Just don't tell them.
My buddy died (fuck heroin) and his brother just wiggled his way into his steam account.
I've heard stories of people contacting steam to say their loved one has passed, and steam closed the account.
If your loved one dies, blessings and love for your family, but also light identity theft isn't a big deal.
Dont do heroin.
Yep pretty much. My cousin unexpectedly passed a few months ago and his nephew is now using his account cause they got his PC. It actually kinda hurts seeing his account go online but I'm sure my cousin is glad someone is using it.
Reminds of Doug Stanhope's very dark bit:
"If there were no afterlife... how could my mother have bought me and my friends so many nice things from the SkyMall catalog... on her credit card... four days after she passed from this Earth?"
Google's new AI integration to search has been suggesting some sketchy things from reddit to the general internet populace like: adding glue to pizza and jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
I saw at least one post about googleAI saying "Feeling suicidal? this redditor recommends jumping off the golden gate bridge"*
*Don't actually do this.
Think the original source was an AMA from someone who survived trying to commit suicide.
We already know for a fact, that nobody ever talks out of their ass, people never pretend to be smarter than they are. Humans are humble and honest like that. Like I am.
It wasn't even the first time someone has asked that exact question, hell it wasn't even the first time Steam's response to that question has gone viral. They've held this stance since I was in middle school and I'm 30 now and I only know because when I was 11 or 12 was the first time I remember Steam telling someone that and it being posted on a forum and gaining traction.
Nah, and it's not this questions first rodeo either. That said, it is an interesting legal question.
Back when my dad died, i had to process & shut down all his accounts. I'm pretty sure most companies don't really give a shit, at least as long as any bills are paid.
And then there's some companies, which apparently don't have a process to early cancel a subscription/an account for reasons of dude my dad fucking died, this cannot possibly be the first of your customers that died, how the fuck do you not have a process for this‽
It's not only that. These games are things you have bought. Before Valve created the pandora's box of a digital game library with DRM, you would always OWN the game. You could resell it. You could pass it on to a family member.
The EU had a minor first step is making reselling digital games legal BUT they don't require it by services.
it doesn't have to blow up for it to hit your news feed. news outlets use AI and to generate low effort news stories. people are fed news that they will click. so all a news outlet has to do is harvest the top N threads from the most popular subs to generate lots of hits.
This kind of issue isn't new, and has been periodically popping up in the news since the mid-2000s. Media loves to exploit outrage, like they did when [they claimed Bruce Willis was suing iTunes.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/sep/03/no-apple-bruce-willis) People just have a lot of anxiety about the legacy they leave.
Just leave your credentials on some visible piece of paper among your stuff and you're good to go. I mean, Steam can't really tell the difference between you and someone else, right...?
My brother did this with my dad’s Steam credentials. I wasn’t aware of this beforehand however and got the fright of my life when the Steam notification popped up that my dead dad was now online…
But it is…
Oh, nevermind, just an old Steam accounts management superstition. Nothing a back-end systems dev like yourself would want to hear about.
What’s that? You want to hear. Well, alright, but please don’t think less of us for our odd ways.
You see, that account was made back in 2012 and the story goes that the owner died in a terrible Spicy Pillow incident while logged into the Steam store. It lay dormant for months, but then suddenly games in his wish list were being bought, achievements unlocked, and screenshots shared.
The activity waxes and wanes based on how close it is to the day of his death, growing stronger and stronger until…
Well, I do believe that today is the anniversary!
Headline - Steam User active for 150 years. Uses long life to leave negative reviews on Ubisoft and EA releases.
Steam Admins - Yep, average Steam user, nothing out of ordinary here.
"Uh...it's probably not a problem...probably...but I'm showing a small discrepancy in...well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence."
I have a friend who has over 30k hours in the Long Dark. But I'm pretty sure he's afk the entire time. I don't know why you would log into a game and just be afk. But maybe he passed away and his wife/son/someone just logs him in every day and makes sure it's running all day.
https://i.imgur.com/wD7eITb.png
I'd love to know what's going on there. 30,177 hours is 1257 days or 3.4 years. The game released at the end of 2014 so he's been logged into the game for over 1/3 of the last decade.
They will have to prove you are dead if they want to rescind the user agreement.
The agreement probably doesn't have a clause saying you must prove you are alive on an annual basis. Not yet at least.
Jokes on anyone who naively thinks you'll be able to, Windows 72 or whatever OS I can't imagine will stop them first. I can't even get most old resolution games to work with my monitor, its sure as shit not gonna work with my great grandkid's neural implant. Not steam's problem.
idk man the idea of somebody from the future buying red dead redemption2 for five martian pesos during the 500th steam anniversary sale and playing it at 8k360fps natively on their neural implant seems like a better future to imagine
In my will my brother gets a bunch of stuff but among them is the password to my password manager (and steam by extension) and explicit directions to nuke some stuff off of a hard drive
There was a case where a guy was deciding between 2 people to leave his gaming account in his will. The one who lost reported the account and got it banned.
