Saw a article on a large number of gamers being over 55 and then I saw this which I believe needs to be addressed in our current laws.
Remember kids; if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Agreed. Same for every digital product we buy, games, movies, music, pictures, etc. We paid for it, we own it, we can pass our along.
I mean, as long as you don’t give Steam any personally identifying info and make sure that your beneficiary has your password and 2FA, I don’t really see how that’s enforceable.
It’s still not unreasonable in my opinion to have a legal route to pass our digital property down. Here we’re talking about steam, a relatively good company, imagine what EA or Ubisoft would do without legal protections.
So don’t be stupid. Got it
My sister has my account info. So when I die, she can do whatever.
They need to make up their minds. Yes or no question, when I buy something on steam, do I own it or am I leasing it? I’ve been buying there under the presumption it was the digital equivalence of buying CD’s like I used to. That was how it was sold to me, and the law is very clear about transferring possessions after ones passing.
I’ve been buying there under the presumption it was the digital equivalence of buying CD’s like I used to.
Why presume when you can read the T&C?
That was how it was sold to me
I don’t believe it was.
And I’m not here to support Steam/Valve. I much prefer GOG, because when you buy a game on GOG, the files are literally yours to use. Buy a copy, download it to your hard drive, copy it to a USB drive, plug the USB drive into a machine that’s never been connected to the internet (let alone your GOG account) and boot up both copies at once.
YMMV when it comes to online multiplayer over severs. I’m a retro gamer, so that’s not my area of expertise, lol. I think for those, you would need separate accounts to play online together.
A service cannot define make stipulations that go against common law, even with when agreeing to “T&C”. When you buy something in a store and then later they go “nono you didn’t actually buy it”, that is selling under false pretense.
I don’t believe it was.
What are you talking about ofcourse it was, and GOG launched 5-6 years later then Steam. When Steam was launched it was marketed as your library of games made as convenient as possible. You lock yourself into our platform and we’ll provide you with many tools like cloudsaves, chat system and online services like Xfire all-in-one, and even when you lose your CD’s, the game is tied to your account, not a physical CD.
Pay closer attention to purchasing items on steam, they purposefully avoid using words like ‘own’ or even ‘buy’. You ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Purchase’ and when you buy something, it says: “Any digital items in this order are now registered to your account on Steam. To access your items, simply visit your library in Steam whenever you’re ready.” I felt like I owned it when I paid money for it and that’s kind of the trick, but reading the wording definitely changes things.
On Steam’s end, it was already decided long ago. I’d say a lot of it is contractual and Steam likely couldn’t change it if they wanted to, but then they were also involved in drawing up the contracts.
Excuse the pun but I’m not buying it lmao, half of my Steam library I bought in a physical store and had no fine print indicating I wasn’t actually “buying” the game. Steam might try a rugpull people but you cannot go against civil law
common law, they might force you into a contract but at least where I live they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.Edit: My law courses were not in English
I promise we have no rights to digital content from a legal perspective. You are just now waking up to the reality.
I believe needs to be addressed in our current laws.
The problem goes much deeper. We’ve seen this with Sony, Google, and more recently Spotify.
Steam and other companies present digital licenses as a “purchase” when they’re simply not. You don’t own anything. You just license it’s use.
There needs to be more regulations around digital licenses. Sellers should be forced to disclose a minimum time that they’ll continue to support a product and held accountable when they don’t.
They should also be forced to use specific verbiage that doesn’t include “purchase” or “buy”. Maybe “rent”.
My son has the password to it and I’ll make sure he gives it to his children. Lol
Makes you wonder, after 100 years they flag the account for review. It would also be impressive if this service still existed after that long as well. Who knows!
Right. I wish they let people download their games like GOG.
We had my Dad’s password info and after he passed, his Steam acct pretty much passed over to my brother, since he was the one always using my Dad’s account anyways. We also have family sharing up, so we all still get to share from most of his games anyways.
I do wonder what they’ll do after an acct is 50-100+ years old and it’s still being used. Will they at some point start tying it to your SS# or find some other way to tie it to specific people?
Yeah… I’m not as optimistic as you are about the lifespan of Steam and how long there will be people using this platform, let alone how long there will be people period. I don’t see this being an issue.
Edited to add: sorry for your loss btw. I’m glad you’re able to share his games, I hope that is a positive thing for you.
Or you can just give your password to your loved ones. Valve can’t stop you from doing that. They aren’t god, they make their billions off loot boxes.
