Same as any other illegality. It’s legal until you get caught. The account will work fine until for one reason or another it becomes obvious you’re not the original owner of the account, and then it’s banned. Billing changes, location changes, ip changes, confession, etc.
Maybe some generations later in the future it becomes suspicious. Valve want gain money and there is no reason that it will deep investigate if the downloads are still paid from the same account and paid with the same banc account, irrelevant if it’s from a different IP or ISP, that are things that can change even with the same user (transladet to other city, changing provider or PC, etc).
I can’t be the only one that puts their age as 1st Jan any random year in the 1920s instead of taking the time to put my real age in to view new games coming out. Steam already thinks I am near death.
I wouldn’t suppose that people are required to inform steam that they’re dead. Therefore, I’d assume the easiest way to bequeath games/DLCs, etc, is to get a wishlist from your loved ones, and then gift all of those games prior to death on a credit card that you might not be able to pay, due to being dead. Steam gets the money, the CC company gets shafted. Alternately, share your credit card details with a loved one and that list, and have them order within hours of your death (this depends on whether or not you were plausibly alive when those CC transactions took place)
About 20 years ago when it first came about this was also a question and Valve said they would “find a way” to unlock games for everyone. Now back then, that was when they only had Valve games on Steam, and a weird ninja game that I bought but never played, setting a president for all time…
They can’t, but if you don’t give you password and safety codes away before you die they can’t legally let you transfer ownership of the games. Just don’t tell them and arrange for all your emails, security keys, and 2FA keys to be safely transfered to your children.
Damn…makes me want to take the time to pirate games I already bought and own…
And then write it in my will that those who inherit my few earthly possessions have to play through each of my games at least once in front of a lawyer in order to receive their inheritance. Lol, I kid, 😂…or am I 😈?
Why is the cc-by-nc-sa license disappointing? Is your disappointment exclusive to version 4.0?
My only disappontment is with those humans (and humans who use ““humans””) who side with AI model using corporations that steal other people’s content to train said models for profit, over regular everyday people.
It’s probably they don’t want to dive nose deep into all individual cases and local shenanigans* about that and probable scams that can occur. You can take other person’s account if you have both password and email access, they don’t oppose that under the table, but they don’t want to be a party in account transit because it makes them responsible for that.
Is it legal what’s described in one’s last words, can these games be lawfully transfered as they are under both legal code and game licensing agreements? If there’s no more living relatives, would Steam transfer your purchases to the government? Or if the inheritance is disputable between two parties, should it decide anything there? They let anything happen as long as they aren’t involved.
As another poster alluded to, digital goods aren’t really considered property in the traditional sense. Digital property is protected under copyright (and other IP laws). The owner could sell the game, but then they wouldn’t own it anymore (e.g. when one game studio buys another, they are buying the games as well). Instead, they grant a licence to use the game, which is how Steam works as well.
If Steam let you transfer your account to someone else (e.g. bequeath or sell it), then they would need this in the licence (which they could do in theory). Other than the logistics of that (especially how to handle people selling accounts - and the scammers that inevitably come with that), the AAA publishers are unlikely to agree to those terms. Ultimately the Steam licence is likely a compromise between Steam’s vision and all the AAA publishers that wouldn’t publish on Steam if they didn’t get the licence they wanted. A bit like how Netflix doesn’t really care if you use a VPN, they just have to enforce it so studios will let them use their content.
I would say in one sense yes, because typically property being bequeathed follows different customs than property being sold for profit.
But the point in this case is that your Steam library is not even “property” to begin with, it is a contract that becomes invalid when one of the parties (the customer) dies.
Not really, and I’m guessing it’s part of their decision here since it could open them to possibilities they don’t like if they say that an account is an asset. It’s also probably fairly complicated, legally; they need to understand how estates are settled in every country they do business, open themselves up more to scammers, etc.
I doubt they’re going to enforce this if you were to give your credentials to someone else. They’re just not going to voluntarily provide the credentials for you.
And check your local inheritance laws. Some places will take pre-death gifts into account depending on how long the time between gift and death is. The UK, as an example, looks at gifts made up to 7 years before a person’s death. It’s messed up.
