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.
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 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?
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 for 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.
That would at least be more honest.. from my perspective anyway. The games industry has done this for so long that this is the norm for generatations who grew up with consoles being online - this is "purchasing" to some as words have usages and not inate meaning.
It would be better if they just stopped doing that but you get more money that way.
"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.
Did anyone actually think they? Is there anywhere where it is allowed to share your username and password with anyone else in order to use your account, whether you live or not?
this. it's kinda shitty considering how much people spend on games they "own" but don't actually have any privileges they had with physical copies, but this is nowhere suprising
Depends on what country you live in. Just because they call is that doesn't mean the law and courts will see it their way.
Relatedly, check out www.StopKillingGames.com. When you buy a game without an expiration date on the box it either is illegal or should be explicitly made illegal to destroy your copy of the game when the company shuts down their servers. Stop Killing Games is a campaign to stop this from happening, and it's actually getting some progress like being noticed and picked up by politicians. If you know Freeman's Mind, Civil Protection, or Ross's Game Dungeon, this campaign was started by Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) who made all of those.
Edit: quote from the FAQ in the website:
Q: Aren't games licensed, not sold to customers?
A: The short answer is this is a large legal grey area, depending on the country. In the United States, this is generally the case. In other countries, the law is not clear at all, since license agreements cannot override national laws. Those laws often consider videogames as goods, which have many consumer protections that apply to them. So despite what the license agreement may say, in some countries you are indeed sold your copy of the game license. Some terms still apply, however. For example, you are typically only sold your individual copy of the game license for personal use, not the intellectual property rights to the videogame itself.
shrugs framing it this way feels like a finance industry tactic where business people attempt to seem intelligent and beyond the public’s capacity to understand by taking concepts and renaming them to finance concepts and then pretending their grift is different than every other con man’s grift in history.
Steam sells games, that is far as I need to zoom in, any farther and business bros are just wasting my time with their sandcastles made out of PowerPoints and economic spiritualism that is grounded in absolutely nothing other than absolving the person running the business for the harm they may enact in doing so.
You don't inherit a lease to a house your parents rented.
Not that I'm happy with "buying" a game actually being "getting a license" instead of actually owning it. Gamepass and the like should be the renting model, not when you pay a game full price.
Assuming that the world continues to exist in a way that lets me have a steam account at the time of my natural lifespans average end (another... 46 years):
My steam library grows at a slower rate than my mass storage has, and I'm quite confident that one will be able to fit my entire steam library as it currently is on a normal and affordable drive in at most 15 years.
With those two facts in play I can remain confident in my ability to crack everything I own (assuming I even want everything) and safely store it for at-will passing down to as many people as I want.
But thanks for the reminder to not blindly trust you, Valve. Always useful to have those.
Seems like a shitty hill to die, sacrificing entire generations of family remaining on your platform over old obsolete games on a subscription service. Tell me the video game industry is stale without telling me the video game industry is stale.
I'm pretty sure they are legally forced to do this. Also, the moment you allow people to inherit accounts, you're inadvertently sanctioning account transfer and sale. They can't really enforce this amd they know it, so nothing really changed.
Precisely. They never check that you are who you say that you are or that you are in fact still alive, so this "rule" is unenforceable. Case in point, many years ago I told Valve that my birthday was Jan 1st 1916, the earliest date it would let me select when I get prompts to input my age for mature-rated content. It still remembers that and autofills it for me on every age-restricted game page I land on in the discovery queue. If it were true, I'd be a 108 year old gamer right now, which isn't impossible but would probably raise some eyebrows at Valve if they ever had the intention of enforcing the "no passing down your account to other people" rule as it would be highly likely that I would be dead and my successors are the ones actually spending 7 hours on the weekends binging TW: WH3 and Stellaris.
It's the executors job to handle the inheritance, which is very different to transfer and sale. Insurances and services of all types handle inheritances, and they ask for documents specifically only available in such circumstances to verify it. It really is due to unwillingness on behalf of Steam
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.
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).
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.
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.
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