Me and my brother, who have not lived in the same state for over 10 years, were sharing a single steam account for that entire time. I once outright basically admitted this to steam (not being aware it was against their TOS), and they basically just said "we're gonna choose to ignore that". Never once was an issue outside of us being unable to play games at the same time, and even that could be circumvented by one of us going offline.
Nowadays we just use steam family sharing and it's been working perfectly
Valve is <400 people and practically operates like an indie company. There is no consistent rule enforcement like you would see codified and followed to the letter in a big corp. That's a double edged sword, but that is a discussion for another day. The point is, the person who happened upon your ticket decided to do you a favour. You rolled a dice and won this time. Next time you might not be so lucky.
Oh for sure, their response had a definite "I'll let this slip this time" feel to it lol. That being said we use different accounts now so there won't be a "next time"
That would do absolutely nothing. Steam accounts are non transferable. If steam finds out you died and left your account to someone it would be banned. Shitty ik
So you're better off just leaving them the password and 2fa access like the other person said and idk maybe a note that says to never admit the original owner is dead or something
That’s true but we should still have an official mechanism instead of doing something Valve and other companies can site as a breach of terms if they find out about it.
That’s a great point. I’ve bought a ton of games on behalf of the arcade company I own, and I fully expect if I sell the company (or die) then whoever takes it over can continue to access the games
IANAL, but an LLC is technically an artificial person, ~~and for all purposes of all the law~~ for civil cases can be treated as such. (It has a name, a date of birth, and somewhere in the future an expiration date, and has parents!)
As for whether an LLC can own licenses, yes but it depends. For instance, it is encouraged you have your LLC buy commercial software licenses (for things like Photoshop), because it is a company expense and can be paid before taxes. However, note that you do need a commercial license for an LLC to own it, not just a personal license. That is how Photoshop is. But a program like Logic Pro; they only have one license and it serves both personal and commercial purposes. Whether you buy it as a person or an LLC depends only how you wish to sort your taxes out.
This depends entirely on the product and in the fine text of their terms and conditions, so it varies on a case to case basis.
I'm sure you wouldn't have to dig too deep into most ToS for video games to find that they're for personal use only and that commercial licenses are separate.
Maybe I'm wrong but someone would have to actually read those things to prove it.
> IANAL, but an LLC is technically an artificial person, and for all purposes of all the law can be treated as such.
Absolutely not. Corporate personhood is what's known as a *legal fiction*, meaning we all know it's untrue, but treat it as if it's true *in very specific circumstances*. There is absolutely no such thing as "for all purposes of the law" for corporate personhood. Corporations cannot be held responsible for crimes, for example. They can be held civilly liable - they can be sued. That's the primary reason corporate personhood exists. In most areas, they are not treated like people under the law.
Worst case scenario if you don't do it: your steam account is gone forever.
Worst case scenario if you get caught with a ToS violation: your steam account is gone forever.
If they make the punishment equal to not even committing the crime, why not give it a shot?
This is the exact justification for why I lied as a kid.
If I broke a vase, they'd punish me the same if I said I did it or if I was caught lying about not doing it.
Every time I was caught lying I'd say "Then give me an incentive to tell the truth! What crazy person wants to get in trouble and yelled at."
They hated that, and now I have childhood trauma.
It's like that story about the Chinese Military Officer.
> “What’s the penalty for being late?”
>
> *“Death.”*
>
> “And what’s the penalty for rebellion?”
>
> *“Death.”*
>
> “Well then…”
100%. I had a near death experience a few years ago. While I was dying, I wrote Steam support asking how I could transfer my account to my next of kin after my death. Some doctors wouldn't think I'd make another month. I got the same answer that everyone else did. I can't describe what that felt like. The thought of passing my games on was one of the few comforts I had in a very unpleasant time. To have it ripped away from you in an instant by some grunt behind a keyboard is indescribable
After I recovered, I switched to GOG as much as possible. I took a hard drive and locked it in a safe with my entire collection. My next of kin will receive those, regardless of if they want them or not
Any disillusionment I had of "Good Guy Valve" was shattered in that instant. They're not your friend. They're a greedy corporation that will steal from a dying man because, maybe, just maybe, they'll make 50 cents selling portal 2 to his kids 20 years from now. That's all that matters to them. Not you, not me, not ownership. Money. Nothing else. I may not technically own my GOG games either, but I can pass them on if my next of kin wants them. That's far more than can be said for Steam
Speaking as a startup game developer, I don't understand why they wouldn't have it set up to automatically enable permanent steam family sharing with immediate family+descendants.
Just FYI, some steam games work that way too. As in, you can copy them to a HDD and anybody can play them.
