…).
Just FYI, you mean day zero patches. Zero days are something else entirely.
Which is why those license agreements generally had a clause that if you disagreed you could return the software with all the media for a full refund.
I’m not saying it’s the right way, just that’s how it’s been structured legally. Of course, in the days of physical media with software that couldn’t phone home it was harder to enforce those licenses if people didn’t strictly adhere to them. The software companies didn’t generally find it worth going after individuals if they found out about violations either. Corporations, on the other hand… I worked once at a media company that Adobe caught running a lot of unlicensed software. The story went that it was so bad at the main office their auditors found a copy of After Effects or something similarly ridiculous on a computer that was used as a cash register in the corporate cafeteria. That was very much worth Adobe’s time and money to get the lawyers involved, and became a very expensive problem for my employer. I wasn’t involved in the problem, but I had to check and clean my local office, where we found about a half-dozen computers with unlicensed software.
It makes no difference.
They’re trying to impose an obligation or task on a customer after the purchase, even if it’s only the customer having to go through the trouble of getting the refund (which is a task they were not informed about before the purchase).
If it’s not before the sale it’s void and even in some cases before the sale (for example bait and switch, were you’re mislead with fake contract conditions until the last minute) it’s void.
The whole point is that they must be clear upfront about any conditions attached when the customer is making the decision to buy and adding any conditions after the sale is not acceptable even if the seller gives options (such as refunds) because the customer has a right to use the product under the conditions at the time of the sale and cannot legally be forced otherwise, including forced to refund.
Owning media and owning the copyright to the media aren’t the same thing. There is a well recognized right to resell and transfer physical media, regardless of what the EULA says. You can’t sell more copies, but you absolutely sell (or gift, or leave in a will) the copy you have. The question here isn’t whether you should have a copyright on your digital purchases, it’s whether your rights to digital purchases should be analogous to your physical purchases.
Realistically, the transfer would likely need to be set up ahead of time via the account holder. For instance, my password manager has a function to allow me to designate a beneficiary. But importantly, that beneficiary assignment must come from my account before I die. If I die without designating a beneficiary, there’s nothing my family can do to gain access to my password vault. Only the accounts I have designated will be able to gain access.
In other words, in order to falsely designate a beneficiary, they would already need access to my account. And at that point, they wouldn’t need to deal with death certificates and beneficiaries, because they already have access to my account.
I’d like you to read what you just wrote very slowly and imagine it’s somebody else saying it, just to visualize if it’s an absolutey bonkers thing to say.
There’s also items in people’s accounts
I’d like you to read what you just wrote veeeeery slowly…
Yes, I know, and people should have access to them. Just share passwords with loved ones and they can take the items out eventually. Steam needs to do things like this because publishers are assholes who want it.
This is absolutely not true. The publishers get very little of a say on what Steam does, as evidenced by the fact that a bunch of them, including Activision and EA, arguably the two most powerful third party publishers, left in a huff over fees and microtransaction revenue splits… and then came back because Steam is the only game in town.
So no, Steam isn’t the good guy having their arm twisted by evil publishers, they are a large corporation that invented most of the practices in both digital distribution and games as a service, including this one.
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Gotta have kids for that
New tinder bio: “need a woman to birth me a child that will inherit my Steam account on the day of my demise”
Better yet: “… on the day of my inevitable demise.”
Sounds more dramatic
Between my birthday of 1/1/1901 and unlicensed game inheritance, shit is going to go down in the next 50 years. We’ll have AI legal reps for powerful firms requesting a statement of all software licenses by the deceased, challenging them, and then having a court order the rest null.
I hate that I will be right about that.
Life Pro Tip: Register an LLC to buy your steam games under. The LLC will never die and you can transfer ownership of the business entity while it retains control of the steam account.
I kind of want one anyway. Is there a real reason I shouldn’t do this?
Disclaimer this was a joke I’m not a lawyer and I have no idea if this would actually work… 😆
Would be hilarious if it actually does and everyone starts doing it…
“Your honor, ‘bonerdragon6969420 llc’ has a long and industrious history…”
I am now curious how and if Steam bothers to deal with business licensing? If they do, it’s probably way pricier than what you’re normally paying.
As others have pointed out - costs a few bucks annually,and requires beneficial ownership report (free IIRC).
Otherwise, it’s a tried and true tactic to pass businesses down through generations. An LLC vs. a corp vs a trust is a convo to have w/ lawyer barred in your state but the general premise is vaguely sane.
Personal use of business assets is generally frowned upon by the IRS.
That’s why I’ll only play during work hours.
Tldr: Don’t do this unless you have a business that requires a steam account for tax purposes. It doesn’t need to be successful but it does need to be real.
