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…
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.
Still applicable
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 byt he 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.
Give your kids your passwords, folks
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”
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.
Summary:
- 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.
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
ya, but as an LLC you get a lot of rights that you didn’t have before!
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…
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.
“Your honor, ‘bonerdragon6969420 llc’ has a long and industrious history…”
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.
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.
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.
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 😞
Bury me with my backlog.
And browser history
I have reached a place where I genuinely don’t care about anyone seeing my browser history.
FBI: “Mr. JoMiran, did you spend an hour browsing through Peggy Hill cosmic horror hentai?”
Me: “Meh. I found most of the tentacle detail work lacking and the exaggerated breast size off-putting.”
Nah we deleting that and then denying it
He died doing what he loved more, creating more backlog.
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.
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…
deleted by creator
Regulate digital purchases.
Work into immortality, ofc.
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.
Does steamworks not have a notion of a parent organization or enterprise? That’s what most other design and development tools do.
If someone leaves, the parent enterprise remains, and new people can be added to the enterprise and can be granted rights over the content.
My family plays the games under my account now. I imagine not much will change when I’m dead.
If their continued usage depends on permissions from your account, that is not a safe assumption
Put your passwords in your will
Yes I agree but I’m telling them family sharing being on is not sufficient.
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.
Right but ultimately they do need access to your account. I’m just saying having family sharing on is not sufficient for long term reliability.
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.
So thats why they say not to give your password to anyone.
I’d like to see them try stopping me giving my kids my password.
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.
Imagine if it said “Epic” instead of “Steam” in the headline.
No one give af cuz Epic sucks?
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.
Whew, that’s much better. I’ve always avoided the Epic store like the plague so nothing lost!