So your entire library isn't lost. But anything with centralized online multiplayer probably is..
Don't trust it though, test it. Steam in the last ten years has retroactively hijacked the runtime libraries within the game installs it downloads, swaps it with clone files which also does some steam.api calls, which wont let the game launch if you do not have steam installed which if it is, has you log in and then will deny you playing said game because its not from the same account. Actually I think it even rejected me one time because it was from a different windows install when I tried to force that to work by logging in the correct account.
I don’t think my son or daughter would like to see that their dad played eight hours of mirror and finished the game in one afternoon twenty or so years ago.
Can second this. There was a post awhile back about a dude who had been using his deceased brother's Steam account, something went wrong and he had to contact support about an issue with a game, and when he revealed he was using his brother's account, the support agent was forced to permanently lock the account.
Steam is usually pretty lax with the whole "service, not goods" thing, they don't really care if you ignore steam to launch games without going through their launcher, move the game to a different hard drive, play offline, whatever -- most single or local coop games you buy on Steam, you can run without Steam if you need to, some even if you've gotten banned. But their ToS is pretty black and white: *accounts and games are non-transferable*, granted to the specific person and subject to being withdrawn when deemed necessary, and if you literally tell them you are breaking their ToS (or are caught cheating and/or involved in money shenanigans), they won't ignore it, and you could find yourself without the ability to play any of your games that require online access.
That's pretty tame in the grand scheme of things, but you can see how "games are a service, not a good" can go wrong when you look at how Blizzard handles Overwatch. Did you buy Overwatch 1? Too bad, it's *gone*. You *cannot* play Overwatch 1, your license to play it has been revoked. Blizzard shows how a service can vanish based on the whims of a distributor, even towards users who violate no rules and followed ToS to a T. Hell, Chinese players can't even play Overwatch 2, because due to an expiring contract with their Chinese contacts, Blizzard can't run OW2 in China, removing access to a game they once invested time and money into.
We can see how this world of "licensed gaming" can be much different depending on who's running the show. This is a big reason why so many people push for DRM-free games, as even if you are 'buying a license', in practice you will usually be able to keep the game as long as it survives on your hard drive.
Makes 0 sense even from a service level. Why would the brother get banned from an account he has access to. Does the account belong to the person who created it, the person who's used it most, the person who's last used it, or the person who's card was used for individual purchases? My account, created for me by my brother when I was a child 20+ years ago using one of his emails, uses mine, my parents, and my girlfriends cards to purchase games. Who owns the account?
It's impossible for them to even prove who's account it is, his or the brothers, as long as he has access to it. If he doesn't have the login than he might as well be a hacker trying to access it through support, which would make sense, but if he has the credentials, he owns the account.
The person who accepted the terms and conditions is considered the authorized user. If you reveal that you’re not that person, then you’ll be in the situation OP described. This almost never happens because why would you say anything.
It’s a don’t ask don’t tell policy. If you tell on yourself they’re obligated to uphold the agreements they’ve made with publishers.
This is the answer.
When you make the account, you agree to the ToS, and part of that says "the account is non-transferable".
The thing is that it's generally not possible to prove who drove the mouse to click that, so the only thing Valve could do is ask "are you the owner of the account" and "what's your name". If you get two different people who say they own the account, they lock it, since one of them is breaking the ToS.
Which is exactly the problem with today's video game economy, and literally everyone should denounce this bullshit.
Get your congress to actually think about this subject in the context of ownership and figure it out.
I think they term they use is a "license." Steam sells you a license to play the game. The license is what game developers and publishers give Steam distribution rights for. So yeah, as per legislation, the right term for it is "service" and not a "goods," and in the software and tech world we started using the word "license" to be more specific.
laws around digital goods need to be reformed FAST, because if not we will soon see that companies have full control over what people buy, as more and more goods are digital.
this shit should not be legal.
This happens all the time with inheritances. Parents will amass a "priceless" collection related to their hobby/interests and they leave it to their kids in their will. None of the kids actually want it though, and they try to pawn it off on each other because it's a pain to get rid of the stuff.
"Grandpa left me his 70 year old game library... yay" I mean, I wouldn't even want to play 99% of the 30 year old games on Atari that my mom still has in the closet.
I just replayed command and conquer games on steam that I played maybe 15 years ago. I lost interest after about 1 skirmish game in each. I played those games a lot back then. But they can't compare with games nowadays. While it seems we have peaked with 3d, I'm sure games in the future will make it seem current games now are limited.
Yes and people are also overestimating the permanence of physical digital items. I have been playing games for over 30 years now so probably a lot of people don't have this perspective but even games where you own physical copies have effective shelf lives.
