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.
It’s technically file sharing, and sharing is caring.
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
I think everybody is missing a crucial point here: what happens with a 200-year-old steam account?
My sister has my account info. So when I die, she can do whatever.
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.https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?hl=en
From what I know, you cannot access or transfer a email account on death, at most you can close it.
So again, there is a need for legal ways to transfer our digital goods in my opinion because unless you have a will, which so many people don’t have set up, with passwords for all of your accounts, which you’d better be updating on every password change, if you die suddenly before you can transfer your account in a orderly fashion, you can be hosed with passing on digital goods
If you can’t with this one particular email provider, you can just use a different one, or even your own domain.
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.
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’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 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.
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.
not only that, but this is also mostly about copyright. steam can’t force publishers to just transfer the licenses. this shit must be resolved in law, not on steam’s whims.
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 stipulations that go against civil law
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.
When you go into a store and buy something, you tend to leave with a physical product. Not so with Steam.
You mention a “library” of games…when you take something out of the library, it’s not yours.
How do you normally access your games? Through the Steam platform, or by running executables directly from your machine (without needing an internet connection)? Because if you usually use the Steam platform, that was the first hint that you don’t “own” the games. And if you need an internet connection, that was the second hint.
Another big hint is, as you said, the game is tied to your account. Not your person. Your account is explicitly non-transferable (e.g., in death). As well, they can remove your access to your account for not being in line with the T&C.
You buy a drill from a store, then you use the drill to break someone’s lock. But you still own the drill – neither Home Depot nor Ryobi has a legal right to take that drill away from you, even if you get caught.
Again, I’m not defending Steam here. This is why I recommend people look into DRM-free services like GOG if you actually care about “owning” your games.
Otherwise, good luck with your class-action lawsuit against Steam. It’s not like I have an empty Steam library, so if a class-action actually won, I’d benefit from that too. I just don’t think it’ll ever happen, thanks to the T&C which most people seem to generally know and accept.
What the fuck are you on about, when I take something out of my personal library at home it absolutely belongs to me.
You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about. DRM is copy and piracy protection and was never a way to lease a game instead of buying. DRM free means you can copy it to anyones PC and will work fine.
Lol…your personal library at home is composed of physical objects that you bought and assembled into what you call a library. A better word might be a “collection” rather than a library, but we’re getting into semantics here.
You seem to be getting very emotional about this. Your anger should really be directed towards Steam, or maybe yourself for not reading the T&C.
DRM is used for copy and piracy protection, yes, but it encompasses many kinds of digital rights, including access. Steam itself is DRM – they manage the rights of which account holders can access which digital games. Even with Steam’s Offline mode (which not all games support), you can run into situations where you can’t play your game offline because of update issues.
Give the Steam T&C a skim, and find out whether you own your games forever. And if I’m wrong and you find something in the T&C that invalidates what I’ve said, then I’d be happy to see it.
Digital content doesn’t fall under the same rules as physical items, for better or for worse.
You seem to be missing my point, it is very clear what Valve thinks about this. It’s literally the article above? And I get their point, but I’m arguing they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.
In the EU there is legal precedent to give access to every account of a deceased person to their next of kin. T&C doesn’t mean shit when it goes against consumer protection or civil laws.
When the T&C say you have to give your kidney to Gabe Newell it won’t hold up in court.
In the EU there is legal precedent to give access to every account of a deceased person to their next of kin.
I thought we were discussing whether or not a game purchased on Steam is something that the purchaser “owns” just like a physical game…
But if that precedent is there, it’ll be interesting to see it play out. Steam users in the EU have definitely died before, but I guess nobody has ever put one in their will yet? Or tried to do an account transfer?
It’s one thing to share the credentials, but I don’t think we’ll see Steam games going from one account (owned by a deceased person) being transferred into an existing account of someone named in the will.
…which, of course, would be perfectly possible to happen with physical games.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong and I’m sorry this is how you’re finding out. DRM is absolutely about limiting and controlling access to content you don’t own, that’s it’s entire purpose.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong, DRM is about the management of legal access to digital content (literally Digital Rights Management). Essentially a way to check if you have paid for the content you’re about to consume, and because protecting the copyrights to digital works is inherently almost impossible, it also tries to prevent unauthorised copies.
Blurays have DRM, they can only be used by a reader with a correct certification, which only gets that if they have implemented HDCP among other specs. I own my blurays and will happily pass them on to the next generation.
But sure, give it your own meaning so you can witchhunt lmao
I feel like we both mean the same things here, and I’m using more extreme and evocative language about it, but we’re literally on the same page. I know a lot, and I mean a lot about DRM, and it means both of what we say.
DRM is intended to limit who accesses the content, on what devices, and when. It does it through a number of mechanisms from accounts, to encryption and certs, to digital hashes and stored keys.
These companies that sell you access don’t sell you a copy of the content though, they absolutely only sell access. You have no legal right to the content, no ‘right of first sale’ rights to resell, you really don’t have rights to the content that are guaranteed, they can always, and I mean always legally revoke access to you, even though you paid, for any reason they want and you don’t have legal recourse.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
- Most companies are not international, and don’t have to deal with verifying the death certificates from 100+ countries.
- The challenge is that dividing it up would add overhead to Steam support, especially if the estate does try to break up an account into games. Not to mention that there’s really no “cash value” on digital games, since there are things like sales, giveaways, bundles, etc.
- It obviously won’t bring them down, but assuming extra work and liability isn’t something they’d do our of the goodness of their hearts.
- We pay to license Steam games and put them in our Steam libraries. This isn’t a new idea…it was a criticism of Steam when it was new, and it was why there was so much pushback. If you’re buying expensive brand-new games on Steam rather than on a DRM platform (or waiting until the cost lowers enough to be worth getting only a license), then you’ve been using Steam wrong.
I’m not even defending Steam here. If you want DRM-free games, buy from GOG. Steam has more games, and sometimes lower prices…but you’re not buying a game that you own. It was never a secret. Hence why they marketed it as a Steam Library. You can use whatever you want in the library, but you own none of it.
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.
Agreed on both counts
OTOH, Steam is an international company, and there are different standards and such for death certificates across the world. So Steam would have to have some expertise in verifying death certificates from any country they operate in.
Increasing overhead and liability when they’d probably earn very little good will is usually not the best business strategy. I don’t think they’d do it unless they were legally compelled to.
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.
Write your steam username and password down somewhere in plain text (and maybe your email auth too since steam seems to like email 2fa garbage), and then someone will find it after you die and can use your account.
Who cares, H1N1 gonna kill us all soon anyway.
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.
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.
nah
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