Trusts are probably a better option for this sort of thing than a LLC.
Just do benchmark videos on youtube or something. Then rake in the sweet, sweet business losses.
You normally pay an annual fee to keep your LLC registered.
There’s at least 10 states with no annual fee. Arizona is $50 to file, $0 annual fees, and no annual report to file.
If you’d prefer your company to have voting rights, you can file in Rhode Island, and your company can vote in local and state elections without ever stepping foot in the state. Hooray late stage capitalism 😞
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Also I think you are required to submit yearly financial reports.
Not in Arizona. You don’t even have to live there, just have to file there.
$800/year is a lot to save maybe $1000 worth of games. At least that’s what an LLC costs where I live.
Almost 10 times less where I live, but not sure because I don’t know which dollars you’re referring to
US dollars. I’m in California, which is probably one of the most expensive states to get an LLC but still. Even at $100/year I’m probably not getting my money’s worth. Digital games don’t hold their value unfortunately.
Register a religious organisation/church worshipping digital media and proclaim that this account is part of religious rituals of your church. In the United States, freedom of religion is a constitutionally protected right provided in the religion clauses of the First Amendment.
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?
Bro, a real bro doesn’t ask these questions.
Yeah, bro. Bro is wanking in the afterlife now
Master Kaio is not happy about it, but he is not surprised either.
You just keep the wishlist private and zero it out. You got the answers to those questions. That’s private info your bro rusted you to die with.
just share your login lol
Gabe is riding to your house in a SWAT van as we speak. Resist, or don’t, your death is inevitable either way.
It’s a bit more complicated. Besides the Steam credentials, you also need to share your email and its password. You need to provide your mobile phone unlocked or share its password (for SMS and two-factor authentication).
I’ll be dead. They can have all of that.
Better setup some dead-man-switch ASAP just in case.
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When you’re dead but someone has got into your steam account and is about to find all of your anime titty games
what are these im interested
Try
Nekopara
Doki Doki Literature Club
Boko No Piku
All great games with lots of tiddy.
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just isn’t the same.
Ah, the olde “fuck me up for life” trifecta.
Boko Piku xD
Bury me with my backlog.
And browser history
Nah we deleting that and then denying it
He died doing what he loved more, creating more backlog.
Who’s notifying Valve someone with an account has died? Link the dead person’s account to a steam family and enjoy the inheritance.
If you will a steam account to someone, there is a chance that there are disputes/claims for the account that need to be settled in court.
The interesting question is what happens if Valve is still around after all of us are long gone and there are millions of 150+ year old accounts, many under active use?
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.
Sounds ripe for a legal challenge, but neo-ownership of digital-goods is already so fragile.
digital goods are more like a service at this point. not really property
True for digital goods THEY are supposed to own, but also consider how dominated we are with OUR digital property. I have witnessed how readily tech giants will abuse their position, abuse the power of defaults, weaponize psychology, and feign deletion… even against my lowly grandma. They think nothing of effectively stealing one’s digital photos, using them for their own purposes, and giving them to the police, so they can destroy your life and your dog.
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.
I don’t think most people think this is new, the article also states this was the result of a question on Reddit to valve personnel. The issue is not “why the change?” but more of “wait I didn’t think/know about this previously, I need to consider the implications/results of this policy.”
EU, do your thing
not sure what EU should do here
When you buy something you should be able to pass it on or sell it to someone else. This “the software not sold, only licensed” BS should be illegal. Either you rent with a monthly fee, or you buy it and own it. Owning something means you can sell it to someone else.
Either you rent with a monthly fee, or you buy it and own it.
Of those two options, you know which one the publishers would pick…
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https://publicknowledge.org/eu-court-when-you-buy-software-you-own-it/
The EU has already taken care of it.
The Court of Justice of the European Union found that a
copyright owner exhausts the right of distribution to a copy of a computer
program once he sells, or authorizes the sale of, the copy. This means that whoever purchased the
computer program can resell it and the copyright holder cannot control the
resale of the copy. The Court found that
this exhaustion principle applies whether the copy is on a tangible medium like
a CD-ROM or DVD or an intangible download from the Internet, and it also
applies to corrected and updated programs that the copyright owner sells. Furthermore, the Court made clear that contract
clauses that deny the customer the right to transfer his copy of the computer
program are void.So, we can in the EU? But they provide no way of doing so without giving the account over.
Yes, like refunds it’ll probably get sorted the first time someone’s estate with a bit of money tries to will it to someone and then they take Valve to court/make a complaint to the EU.
We gotta get these generational backlogs started
Regulate digital purchases.
Work into immortality, ofc.
I’d like to see them try stopping me giving my kids my password.
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