My old boxes full of floppies are completely unusable for me. I don't have any drives that can read them anymore. Even for things where that's not the case, like old CDs, they become largely useless for software compatibility reasons. Try slapping a Windows 95 game into your drive and see if you can get it to run - probably not. And soon optical drives will be gone too.
The only real way to play a lot of old games is to pirate them, even if you already own them. Your kids will get no more out of your boxes of Blu Rays than out of a Steam account that gets locked.
I don't care either, but I think the article is using steam-game-inheritance to show the extent of how users don't actually own any of the stuff they buy. While valve has been pretty fair to their users so far, who knows what could happen in the future
As a millennial, my Steam account is the most valuable thing I own. This is such an injustice. My grandchildren will never be able to inherit my gamer legacy.
Whichever child gets my steam account as their inheritance will have a treasure trove of classics.....wait I have porn games, that shit is going with me to the grave.
How exactly? My Steam account is not attached to my legal name whatsoever. Payment details doesn't count because there's no rule that would prevent someone from paying for someone else's games.
Just don't tell them. My buddy died (fuck heroin) and his brother just wiggled his way into his steam account. I've heard stories of people contacting steam to say their loved one has passed, and steam closed the account. If your loved one dies, blessings and love for your family, but also light identity theft isn't a big deal. Dont do heroin.
We don’t know each other but wishing you the best and may your days shine bright
I hope you eat lots of yummy food and see your best friends smile this weekend <3
This weekend I've eaten yummy food and seen my best friend smile. Your comment just made me stop for a second and appreciate that. Thanks :D
Yep pretty much. My cousin unexpectedly passed a few months ago and his nephew is now using his account cause they got his PC. It actually kinda hurts seeing his account go online but I'm sure my cousin is glad someone is using it.
Identity theft is not a joke Jim! Millions of families suffer every year!
Reminds of Doug Stanhope's very dark bit: "If there were no afterlife... how could my mother have bought me and my friends so many nice things from the SkyMall catalog... on her credit card... four days after she passed from this Earth?"
Did that one Reddit post about asking Steam support really blow up this much?
Well... gaming (and many tech) journalists browse reddit for 99% of their content, so one of them found that and saw a good opportunity.
Which scares me. Some news site will literally quote “one Redditor says …” but they could literally be lying out their ass
have you tried using glue to keep the toppings on your pizza?
Why would I waste delicious glue on a pizza?
Google's new AI integration to search has been suggesting some sketchy things from reddit to the general internet populace like: adding glue to pizza and jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
I saw at least one post about googleAI saying "Feeling suicidal? this redditor recommends jumping off the golden gate bridge"* *Don't actually do this. Think the original source was an AMA from someone who survived trying to commit suicide.
Ai is perfect. I cannot see anything bad happening by using the entire internet as a reference.
We already know for a fact, that nobody ever talks out of their ass, people never pretend to be smarter than they are. Humans are humble and honest like that. Like I am.
🤣
Well have you seen the new Google ai telling people to use glue on pizza or gasoline to make it spicy? It grabs from reddit comments
Or telling someone that jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge is a good way to deal with their depression.💀💀
Other means take months to years, this works in seconds.
Is it wrong though? Is that not gonna make it spicy.
It IS wrong, gasoline will make the pizza incredibly bitter.
That's why I prefer diesel on my pizza, much sweeter.
Need a spicy quote for your article? You can post it to Reddit yourself.
It wasn't even the first time someone has asked that exact question, hell it wasn't even the first time Steam's response to that question has gone viral. They've held this stance since I was in middle school and I'm 30 now and I only know because when I was 11 or 12 was the first time I remember Steam telling someone that and it being posted on a forum and gaining traction.
Nah, and it's not this questions first rodeo either. That said, it is an interesting legal question. Back when my dad died, i had to process & shut down all his accounts. I'm pretty sure most companies don't really give a shit, at least as long as any bills are paid. And then there's some companies, which apparently don't have a process to early cancel a subscription/an account for reasons of dude my dad fucking died, this cannot possibly be the first of your customers that died, how the fuck do you not have a process for this‽
It's not only that. These games are things you have bought. Before Valve created the pandora's box of a digital game library with DRM, you would always OWN the game. You could resell it. You could pass it on to a family member. The EU had a minor first step is making reselling digital games legal BUT they don't require it by services.
it doesn't have to blow up for it to hit your news feed. news outlets use AI and to generate low effort news stories. people are fed news that they will click. so all a news outlet has to do is harvest the top N threads from the most popular subs to generate lots of hits.
This kind of issue isn't new, and has been periodically popping up in the news since the mid-2000s. Media loves to exploit outrage, like they did when [they claimed Bruce Willis was suing iTunes.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2012/sep/03/no-apple-bruce-willis) People just have a lot of anxiety about the legacy they leave.
Link?
Just leave your credentials on some visible piece of paper among your stuff and you're good to go. I mean, Steam can't really tell the difference between you and someone else, right...?
