It turns out that digital rights management and its consequences extend even beyond your passing when it comes to Steam. Valve has made it clear that no, you cannot will your Steam account or games to someone else when you die.
The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable” the response reads. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”
↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica
My wife and I make sure we know each other’s passwords and login credentials to the most important accounts and services in our lives, since an accident can happen at any time, and we’d like to be somewhat prepared – as much as you can be, under the circumstances – for if something happens. I never even considered merging Steam accounts, but at least granting access to the person named in your will or your legal heir seems like something a service like Steam should be legally obliged to do.
I don’t think Steam’s position here – which is probably par for the course – is tenable in the long-term. Over the coming years and decades, we’re going to see more and more people who grew up almost entirely online pass away, leaving behind various accounts, digital purchases, and related matters, and loved ones and heirs will want access to those. At some point over the coming decades, there’s going to be a few high-profile cases in the media about something like this, and it’s going to spur lawmakers into drafting up legislation to make account and digital goods transfers to heirs and loved ones not a courtesy, but a requirement.
In the meantime, if you have a designated heir, like your children, a spouse, or whatever, make sure they can somehow gain access to your accounts and digital goods, by writing stuff down on paper and putting it somewhere safe or something similar. Again – you never know when you might… Expire.
Once you go GOG you never go…
I always buy things on GOG and not Steam if they are available on GOG (GOG allows you to download DRM-free offline installers), unfortunately, lots of stuff that is available on Steam isn’t available on GOG.
” Over the coming years and decades, we’re going to see more and more people who grew up almost entirely online pass away, leaving behind various accounts, digital purchases, and related matters, and loved ones and heirs will want access to those”
really, why?
why would your loved ones would want access to your steam account of all things? I can understand social media, usually just to make the final announcement and wrap things up, but steam?
Letting aside the accomplishments, badges and stuff (which I don’t feel any attraction to, but others apparently do), some steam accounts contain collections for which more than 5K was spent.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3apckf/how_much_is_you_steam_account_worth/
And these figures are from 8 years ago.
I’d like my little boy have my account, even though I haven’t spent one tenth of that. I guess I’d have even a financial cause if I had spent more than 5K.
But, my little boy Ali, if you’re reading this, don’t ever buy a Paradox expansion if it is not on a huge sale. DON’T. Just don’t.
Ha, I’m not going to even remotely mention how much I’ve spent on Steam… Even just my Fantasy Grounds account is stupid on how much cash has flowed…
Traditionally you inherit things someone bought… A friend of mine inherited a large collection of vintage consoles and associated games from his father and i’m sure there are many others.
License instead of buy.
That’s what the software and entertainment industry has been trying to impose on us for decades.
And all those texts in hadron-size fonts have all been barring us from claiming ownership on things we thought we bought.
I’ve got my family to use LastPass. And within that we have each other as dependents.
When family members have passed, one of the hardest things was finding out What they left behind then the countless hours on the phone or via emails to gain access.
Some things, like a family member’s bitcoin were lost, because no one knew how to access them as their wallet password died with them and there is no central authority to gain ownership again.
Adurbe,
There must be a lot of people who go through that, trying to piece together other people’s digital lives.
Regarding the wallet, I’m not sure if it’s worth it but you might try brute forcing it. I’ve had good luck with hashcat and gpu password cracking.
https://allprivatekeys.com/cracking_wallet.dat
Of course it really depends on how complex the password was, but most people’s passwords aren’t that secure.
Alfman, Adurbe,
Just brainstorming…
It might be possible to add “future transactions” into bitcoin where a wallet will transfer all their assets to another one, or equally to several, unless cancelled at a certain time.
Or maybe Bitcoin might not allow this, but Ethereum with their higher flexibility can.
The idea is “as long as I am alive”, I will postpone this transaction say by 18 months. And when the owner passes away, it won’t be possible to cancel it, hence it goes to the executor of the will.
sukru,
A technical solution to a real problem, that is an interesting thought 🙂
I really don’t know if things like this can be done with ethereum contracts. Probably need some client rewrite. Adding to the brainstorm….it’s not uncommon for the elderly to continue living several years after becoming senile. The ethereum contract might activate before death. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but may have unintended consequences such as legal/tax implications.
