PCGaming

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.

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.

You buy the license mate. Isn't it how it always is? Isn't it why we call the good ol days license keys? Because we buy those license keys. The problem is not the word "buy" or "purchase" being used. The problem is DRM as its true meaning. Digital Rights Management. How would you enforce a sale of offline single player license keys? When you don't have the keys anymore, you should also uninstall the game. But would you? Hence the need for online DRM. The problem now is that companies don't like it when you resell those licenses and since it is their IP and their right, they can enforce that too with online drm. I am not saying the current state of affairs is good by any means. I am stating how we all came here in the first place. We do need a law for more consumer protection regarding the sale of digital goods. Or fuck, any law regarding digital things. Our law hasn't caught up much with the advancement of technology

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Yeah... I'm not as optimistic as you are about the lifespan of Steam and how long there will be people using this platform, let alone how long there will be people period. I don't see this being an issue.

Edited to add: sorry for your loss btw. I'm glad you're able to share his games, I hope that is a positive thing for you.

My best friend died a few years ago. He was a dumbass with his passwords and I did tech support for him a few times, so I knew his password. It's nice to be able to share his games with friends (many of whom already had library sharing set up, but it needs to be redone if a sharee switches devices, I think). I was talking about this issue to some friends recently, because we were lucky to have my friend's details. How grim it is to be on the forefront of this question, eh?

1. They'll have to provide proof of death, which every other company has to deal with when people die.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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.

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.