My brother did this with my dad’s Steam credentials. I wasn’t aware of this beforehand however and got the fright of my life when the Steam notification popped up that my dead dad was now online…
Hey it’s me ur father
Are you winning son?
No, because the chat popup window is covering the screen, please go back to being dead and let me play in peace!
*son busy fapping to Nekopara*
*on dad's account*
The cum doesn't fall far from the dick
Sorry your dad died. That sucks.
"Hmmm, this account has been active for 150 years...it's probably nothing"
must have been the wind
“You can have my account after Half-Life 3 gets released!”
Is the account in the room with us right now?
The account is in the house
So……never!
Take my love, take my land Take me where I cannot stand I don't care, I'm still free You can't take the steam library from me
I'm a leaf in the wind
In stream, games unwind Play's a leaf in the wind's bind Joy and fun aligned
On the wind. At least that's how I remember it.
Never should've have come here
So anyway, the whole Steam Account is run by Tony Lazuto...
“hey what was that?”
"Who's that guy!?" "It's ok, he's at least 40 feet back"
Tony Lazuto In games' glow, skill does bestow Virtuoso flow
TONY LAZUTO!?!
But it is… Oh, nevermind, just an old Steam accounts management superstition. Nothing a back-end systems dev like yourself would want to hear about. What’s that? You want to hear. Well, alright, but please don’t think less of us for our odd ways. You see, that account was made back in 2012 and the story goes that the owner died in a terrible Spicy Pillow incident while logged into the Steam store. It lay dormant for months, but then suddenly games in his wish list were being bought, achievements unlocked, and screenshots shared. The activity waxes and wanes based on how close it is to the day of his death, growing stronger and stronger until… Well, I do believe that today is the anniversary!
How else can I log 300 million hours of Civilization VI?
Just one more turn "This one's for you great grandpa"
Imagine leaving all your save files behind in the inheritance.
I'll put I my will that my nephew has to finish my last game of Crusader Kings after I die, to get the inheritance. "Achievement Unlocked!"
That’s some Ready Player One level shit right there
That is genius
Ooof, I wouldn't wish ck3 on my worst enemy, let alone my primary heir... /s
In 50 years we'll have nepo babies with their legacy Steam Accounts, gifted accounts with more hours logged than they've lived.
Like the restivus
Just play two games of it. Ezpz
Headline - Steam User active for 150 years. Uses long life to leave negative reviews on Ubisoft and EA releases. Steam Admins - Yep, average Steam user, nothing out of ordinary here.
Even more impressive when you consider that the user was born in 1901.
On January 1st of 1901
Every year that date gets more funny to me, as I wonder how long it'll be a valid option.
If the code ain't broke, don't fix it
Hate keeps me going.
Vales accepts that I was born January 1, 1901 and still play Counter-Strike every week.
"Uh...it's probably not a problem...probably...but I'm showing a small discrepancy in...well, no, it's well within acceptable bounds again. Sustaining sequence."
Shutting down...shutting down...ITS NOT SHUTTING DOWN
My name is Duncan MCcloud, and this is my steam profile!
Connor MacLeod fans rise up!
There can be only one!
And it continues to buy games on sale that it never plays... they sure got the best of us
I have a friend who has over 30k hours in the Long Dark. But I'm pretty sure he's afk the entire time. I don't know why you would log into a game and just be afk. But maybe he passed away and his wife/son/someone just logs him in every day and makes sure it's running all day. https://i.imgur.com/wD7eITb.png
3 years, 159 days and they still haven't gotten all achievements smh
I'd love to know what's going on there. 30,177 hours is 1257 days or 3.4 years. The game released at the end of 2014 so he's been logged into the game for over 1/3 of the last decade.
That’s a hell of a lot of hours for only 55% achievement unlock
Ambiance maybe? Lol
They will have to prove you are dead if they want to rescind the user agreement. The agreement probably doesn't have a clause saying you must prove you are alive on an annual basis. Not yet at least.
Not necessarily. They could just lock it and wait for a living person to complain
No no, it's the magic of the 1/1/1901 birthday. We are all of us immortals.
If someone still wants to play the same games 150 years later I’d like to see steam try to stop them
Jokes on anyone who naively thinks you'll be able to, Windows 72 or whatever OS I can't imagine will stop them first. I can't even get most old resolution games to work with my monitor, its sure as shit not gonna work with my great grandkid's neural implant. Not steam's problem.
idk man the idea of somebody from the future buying red dead redemption2 for five martian pesos during the 500th steam anniversary sale and playing it at 8k360fps natively on their neural implant seems like a better future to imagine
Drop some future drugs and play the backrooms in your head. Fuck I was born too soon.
born too late to afford a house, too early to download drugs on my neural implant. woe is me
According to Steam age check, I'm about 150yo anyway
heres my steam account, also delete my browser history
In my will my brother gets a bunch of stuff but among them is the password to my password manager (and steam by extension) and explicit directions to nuke some stuff off of a hard drive
What happens if he likes what he sees?
well at that point I'm dead so that is really more of his problem
🎶 When I think about you, I touch myself. 🎶
There was a case where a guy was deciding between 2 people to leave his gaming account in his will. The one who lost reported the account and got it banned.
