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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 😈?
You child boots up "Kabuki Fursona 7" with tears in their eyes as the lawyer just laughs.
Then they boot up Spiritfarer and everybody sobs. Lol.
How will they control if someone other continue with your account when you die?
When it appears the OG user is 150 years old.
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.
Nope. I too don’t use my own DOB but I’ll tend to keep the range correct. Maybe I should start going older.
Shame. It would be a good way to know if you are their favorite child lol. All joking aside, I think this is a compromise as others have alluded deep in comments. Valve likely doesn't care or enforce it, but they don't want to be responsible for account transfer due to games licensing and other legal shenanigans.
Is this any different from selling an account, which I presume you're not allowed to do?
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.
Would be kind of funny to see the different stats that would change if a family was able to pass on the full account. Like maybe one child didn't give a fuck about games (outside of just signing in here and there to keep it alive and update stuff like email and security) and no other activity. But then their kid goes hard into games and see the gaps of time. There would be lots of accounts that may have super awkward stuff like hentai visual novels. lol. But seeing some stupid high amounts of achievements and total hours of play time would be neat.
But not exactly shocking that these digital accounts would not have the ability to go much past your death. Unless we see the very deep change of all companies allowing people to remove a game and basically "gift" it. Which I can't see happening. Even physically having discs/carts hits a limit after so long. Normal wear of use and the material rotting does mean it is likely those would also not survive past a couple of generations. And that ignores the same issues afflicting the consoles needed to play the media.
So basically the real solution to both the digital and physical passing games (or music/movies) is to rip DRM-less copies and keep the needed tools to either use the game without having the disc or needing to register to a server that is likely gone. Might be a good idea to leave ReadMe instructions along with the iso/rom and copies of the official and community patches that help with new OSes. After that it is basically just down to needing virtual machines or some other PC emulators to run old emulators.
blockchain would solve a lot of these issues but IP owners and even steam likely, appear to be allergic to the idea of digital ownership. i wonder why?