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After you die, your Steam games will be stuck in legal limbo
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Why presume when you can read the T&C?
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.
A service cannot define stipulations that go against civil law ~~common law~~, even with when agreeing to "T&C". When you buy something in a store and then later they go "nono you didn't actually buy it", that is selling under false pretense.
What are you talking about ofcourse it was, and GOG launched 5-6 years later then Steam. When Steam was launched it was marketed as your library of games made as convenient as possible. You lock yourself into our platform and we'll provide you with many tools like cloudsaves, chat system and online services like Xfire all-in-one, and even when you lose your CD's, the game is tied to your account, not a physical CD.
When you go into a store and buy something, you tend to leave with a physical product. Not so with Steam.
You mention a "library" of games...when you take something out of the library, it's not yours.
How do you normally access your games? Through the Steam platform, or by running executables directly from your machine (without needing an internet connection)? Because if you usually use the Steam platform, that was the first hint that you don't "own" the games. And if you need an internet connection, that was the second hint.
Another big hint is, as you said, the game is tied to your account. Not your person. Your account is explicitly non-transferable (e.g., in death). As well, they can remove your access to your account for not being in line with the T&C.
You buy a drill from a store, then you use the drill to break someone's lock. But you still own the drill -- neither Home Depot nor Ryobi has a legal right to take that drill away from you, even if you get caught.
Again, I'm not defending Steam here. This is why I recommend people look into DRM-free services like GOG if you actually care about "owning" your games.
Otherwise, good luck with your class-action lawsuit against Steam. It's not like I have an empty Steam library, so if a class-action actually won, I'd benefit from that too. I just don't think it'll ever happen, thanks to the T&C which most people seem to generally know and accept.
What the fuck are you on about, when I take something out of my personal library at home it absolutely belongs to me.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. DRM is copy and piracy protection and was never a way to lease a game instead of buying. DRM free means you can copy it to anyones PC and will work fine.
Lol...your personal library at home is composed of physical objects that you bought and assembled into what you call a library. A better word might be a "collection" rather than a library, but we're getting into semantics here.
You seem to be getting very emotional about this. Your anger should really be directed towards Steam, or maybe yourself for not reading the T&C.
DRM is used for copy and piracy protection, yes, but it encompasses many kinds of digital rights, including access. Steam itself is DRM -- they manage the rights of which account holders can access which digital games. Even with Steam's Offline mode (which not all games support), you can run into situations where you can't play your game offline because of update issues.
Give the Steam T&C a skim, and find out whether you own your games forever. And if I'm wrong and you find something in the T&C that invalidates what I've said, then I'd be happy to see it.
Digital content doesn't fall under the same rules as physical items, for better or for worse.
You seem to be missing my point, it is very clear what Valve thinks about this. It's literally the article above? And I get their point, but I'm arguing they don't have a legal leg to stand on.
In the EU there is legal precedent to give access to every account of a deceased person to their next of kin. T&C doesn't mean shit when it goes against consumer protection or civil laws.
When the T&C say you have to give your kidney to Gabe Newell it won't hold up in court.
I thought we were discussing whether or not a game purchased on Steam is something that the purchaser "owns" just like a physical game...
But if that precedent is there, it'll be interesting to see it play out. Steam users in the EU have definitely died before, but I guess nobody has ever put one in their will yet? Or tried to do an account transfer?
It's one thing to share the credentials, but I don't think we'll see Steam games going from one account (owned by a deceased person) being transferred into an existing account of someone named in the will.
...which, of course, would be perfectly possible to happen with physical games.
I'm sorry but you're wrong and I'm sorry this is how you're finding out. DRM is absolutely about limiting and controlling access to content you don't own, that's it's entire purpose.
I'm sorry but you're wrong, DRM is about the management of legal access to digital content (literally Digital Rights Management). Essentially a way to check if you have paid for the content you're about to consume, and because protecting the copyrights to digital works is inherently almost impossible, it also tries to prevent unauthorised copies.
Blurays have DRM, they can only be used by a reader with a correct certification, which only gets that if they have implemented HDCP among other specs. I own my blurays and will happily pass them on to the next generation.
But sure, give it your own meaning so you can witchhunt lmao
I feel like we both mean the same things here, and I'm using more extreme and evocative language about it, but we're literally on the same page. I know a lot, and I mean a lot about DRM, and it means both of what we say.
DRM is intended to limit who accesses the content, on what devices, and when. It does it through a number of mechanisms from accounts, to encryption and certs, to digital hashes and stored keys.
These companies that sell you access don't sell you a copy of the content though, they absolutely only sell access. You have no legal right to the content, no 'right of first sale' rights to resell, you really don't have rights to the content that are guaranteed, they can always, and I mean always legally revoke access to you, even though you paid, for any reason they want and you don't have legal recourse.