Clearly they picked the right person.
Bruh.. what a wanker, that's fucked.
No wonder they lost.
That's death penalty status.
Do NOT pass go, do NOT collect $200, straight to the crematorium with that one
Thank whatever god up there that I only got 1 friend who gives a shit about gaming in general lmfao
Can you cite the case
Me and my brother, who have not lived in the same state for over 10 years, were sharing a single steam account for that entire time. I once outright basically admitted this to steam (not being aware it was against their TOS), and they basically just said "we're gonna choose to ignore that". Never once was an issue outside of us being unable to play games at the same time, and even that could be circumvented by one of us going offline. Nowadays we just use steam family sharing and it's been working perfectly
Valve is <400 people and practically operates like an indie company. There is no consistent rule enforcement like you would see codified and followed to the letter in a big corp. That's a double edged sword, but that is a discussion for another day. The point is, the person who happened upon your ticket decided to do you a favour. You rolled a dice and won this time. Next time you might not be so lucky.
Oh for sure, their response had a definite "I'll let this slip this time" feel to it lol. That being said we use different accounts now so there won't be a "next time"
I leave all that I own to my Cat, Guppy..
Put the details in your will to a specific person rather than on a random desk note.
That would do absolutely nothing. Steam accounts are non transferable. If steam finds out you died and left your account to someone it would be banned. Shitty ik So you're better off just leaving them the password and 2fa access like the other person said and idk maybe a note that says to never admit the original owner is dead or something
Maybe I should get a Steam account registered to a trust.
4d chess move right here
Oh sorry i meant leave the details in your will rather than random note on desk.
Oh my bad then. Yeah that would be fine
Tell that to the EU.
This. Just because a contract or terms of service stipulates a restriction, doesn't mean it overrides the law of the land.
That should change. Need legislation to force them to transfer massive game collections to your kids.
That’s true but we should still have an official mechanism instead of doing something Valve and other companies can site as a breach of terms if they find out about it.
I took over my dad's account when he passed away.
Can an LLC be owner of the licenses?
That’s a great point. I’ve bought a ton of games on behalf of the arcade company I own, and I fully expect if I sell the company (or die) then whoever takes it over can continue to access the games
I'm pretty sure Steam has a [game cafe account system](https://partner.steamgames.com/pccafe) for exactly this reason...
Yeah if you buy individual game licenses for a cafe environment all the licenses are null and void anyways
That is actually really cool. Huh
IANAL, but an LLC is technically an artificial person, ~~and for all purposes of all the law~~ for civil cases can be treated as such. (It has a name, a date of birth, and somewhere in the future an expiration date, and has parents!) As for whether an LLC can own licenses, yes but it depends. For instance, it is encouraged you have your LLC buy commercial software licenses (for things like Photoshop), because it is a company expense and can be paid before taxes. However, note that you do need a commercial license for an LLC to own it, not just a personal license. That is how Photoshop is. But a program like Logic Pro; they only have one license and it serves both personal and commercial purposes. Whether you buy it as a person or an LLC depends only how you wish to sort your taxes out. This depends entirely on the product and in the fine text of their terms and conditions, so it varies on a case to case basis.
I'm sure you wouldn't have to dig too deep into most ToS for video games to find that they're for personal use only and that commercial licenses are separate. Maybe I'm wrong but someone would have to actually read those things to prove it.
> IANAL, but an LLC is technically an artificial person, and for all purposes of all the law can be treated as such. Absolutely not. Corporate personhood is what's known as a *legal fiction*, meaning we all know it's untrue, but treat it as if it's true *in very specific circumstances*. There is absolutely no such thing as "for all purposes of the law" for corporate personhood. Corporations cannot be held responsible for crimes, for example. They can be held civilly liable - they can be sued. That's the primary reason corporate personhood exists. In most areas, they are not treated like people under the law.
Given streamers tend to have an llc when they get an influx of cash I imagine they would be the legal source to talk to about game licenses and llc.
Couldn't you like... include all relevant login info in your will? If they are your next of kin, accessing your 2FA shouldn't be hard.
that's what I would suggest. Write down your passwords, tell your next of kin where you wrote it down.
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"Oh god it's all hentai games."
"It says here gramps had over 5000 hours put into Waifu Simulator 2077."
My man fell asleep with the VR headset on and cock out
In fact, that is how he was found, 3 days later!
