Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die

Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 185 points – Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die
techspot.com

If you cannot pass on your ownership rights to your purchased games to your children, then you cannot pass on your copyright either, I guess?

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I mean... They're saying they can't transfer games from one account to another right? But you could just put your account details in your will and anyone could login to your steam account and access your games, right?

Sure would be nice if they had the feature. But I'm not sure it's such a big deal.

This is explicitly against their TOS. Whether or not you'll be found out is a whole other matter

I suppose they would only find out when the account is still in use after 130 years.

Or if they cared to check payment details and such.

What if I’m planning to live for more than 130 years, then what? Fuck big corporations /s

Start following the blue zone life style friend!

This is explicitly against their TOS. Whether or not you’ll be found out is a whole other matter

Also whether or not those TOS are legally enforceable in every single country Valve operates in.

I can't be arsed to read the ToS again, but is it also forbidden to just share an account between several people?

My brother and I opened up that account six years ago and except for the times I forgot to turn my internet off to not be kicked out of games while my brother plays one we never had problems. It would be really shitty if we got into trouble for this because the account is valued somewhere between 1.500 and 4.300€ and is the most expensive thing I own except for my PC.

Probably technically, but I can almost guarantee you they quite literally couldn't care less about two brothers sharing an account. They're more worried about large groups sharing an account.

Over the years I have heard stories where Valve closes an account after the owners passing. This is usually because the poster said they had trouble with something and explained that the original owner passed. Valve then responds by closing the account and ignoring the issue.

With that said I don't think large groups of people can effectively share a library/account because only one person can play at a time. Small groups like spouses, parents, siblings or a small friend group is doable because it is easier to coordinate who is gonna use the account at any given time. This is especially true if they live together.

With the Deck, I have issues where I boot up a game on my living room PC and my Deck closes it's game making me lose progress on the Deck. Imagine that multiplied 20x. Getting kicked mid match, losing that boss fight, lose your high score, getting left on cliffhanger mid cutscene. The throw your controller rage stuff.

They can. I buy and gift games to my son all the time.

Gifting is not the same as transferring an already bought game to another account. Can you do that?

It the same mechanism. They can do it, they just don't want to.

Honestly it's bullshit, thousands of dollars of games have died with my brother-in-law, and it's just another reason to pirate everything digital you can.

Don't die without a will and don't die without telling family important details/passwords.

Even for unexpected/accidental deaths, this has an easy fix: Put my bitwarden master password on my will.

IANAL, but I feel like if the heirs to an estate cared enough about the deceased's Steam account enough to get the court involved, Steam wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But that's probably what it would take to get them to do the right thing.

I - ANAL

haha

I find it pretty funny too as I always forget what it means. It's an ugly saying.

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

(keep a copy of mr. goldburg)

That's ridiculous. You should be free to give away, sell, or trade digital games just like you can with physical copies.

In the EU, you can.

But only the whole account, or did that change

Not the whole account, only individual games.

Last I heard, Steam hadn't actually implemented that functionality yet, though.

It would probably take someone to sue them, but they would have to implement it.

Agree, even more so with the private cloud data. If your loved one dies and you want to visit multiplayer you created together in open world builders it would be shitty to take that away from them. Eg: Father and son played Minecraft together on LAN server or whatever (If that even is a thing)

How do they know that I'm dead? Have they attended my funeral?

Yes, Gaben personally goes to every funeral and tells your beloved ones "Hello, I'm Gabe Newell and this was one of our best costumers"

In that case I won't be complaining that my family can't keep my account with all the hentai games

Gotta find someone worthy of inhereting your exquisite library

It doesn't matter. You can't do it if you're alive, either.

Yes you can, you many not be allowed to, but you absolutely can.

No, you can't transfer your account to someone else. You can give someone else your password, but that doesn't make them the official owner.

No reason to have kids if they can't carry on my legacy.

I mean you'd hope people would have kids to play games with them, which means they would probably build their own steam library hopefully before you die and would be willing to hand it off. While you're alive you can use the family share setting so they can play your games and leave them the credentials to your account in your family's password manager that they inherit

That's okay, I plan to be reincarnated.