I think everyone is eager to have Steam let them “pass on” their games…but if that happens, there’ll probably be a lot of…
- People reporting you (aka. the owner of your account) as dead so they can steal your games
- People fighting over legitimately dead people’s Steam accounts
- Games in a single Steam account getting divvied up amongst multiple people/accounts, which would be unnecessary overhead for Steam Support.
It’d be nice if there were an easy solution, but I don’t think there is one.
- They’ll have to provide proof of death, which every other company has to deal with when people die.
- What’s one more thing that crappy family is going to do, not like they’re going to only fight over the stream account and not fight over the house, land, or cash.
- I’m going to be a little snarky here and say, “Won’t somebody think of the corporations!” Having to do some extra work isn’t going to bring down a billion dollar company.
- Who cares if it’s not a simple solution? A legal solution should be provided since we as gamers have paid for these games and we should have a avenue to pass them to our surviving kin or whoever we want.
A lot of the problems are already solved by probate/estate/etc.
Like, if you had property at a bank, you’d need a death certificate which you’ll have requested tons of if someone you loved died… along with potentially some sort of proof that you were the rightful heir (Worst case, you’d establish this through probate, likely going to end up being a simple document). This would be more overhead for steam, but usually not complicated documents once everything is settled. As for splitting up the account, your steam account would probably be classified as a singular item and any attempts to break it up in a will would likely just end up being void.
I am surprised anyone cares that much. I don’t. 900 games and a 20+ year old account and I fully get that it all just goes away when I die, it just doesn’t matter. That is simply part of the plan when you pay for the convenience of having a cloud of installers and save files.
My kids don’t care. They already have their games. If they wanted ones that I played they will buy it in a steam sale.
The things you need to care about are creative software. My kids would be pissed if the artwork I made could never be retrieved. But games? Meh.
I agree with you, especially when viewed with an eye towards practicality. It opens so many cans of worms that it’s probably not worth Valve investing any resources.
I don’t see the issue. The account is tied to an email address with which you can reset the password. With a death certificate you can transfer access to the email account to a different person, reset the login password, change the email address it’s tied to and change the banking details.
So the Steam account can be transferred, they just don’t do it for you.Google has a feature that lets you automatically send your account login info to an address of your choosing if you haven’t logged in in over, say, three months. If I croak unexpectedly, my family will eventually receive access to my email and will be able to subsequently access anything that email was tied to.
Not a huge fan of Google in 2024 but this feature is worthwhile.
I’m sick of this stupid fucking talking point. Steam doesn’t own your email address or credentials. They don’t verify ownership or tie someone’s identity to an account. You can just give your fucking credentials away and they won’t know or care. Shut the fuck up about this already.
Well glad you have your death date all planned, you’ll never unexpectedly die before that date, have your will and trust set, are having your will and trust legally updated ever time you update your password for all your digital media accounts.
Not all of us do and in lieu of relying on individuals to have this shit set up and hope nothing goes wrong I’ll continue to advocate that we need a legal avenue to ensure legally purchased digital goods are able to be passed on after death and no I’m not going to shut the fuck up about but you’re more than free to continue to not give fuck.
You really think bitching about it on social media is advocating? What are you actually doing to raise awareness? Ah, I see you just downvoted and didn’t reply. That’s what I thought.
You only need to pass access to your password manager, which already includes everything. Since you should already have a physical recovery information card printed for your password manager in a drawer somewhere, it would be found anyway.
They’re just not going to move your library of games to another account’s library. I highly doubt that, even though it does technically go against the TOS, giving your credentials to someone else is going to get that account banned.
They won’t transfer it; but you still can. And with good reason, too. If they allowed it, people would try and use it to steal accounts.
Honestly always online DRM is illegal. You cannot provide a good a service. All these companies who are planting these time bombs into software and devices need to be handed a big FU and realize that they are creating the piracy they claim to protect against.
I like Valve, but I don’t like them enough to believe they won’t close my account on a whim for no reason one day.
Who cares, H1N1 gonna kill us all soon anyway.
2010 is calling.
Even with it settling down a bit, Covid is still very much outpacing H1N1, it’s still going to be the virus of the season.
I’ve survived so many human extinction events so far.
so far
I’ve survived all of them so far so it only makes sense I’ll survive all of them to come as well.
I like the bomb technician approach, either I will survive or it won’t be my problem anymore.