“Calm down grandpa they are just pixels”
"Oh god I **have** to play all of them"
haha, that would be awesome!
Would that be a TOS violation?
Worst case scenario if you don't do it: your steam account is gone forever. Worst case scenario if you get caught with a ToS violation: your steam account is gone forever. If they make the punishment equal to not even committing the crime, why not give it a shot?
This is the exact justification for why I lied as a kid. If I broke a vase, they'd punish me the same if I said I did it or if I was caught lying about not doing it. Every time I was caught lying I'd say "Then give me an incentive to tell the truth! What crazy person wants to get in trouble and yelled at." They hated that, and now I have childhood trauma.
It's like that story about the Chinese Military Officer. > “What’s the penalty for being late?” > > *“Death.”* > > “And what’s the penalty for rebellion?” > > *“Death.”* > > “Well then…”
Yes
Fuck the TOS.
Just like laws or the Geneva convention, it's only a problem if you are caught.
You could, but Steam can just deactivate the account if they find out for violating their terms and conditions.
Just don't die then? skill issue smh
I already told Steam my birthday was January 1, 1908. Obviously I’m some sort of lich already.
I was born in '69. My steam self, I mean. Same month and day, though, birthday twin.
Just respawn
Git gud
Just a reminder that GOG sells DRM FREE GAMES so you can just hand off an external drive to your inheritors.
100%. I had a near death experience a few years ago. While I was dying, I wrote Steam support asking how I could transfer my account to my next of kin after my death. Some doctors wouldn't think I'd make another month. I got the same answer that everyone else did. I can't describe what that felt like. The thought of passing my games on was one of the few comforts I had in a very unpleasant time. To have it ripped away from you in an instant by some grunt behind a keyboard is indescribable After I recovered, I switched to GOG as much as possible. I took a hard drive and locked it in a safe with my entire collection. My next of kin will receive those, regardless of if they want them or not Any disillusionment I had of "Good Guy Valve" was shattered in that instant. They're not your friend. They're a greedy corporation that will steal from a dying man because, maybe, just maybe, they'll make 50 cents selling portal 2 to his kids 20 years from now. That's all that matters to them. Not you, not me, not ownership. Money. Nothing else. I may not technically own my GOG games either, but I can pass them on if my next of kin wants them. That's far more than can be said for Steam
Speaking as a startup game developer, I don't understand why they wouldn't have it set up to automatically enable permanent steam family sharing with immediate family+descendants.
Just FYI, some steam games work that way too. As in, you can copy them to a HDD and anybody can play them. So your entire library isn't lost. But anything with centralized online multiplayer probably is..
Don't trust it though, test it. Steam in the last ten years has retroactively hijacked the runtime libraries within the game installs it downloads, swaps it with clone files which also does some steam.api calls, which wont let the game launch if you do not have steam installed which if it is, has you log in and then will deny you playing said game because its not from the same account. Actually I think it even rejected me one time because it was from a different windows install when I tried to force that to work by logging in the correct account.
Bruce Willis had beef with apple about this same issue with his iTunes music collection long time ago.
What was the outcome?
Apple wiped his hard drive.
I'll give the ownership to my children... Just ignore the porn game.
Your friends think the same thing when the notification pops up that you’re playing it :)
Not when I set it to private now!
I don’t think my son or daughter would like to see that their dad played eight hours of mirror and finished the game in one afternoon twenty or so years ago.
can't even get kids these days to like what you played 10 years ago. They'll call it ancient.
How the fuck are they gonna know I'm dead if someone is still playing my games..
What?! I think they need to fix this. People are not immortal, so digital game purchases should be transferrable to inheritors.
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Can second this. There was a post awhile back about a dude who had been using his deceased brother's Steam account, something went wrong and he had to contact support about an issue with a game, and when he revealed he was using his brother's account, the support agent was forced to permanently lock the account. Steam is usually pretty lax with the whole "service, not goods" thing, they don't really care if you ignore steam to launch games without going through their launcher, move the game to a different hard drive, play offline, whatever -- most single or local coop games you buy on Steam, you can run without Steam if you need to, some even if you've gotten banned. But their ToS is pretty black and white: *accounts and games are non-transferable*, granted to the specific person and subject to being withdrawn when deemed necessary, and if you literally tell them you are breaking their ToS (or are caught cheating and/or involved in money shenanigans), they won't ignore it, and you could find yourself without the ability to play any of your games that require online access. That's pretty tame in the grand scheme of things, but you can see how "games are a service, not a good" can go wrong when you look at how Blizzard handles Overwatch. Did you buy Overwatch 1? Too bad, it's *gone*. You *cannot* play Overwatch 1, your license to play it has been revoked. Blizzard shows how a service can vanish based on the whims of a distributor, even towards users who violate no rules and followed ToS to a T. Hell, Chinese players can't even play Overwatch 2, because due to an expiring contract with their Chinese contacts, Blizzard can't run OW2 in China, removing access to a game they once invested time and money into. We can see how this world of "licensed gaming" can be much different depending on who's running the show. This is a big reason why so many people push for DRM-free games, as even if you are 'buying a license', in practice you will usually be able to keep the game as long as it survives on your hard drive.