You typically don't get "ownership rights" when you purchase a game on Steam. You'll typically be purchasing a licence to play the game, which could be taken away at any point. Some Steam games don't include DRM after installation, and you'll truly own those games after downloading them. (you can search for a game here, and find the DRM used) I'd recommend avoiding purchasing games on Steam whenever DRM is included if you want to own the game you'd buy, there are a lot of online stores that sell games without DRM.

Can same game be with DRM on steam and without DRM on other platform.

Yes, happens all the time on gog. They don't have the same library of games but there is an overlap.

If the game is DRM free on GOG it usually only has the Steamworks DRM on steam. That one is so easy to remove that you might aswell call it DRM free since its only use is to make publishers think their game is protected.

Yes. In those cases the steam DRM is usually for achievements, friend joining, and checking that it was run via steam.

There are plenty of "steam emulators" or even patchers that remove the steam DRM.

So as long as you have the files applications such as SteamEMU and Steamless are godsends in ensuring that when you "buy" a game you will still be able to play it.

You typically don’t get “ownership rights” when you purchase a game on Steam. You’ll typically be purchasing a licence to play the game, which could be taken away at any point.

That is certainly what Valve thinks and writes in their TOS but if their store has a big button that says "BUY HALO" then courts may very well decide that you actually bought Halo.
And many countries have a strict legal definition of what buying means that cannot be overruled by some company's TOS.

That's why the button says "purchase" instead of "buy" it's been a bit since I used Steam, so I had to check to be sure. I think there's a legal loophole there, but I'm not great with English.

That’s why the button says “purchase” instead of “buy”

First off, they're synonyms
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/purchase#synonyms

Now, I'm certainly no expert on the US legal system. It certainly seems silly if you could circumvent entire laws just by using synonyms but what do I know.
However I have been talking about other countries where that is not the case and where the language is not English.
So It really doesn't matter whether it say "buy" or "purchase" in English when it's "kaufen" in German or "acheter" in French.

Valve needs to be forced to allow customers to sell and trade their digital games

Fine just create a digital corporation of your identity and assign rights to that instead. I hear they have the same rights as people.

It is worth noting here that Valve recently announced a new feature that allows Steam users to share games with their friends and family. Dubbed "Steam Families,"

New? That exists for years Oo. Or what am I missing here?

Previously, if you shared your library and someone else was playing any game, they would get ejected from said game and be unable to play any other game, as soon as you started to play any game whatsoever.

This made it more or less useless.

Now they changed it to where you can only play the same game as many times as your family collectively owns it. So, if your family member plays a game you only have a single copy of, they can keep doing so, until you start that exact game. You may still need to activate the client beta for this, but it'll be active for everyone eventually. (Don't know if it is yet, as I'm using the beta)

They made it useable (see the wan show on it a cople weeks ago)

What's a steam account and why would i want one?

It's the biggest video game marketplace/launcher/DRM makers for PC. If you play video games on PC most games you buy would probably have to be through steam. Their parent company, Valve, is the only multi-billion dollar company I like because so far they have stayed pro-consumer.

Which explain why game piracy stay pretty low too. Valve with steam provide a great service

😂 this platform continues to make me laugh. Everybody worships steam but somehow all other businesses are bad.

Yes as a long time PC gamer, I don't understand why people act as if steam and valve are gods. Like ok cool it has the most games and whatever, but they've been going downhill. There's so many random asset flips and porn games now, and their sales have been shit for years now. I remember games going on sale for 90% off during seasonal sales, and all the % off coupons they'd just randomly give out. That never happens now.

Treat people well, and people will like you.

Yeah also billionaires are literally satan but Gabe Newell gets a pass for some reason lol

Lol yep. They used to think the same way about Elon musk until he bought Twitter and started speaking his mind. Same with the orange man. They all loved him and then one day the software update went out and it was instant hate.

Steam has mostly fixed the "service" issue compared to something like streaming services. One place to get almost any and all games. One account to access it all. Very simple for the end user. And does a load for the community as well. Take a look at proton for a example.