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 personally don’t value them differently, but I see your point.
The wonky ownership of these games is actually the reason I’ve been pretty much exclusively buying stuff on GoG for a few years. I don’t know their stance on inheritance, but at least the hypothetical grandchild won’t need perpetual access to the account to keep playing the games.
In the end, clear legislation is kinda the only thing that can resolve this mess.
These days a will should include documentation of logins. No need to bypass Steam DRM when my relatives have my phone’s PIN and email credentials to just access all games. Pretty sure my local laws cover digital inheritance.
Yeah, my point was, if they do try to enforce their policies, we could probably find a way to work around it. It’s probably cheaper and easier than for your heirs to test those digital inheritance laws in court.
They also don’t let you transfer purchases if for instance you’re being stalked
Had a friend lose a thousand games that way
Friend could have in theory just authorized their steam library on the computer and played them through a different account. The “family sharing” thing.
Don’t you have to be friends for that? I believe there was a website that showed your friends list, even if your profile was set to private.
Wait, what does stalked mean in this context? Aren’t you able to block people on Steam?
You can but they can just go to a steam profile site and see your previous names/the id doesn’t change
And if they have a link to your profile (since it uses the id) they will always find you
For this case they made her player of the week in a group she wasn’t apart of. It’s still there today but the profile is deleted (hence the question mark)
Blocking an account doesn’t really solve the trauma of being scared to accept any friend request since it could be this guy
Steam support did nothing
Oh I didn’t own my steam account it was created for my future children. it’s a trust.
Lol. That’s hilarious. But unfortunately you never owned the games in the first place. You rented the privilege to play the game for life?..life of the rental company or your life only? Oh man, we gotta go thru the small print on this.
I understand for the life of the company. But it’s not even my steam account. It’s my child’s who’s currently -5 years old (give or take). I did create it on their behalf a decade ago to redeem the free games on their behalf and gift them games I think they’ll enjoy.
“Add to Cart”, “Continue Shopping”, “Purchase for myself”, “Purchase as a gift”, “Purchase”.
Who knows, one day a court may find these terms could lead people into believing they’re buying a game and force some companies to allow us to to trade or resell them (an EU court most probably).
Purchased should mean what it means for other things like cars or apples…you get a copy of an apple via a purchase and you are guaranteed to be able to use that apple in any manner you please. So for example, you could eat it, ferment it, store it in resin for posterity and for future humans to recreate it. There aren’t any limits to a purchase. So I agree, maybe we need ask the supremes of the supreme court if purchasing means different things. So if I purchase sex from a prostitute legally in Las Vegas, does that prostitute need to specifically state what activities I will own? Or if I go to Costco and buy a fried chicken, does Costco need to specifically state that the chicken is not just a rental but a final exchange between you and Costco, money for dead poultry. More relatable, a screw driver from home Depot, that thing will last a few uses, so do you still own it if home Depot goes down? Can you still rotate screws with it?
Software can be both a product and a service:
- it’s a product when running on my computer (i.e. the game)
- it’s a service when running on their computer (i.e. providing the hosting/downloading, multiplayer client-server hosting).
The issue preventing one practically enacting on software is that copyright defaults to preventing you redistributing it, and you need the source code to be able to modify (fully). Thankfully some games are free software/open source when you can act on your ownership.So that should be “I purchased a game” when you got a detached product that is functional forever… unless the makers make a deal with Microsoft to fuck it up on the next illegally forced update or with Nvidia to change the next card such that it is unplayable.
And it should be “I purchased…I subscribed to this online game” when you know that shit is not yours, so don’t expect it to last.
“yes, you made a purchase. But what you purchased were tickets. Tickets to specific rides at a theme park. You did not buy the rides. You bought tickets for the rides. Those tickets are valid for your personal use. If you are not the one using them, they are not to be used.” –Their argument in court probably.
You can resell Windows CD keys legally in the EU as the courts rejected the “only for you” part of the argument: invalidating that part of the EULA. I probably have the right to resell my Steam game tickets.
The small print just says “lol gottem”
For the life of the trust. Could span generations.
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.
Your Steam games will go to the grave with you
Great, then I’ll finally have some time to play them…
Only if you have broadband in the grave with you.
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?
I’ve been playing Hades, we got this.
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
It’s just Diablo… the new fully-immersive experience.
Ah, so that’s what they use in a cremation chamber nowadays…
So thats why they say not to give your password to anyone.
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.
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.
On one hand, that’s shitty.
On the other hand, I cant imagine anyone in my family gives a shit about my games.
Leave it to a charity or a friend
Can’t! Steam won’t let you!
I mean, you change the name and email and done. Transferred. Unless you’d rather not because your username is PussyBangersNSmash69
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, if you’re stupid enough to tell valve about the death that is
I’m totally 132 years old tho
Imagine tomb raiders of steam accounts in the future ☠️
“This account is 132 years old, it is worth it to hack it”.
With the amount of people that made their account with a fake DOB of like 1900 or something to get around mature content I’m sure they already see plenty of users that age lol
Hey valve, I died…
Hey valve, so, Uhr… Funny thing… I’m actually… Uh
… kinda dead“… I got better.”
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 anyone thinks this is new, the article clearly 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 about this previously, I need to consider the implications/results of this policy.”
EU, do your thing
not sure what EU should do here
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
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…
Regulate digital purchases.
Work into immortality, ofc.
This is Valve thinking ahead - when we invent the ability to respawn, we can just log back in like death never happened.
Means you don’t own anything then. It is a lost autonomy. Once lost, you will only lose more with time.
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.
I’m not sure what exactly you think I said?
