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.
There is nothing that Valve could change about this with the current way games are licensed.
All your Steam account is is a collection of lifetime leasing contracts between you and the seller. Steam already forces third parties to give you liftime access even if the game is pulled from the store page, but that contract gets voided once one of the two parties ceases to exist, be it the buyer or the studio that sells the game.
Legally binding the games to your account instead of you also isn’t possible since in most countries you either have to be a real person or a registered entity to form contracts.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
techspot.com
Newest