This means that when a Steam user passes away, their entire game library and account cannot be bequeathed or transferred to their loved ones.
The gaming community has expressed frustration over this policy, with some suggesting workarounds like sharing login credentials, but these may only be temporary solutions.
This issue highlights the broader problem with digital purchases, as users do not truly "own" the content they buy, but rather have a license to access it.
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.
Isn't this all already possible in Germany? I'm pretty sure I remember a story about valve losing a lawsuit some years back so in Germany people are allowed to transfer their games.
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.
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.
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...).
Actually the original meaning was the way I intended.
The term "zero-day" originally referred to the number of days since a new piece of software was released to the public, so "zero-day software" was obtained by hacking into a developer's computer before release.
Using “updated” terms intending them as their original meaning is not usually the best plan… Like me saying “that’s an awful haircut” but using awful as the near synonym for awesome.
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.
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.
Pretty sure I'm good. Account email is a forwarder to a family domain and they have access to everything relating to the account. For all intents and purposes, it's just me logging in from the grave.
Sorry for not being clear, I wasn't aware family sharing was even a thing. In my case, everyone is using my credentials to log into and use the games under my account. All the same property so same IP.
Oh interesting. Yeah they just released a family function that’s currently in beta. You can add multiple people and you all share the library. It’s really cool. But I can’t imagine they’re going to let it stay as is. Super easy to abuse lol
Yeah, but Valve doesn't really give a shit if it's abused. Steam is a solitary positive example of the weird "(mostly)benevolent monopoly" idea. GabeN owns the company, there aren't any shareholders to appease, so as long as he's alive steam will be solid. I hope he has a successor picked out that can uphold his ideals.
We don’t know that because the program is 1) in beta and 2) like 2mo old. We’ll see where it ends up. I like valve currently but we’ve seen plenty of companies about face on great features and Gabe isn’t immortal. Plus…yeah the feature is being abused dude. They have no check on families. They allow you to share with 5 people of your choice. One buddy and I share and he now has 200 more games I got almost 700. Between our group of 4 we all now have almost 2000 games. It’s absurd.
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.
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.”
Exactly what I was thinking, people would be mad as hell. Heck, a few months ago I made someone realize they didn't own their games on Steam because they were complaining about Epic and it blew their fucking mind.
There are two and only two things that makes Epic Games a pariah.
(1)Exclusive content on PC should be shunned so hard that it's not even a fucking option. You can explain away exclusively on PS3 because of its unique hardware, but it's just a naked monopolistic power grab on PC.
(2) Epic game store sucks on every level. It's a pigs 3 week old rotting corpse compared to Valve's packaged ham.
Already the case in the US when it comes to media licensing unfortunately. We only own a temporary, restricted, personal license, regardless of the medium.
Criminals can claim a lot of things but that is not democracy which requires citizens which requires autonomy. Anyone stealing individual autonomy is a traitor.
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