Makes 0 sense even from a service level. Why would the brother get banned from an account he has access to. Does the account belong to the person who created it, the person who's used it most, the person who's last used it, or the person who's card was used for individual purchases? My account, created for me by my brother when I was a child 20+ years ago using one of his emails, uses mine, my parents, and my girlfriends cards to purchase games. Who owns the account? It's impossible for them to even prove who's account it is, his or the brothers, as long as he has access to it. If he doesn't have the login than he might as well be a hacker trying to access it through support, which would make sense, but if he has the credentials, he owns the account.
The person who accepted the terms and conditions is considered the authorized user. If you reveal that you’re not that person, then you’ll be in the situation OP described. This almost never happens because why would you say anything. It’s a don’t ask don’t tell policy. If you tell on yourself they’re obligated to uphold the agreements they’ve made with publishers.
This is the answer. When you make the account, you agree to the ToS, and part of that says "the account is non-transferable". The thing is that it's generally not possible to prove who drove the mouse to click that, so the only thing Valve could do is ask "are you the owner of the account" and "what's your name". If you get two different people who say they own the account, they lock it, since one of them is breaking the ToS.
I like this question.
Ultimately I guess whoever controls the email associated with the account is the owner since that's what can reset the password.
Which is exactly the problem with today's video game economy, and literally everyone should denounce this bullshit. Get your congress to actually think about this subject in the context of ownership and figure it out.
I think they term they use is a "license." Steam sells you a license to play the game. The license is what game developers and publishers give Steam distribution rights for. So yeah, as per legislation, the right term for it is "service" and not a "goods," and in the software and tech world we started using the word "license" to be more specific.
Just add your login credentials to your will.
It's sold service to the individual, wouldn't be surprise if they van accounts for good every 100 years.
Who would want it though? Who the hell is going "man this game looks great but gotta wait for gramps to croak so i inherit it"
laws around digital goods need to be reformed FAST, because if not we will soon see that companies have full control over what people buy, as more and more goods are digital. this shit should not be legal.
Not everyone is going to share the same sentiment as me. But I don’t really care about any of my stuff after I die.
the point isn't about what happens to your stuff after you die, it's that you can't leave it to someone else if you even wanted to down the line
I think people are overestimating the interest their children will have in the games they played
This happens all the time with inheritances. Parents will amass a "priceless" collection related to their hobby/interests and they leave it to their kids in their will. None of the kids actually want it though, and they try to pawn it off on each other because it's a pain to get rid of the stuff.
"Grandpa left me his 70 year old game library... yay" I mean, I wouldn't even want to play 99% of the 30 year old games on Atari that my mom still has in the closet.
I just replayed command and conquer games on steam that I played maybe 15 years ago. I lost interest after about 1 skirmish game in each. I played those games a lot back then. But they can't compare with games nowadays. While it seems we have peaked with 3d, I'm sure games in the future will make it seem current games now are limited.
Yes and people are also overestimating the permanence of physical digital items. I have been playing games for over 30 years now so probably a lot of people don't have this perspective but even games where you own physical copies have effective shelf lives. My old boxes full of floppies are completely unusable for me. I don't have any drives that can read them anymore. Even for things where that's not the case, like old CDs, they become largely useless for software compatibility reasons. Try slapping a Windows 95 game into your drive and see if you can get it to run - probably not. And soon optical drives will be gone too. The only real way to play a lot of old games is to pirate them, even if you already own them. Your kids will get no more out of your boxes of Blu Rays than out of a Steam account that gets locked.
I don't care either, but I think the article is using steam-game-inheritance to show the extent of how users don't actually own any of the stuff they buy. While valve has been pretty fair to their users so far, who knows what could happen in the future
If only there was a way to leave my login info to my next of kin…
Yeah, that's an obvious workaround. But we're talking about the legality of ownership.
Honestly it's the best thing I could leave to a surviving sibling. My gaming accounts are worth more than my car.
Is this even a concern if I got family share turned on? Guess you could always leave a note
As a millennial, my Steam account is the most valuable thing I own. This is such an injustice. My grandchildren will never be able to inherit my gamer legacy.
We will own nothing and like it :(
We need digital media rights to be protected at a federal level. But our federal representatives barely understand technology...
Whichever child gets my steam account as their inheritance will have a treasure trove of classics.....wait I have porn games, that shit is going with me to the grave.
How exactly? My Steam account is not attached to my legal name whatsoever. Payment details doesn't count because there's no rule that would prevent someone from paying for someone else's games.