It really seems like we need a more comprehensive solution for all digital assets, limiting it to ethereum makes it a rather niche solution. From a purely technical standardization standpoint, we can do better. The will itself could contain cryptographic signatures that match user’s public keys made for this purpose. However it’s very hard to envision the kind of standardization needed becoming widely deployed across providers.
Alfman,
Aren’t laws technically like that? They are (sometimes vague) procedures to follow on certain conditions. We just have the ability to code it in a more strict and concise way.
Yes, this is a valid concern. One solution is transferring these to an escrow, that could also act as or help with conservatorship (which is another topic on its own). This way the funds does not move to another ownership until actual day of death.
It’s already acquired that licenses of software you purchased in EU are possible to resell.
That’s how I bought my mother legal licenses of MSOffice (yeah…) for a 10th of the original price.
The rationale is that while you don’t own the software, you own the license, as a good like anything else. In other words, non-transferability is already acquired in EU.
It’s only a matter of time that the same will happen for inheritance, IMHO.
As someone called, this is “Harry Potter Goblins” style “ownership”. You get the license from a master craftsman, but when you pass away the good returns to the original creator.
Not that it is inherently a bad arrangement. But this is not how things are “sold” to us. Unless they replace the “buy” buttons with “license”, it is essentially false advertisement.
sukru,
After smashIt posted Louis Rossman video in the ifixit thread I came across this other video that covers this topic: content you buy but gets taken away.
“Piracy is MORALLY JUSTIFIED after Telstra Locked Customer Purchases Behind New Hardware”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DvOF-giJQ
IMHO this is just going to keep getting worse until legislators pass laws to explicitly protect buyer rights. The trouble these days is that consumers no long have a physical copy, it’s all locked behind someone else’s server. IMHO this ownership loophole needs to get closed. The law should dictate that companies that revokes content after the fact for any reason without the buyer’s consent becomes an automatic breach of contract. Consumers who legally purchased content need to legally be entitled to a full refund when the content can no longer be accessed due to no fault of the buyer..
This may be unrealistic legally, but at least morally in the case where service providers holding the content end up shutting down permanently, the buyers should be allowed to “pirate” the content they paid for but have been deprived of using. After all the copyright owners were already paid legitimately for those copies.
Alfman,
Thanks for sharing the link. It seems like this never ends.
There were more cases like Sony buying Funimation when they have Crunchyroll and becoming the defacto Anime provider in the USA (a thing regulators completely ignored, btw). But their first action was purging all Funimation purchases, and making digital codes useless saying “we only support subscription”. So say you “bought” “Naruto” seasons $20 a piece, but your only option to be able to continue watching it is paying another about $10 *per month*.
And about civil disobedience?
This is exactly how we got those exceptions in copyright, but of course the challenges are not easy, and many people will falsely be accused.
The Napster / MPAA fight was like that. They carged many grandmas hundreds of thousands of dollars, until they had to give up. Not entirely but at least real mp3 purchases was a thing (being able to download them DRM-free).
Google did a similar move with scanning all the books for libraries, and even though it was technically illegal, they got an exemption after the fact.
Internet Archive is similar, they went ahead and did many technically illegal things, but are still standing and getting explicit (and sometimes implicit) approvals form library of congress.
“It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission” when you are right.
Valve aren’t above the law nor our their license agreements. I’m not sure if this issue has ever actually been tried in court, but I can see a court overriding valve to enforce the will upon death. I also agree with sukru’s point about false advertisement.
Death aside, The real question is, what will happen to your account when Valve is absorbed by a merger ? Will the rules change? Will DRM expire everything about your purchases, etc.? I prefer the old tech as having physical media locally, as I can utilize them at will or will it to love ones.
spiderdroid,
Also, what’s going to happen when the copyrights finally expire? Congress have pushed copyrights so far out that we won’t be alive to see it, but all of this content is legally supposed to become public domain. I question whether this is really going to happen for the majority of software that is either locked down via DRM or worse locked into irreplaceable remote servers. Even today we’re already seeing certain games becoming unusable when server side components shut down. In general the public are not given the binaries nor source code to continue to run their games by themselves… unless outsiders have the resources to hack the software and reimplement the missing server bits by themselves, the software just stops working.