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.
Valve is a business, they don’t give a shit about vibes, when Valve gets sold off and it will one day (probably sooner than we expect) none of these “vibes” or “culture” are going to matter one single tiny little bit.
That is the point of this whole system, we receive assurances up down left right and in every which direction that entities like Valve won’t be ripped up and destroyed by venture capital, private equity, or whatever the fuck the current grift the 1% has us in… and they are empty promises by design.
A company is not legally defined as the will of its creator/creators, rather the labor and particular genius of a company’s workers is purposefully rationalized into a structure that we are supposed to accept is fundamentally designed to be ripped from our hands brutally because “that is just how the adult world works, shut up and get back to work”.
Justification of unnecessary violence and destruction is one of the primary products of the system.
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.
This. It's absolutely already enforced. Valve simply will do nothing to enable access to a relative that comes asking and most of the currently existing accounts will just fade into the ether because in most cases relatives aren't going to be particularly worried about recovering game accounts of all things when somebody passes away.
It's a bit more complicated. Besides the Steam credentials, you also need to share your email and its password. You need to provide your mobile phone unlocked or share its password (for SMS and two-factor authentication).
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.
Isn't this all already possible in Germany? I'm pretty sure I remember a story about valve losing a lawsuit some years back so in Germany people are allowed to transfer their games.
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.
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 by the 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.
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.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soon they’ll clarify their philosophical stance on identity & claim a person changes so much from moment to moment that yesterday-you doesn’t exist anymore, & therefore must pay again
At some point, Gabe is going to sell the company and/or die. The company will be transferred to a hedge fund. And then you'll see a bunch of evil IT bros come up with increasingly sadistic means of cannibalizing the user base for profit.
Drink the Mountain Dew Verification Can to continue, etc, etc.
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
What if you do it a roundabout way? Record your Steam and email login info and include the paper that has it in the will. You're not giving them the account, just a piece of paper. What they do with it is up to them.
True for digital goods THEY are supposed to own, but also consider how dominated we are with OUR digital property. I have witnessed how readily tech giants will abuse their position, abuse the power of defaults, weaponize psychology, and feign deletion... even against my lowly grandma. They think nothing of effectively stealing one's digital photos, using them for their own purposes, and giving them to the police, so they can destroy your life and your dog.
The interesting question is what happens if Valve is still around after all of us are long gone and there are millions of 150+ year old accounts, many under active use?
In a world that isn’t drowning in late stage capitalism what we call that is the overwhelming gift given to us by the generations before us so that we may in turn give it to the next generation. Video games are only a tiny subsection of those gifts compared to everything else we just get handed for free.
Wealthy US boomers brutally executed that way of looking at the world though, so literally any form of passing on gifts to the next generation other than being rich as fuck and directly leaving an unbelievable amount of money to your kids is unfathomable or framed as unfair or absurd in modern day society.
Yea but you need the owner account to authorize the computer. So next time you upgrade or wipe your gaming rig you'd be screwed unless you find a bypass and if you're working that hard, just have the password+mfa
Check out the new Steam Family Beta. My friends and I are now a polyamorus "family" as far as Steam is concerned. I can play their games, they can play mine, didn't have to touch each other's computers, and live in separate households.
oh I do hope they have improved it. When we started with steam the game borrowing was pretty great but now she can't be online when I borrow a game which is just dumb.
The new system is "they can't be playing the game you want to borrow at the same time". My friend and his partner were awkwardly sharing a copy of BG3 before we tried the Family Sharing beta, now if I'm playing something else they can both play at the same time using my copy.
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.
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