If they can prove you got a bunch of gold with a loan and then your descendants suddenly have a bunch of gold, but they can’t prove it’s the same gold, is that enough to make the descendants pay back the loan?
What if you did it with Monero to make it impossible to prove it’s the same money?
My dad did this. Was almost 70k in unsecured debt at the time of his death. I gave most everything away except his fishing stuff. He had so much shit.
Only one credit card company said “it’s good you are taking over the payments”. Told her I never agreed to that, just informing you of his death, and if they contact me again my Saul level lawyer is going to enjoy that lawsuit. Never heard from them.
Aw damn, I’m glad you knew better, that’s downright predatory and should be illegal. You know there are people out there now paying their parents’ credit card bills, thinking that that’s just how things are. I hope that when those people find out, they are entitled to getting every penny back with interest.
Most debt actually can't be inherited, instead debt collectors get first dibs on inheritance assets until they're made whole or the estate runs out of assets, whichever comes first.
That doesn't mean that debt collectors won't try to convince family members to pay. Just tell them where they can shove it.
It is bullshit tho. I feel like for how massive these libraries are, I should be able to do that. Even if it requires a death certificate to make the transfer.
This is what steam is: a lesser form of ownership in exchange for the perks of the platform. I’ve come to prefer physical media first, DRM free second, and steam third. It’s just not as good of a value proposition to me compared to outright ownership (of the license to use the software, I know we don’t own “the game”).
Physical media today isn’t really much better though, increasingly frequently all a disk gets you is a license to activate a digital copy anyways, with a “must be online for first play” requirement.
I’m curious what recent games you’ve been able to purchase physical copies of that ran without updating or validating using the internet. I didn’t know any publishers still did that, at least not on PC.
I admittedly don’t buy many games lately, especially not from the big budget crowd. BG3 seems to run fine without internet, as do Sea of Stars and Noita.
Add it to the list of ethical circumstances for piracy.
In fact, for the titles I cared about, I would contact the studio/publisher themselves, explain the situation, send a death cert and a steam account, and see if they would allow a transfer or grant a new key. If not…they’re part of the problem.
I’m not in software dev but 8 years seems a long time to make a game like this. I love the game and play it daily, but it’s not that deep. It’s has 5 maps and 20 guns and 2 kinds of enemies. That doesn’t doesn’t seem like an 8 year dev time.
Likely a lot of time was spent iterating and experimenting with different ideas, testing out concepts, tweaking, etc. Haven’t played the game but I do work as a software developer.
No, just the opposite. It’s a ton of work for not a lot of results. It’d be like saying it took you 3 days to make a sandwich. That’s wayyyyyy longer than I’d expect it to take, with the caveat, I’m not a professional sandwich maker.
Why do people always feel like their inexperience on a topic is relevant?
Because this feels unusual but I’m not an expert and I can’t say whether that amount of time is truly usual or not. I’m in manufacturing and when people say what I said, then it’s usually as an invitation to discuss the topic.
I’m going to provide a different reply than the others.
Yes, I would consider 8 years a long time to make a game like Helldivers 2.
But all that means is that a studio in a good position to make that type of game would likely be able to do it in a much shorter amount of time.
In this case, we have a studio that was, in hindsight, too small and trying to be too ambitious in the game they were trying to make. So, trying to grow a studio at the same time you are trying to build an overly ambitious piece of software is going to have multiplying affects on how long said project will take.
I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…
Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?
This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.
Here’s a video showing everything iD worked on related to what was referred to as “DOOM 4” from like 2007 to 2013 before scrapping a huge part of it and coming out with the critically acclaimed 2016 version (which was only shown starting around 2015 at QuakeCon and E3).
Note that not EVERYTHING was scrapped, as you can see things like the super-shotgun model are close to the final release - as well as what you can tell were early slower iterations of the execution-style animations the game became famous for doing, but a lot of what is shown in that trailer was never to be seen again outside of these old videos people have attempted to archive.
Pretty sure the maps have static meshes but their placement is randomized. So the maps may be similar with handmade pieces, but those pieces are randomly placed to generate the map.
You’re leaving out Joel completely. They had to make that system for him to GM us, and I like how we choose what new weapons and stuff we unlock with our actions.
The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.
Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.
Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.
Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.
I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it’s been so successful.
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