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!
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.
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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.
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Transferring ownership of the account also transfers the game license owned by the account. Still upset publisher
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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.
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.
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.
That’s a lot of effort just to play HuniePop
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…
$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.
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"
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.
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“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
Old and busted: Pretending someone’s alive for their Social Security check
New hotness: Pretending someone’s alive for their Steam account
4 generations later: “I’ve inherited my father’s steam account just as he inherited it from his father and so on. The library has grown ever larger, and yet so many remain untouched. The summer sales have sustained my forefathers and yet I feel hollow. Each year, more games are added to this historic account, but each year brings more regret as the purchases go untouched. I shall make a promise to myself: finish the extensive library, honor my family, complete the library. But first, some more Counter Strike.”
blah!@birthday-ssn
What Stream support have sent that person is probably an accurate representation of what happens when you apply their policies as written. Write another article if they are seen enforcing it.
Luckily, SteamDRM is usually easy to bypass, so if that happens one could prepare accordingly.
The difference is that your Steam account is probably holding thousands of dollars in value while your pirated copies of Steam games are worth nothing. And presumably that whichever of your grandchildren gets nerdy gran’s stash will likely not care to reverse engineer your warez archives just to play Bioshock again in 2075.
It’s not about access to the games, it’s about whether you own what you buy.
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.
I get that, but that’s just the vibe Valve has to me.
Less about enforcement than ease of transfer. If I’ve got a Steam account and you’ve got a Steam account and I die, Steam won’t let you transfer the licenses from my account to yours. You just have to maintain two independent accounts now - accounts with 2-factor authentication that you also have to maintain (so second cell numbers and emails, etc).
Steam will simply let the administrative burden of juggling extra accounts take these licenses out of the pool.
just don’t die
just don’t die
So far that’s been working for me.
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.
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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”
Means you don’t own anything then. It is a lost autonomy. Once lost, you will only lose more with time.
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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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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.
My family plays the games under my account now. I imagine not much will change when I’m dead.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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