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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

> I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles.

Why?

Steam has never done anything to support ownership of games, their policy completely bans transferring licenses or accounts to other people or leaving them to someone when you die. Their next CEO is someone who has only known extreme wealth their whole life and gets the job because daddy started the company, when has that been a catalyst for societal good?

GOG is the only one to have advocated a different status quo, but they have virtually no marketshare that could pressure developers and publishers to accept more equitable terms beyond eschewing DRM.

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This was actually a funny question at work over lunch. A few of us have kids and like most tech guys over 30, our steam accounts have turned into collections. So I asked, who gets your steam account when you kick it. It’s difficult to think about and seems baffling to spend thousands of dollars and hours assembling a collection only for it to poof away into nothing.

When we were in college, one of my friends joked that their stream library was their largest financial asset.

When stream trading was more of a thing, and we had a ramen diet, it was probably true

It’s steam, not stream. Normally, I’d assume it’s a simple typo, but I got worried when you wrote it twice. Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me… you can't get fooled again.

George, is it you?

Combination of a swipe text keyboard and mild dyslexia. I'm looking for a more accurate replacement to help.

Lol, relatable. For me it's not the library (because I have backups of that), but the in-game items. And not even for their monetary worth (which is relatively low), but for sentimental value (the stats counted on them).

Haha. I actually back up my steam collection via torrents of GoG releases.

Now, I can to some extent automate the rip-out of steam integration, there are solutions. And thus not rely on torrents. But why would I if it's the same thing in the end, and torrents are that much simpler.

Technically legal since Steam grants ownership?

They explicitly do not.

> The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.

https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement

Who says anyone needs to inform Valve of your passing? Make sure your children have access to the email backing the account and they're good to go.

What happens when faceID or biometrics is required? Quickly gets very creepy if your kids want to keep playing your games

What happens if Valve don't exist?

If this continues long enough there will be plenty of 140-year-olds rocket-jumping through levels in TF...

Cue the scientific reports saying "Gamers have the longest life expectancy. Look at how many 100 year olds there are on Steam!" Same people who thought Okinawans were the longest lived people on earth, just because of the poor record keeping and social security fraud there.

Yeah but you need to put that in a package that unlocks in case of your demise, timely or not. Password database and two factor authentication (back-up codes at the very least). Possibly a secondary password database if your primary one contains stuff you don't want those that stay behind to know about.

There are many signals that will inform them you are dead and AI will easily detect them: the change to your gaming routine and purchasing habits and platform usage as they grind to a sudden and complete halt except for the occasional sign-in to play one of your games, and the "age of account" will inevitably betray you.

I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.

I'm optimistic that devs empowered by LLMs and local LLM will fight back and create new platforms if gatekeeping gets too out of hand

Why would anyone use slop alternatives though? I don't think people wouldn't be creating non-slop ones.

I think the larger question is how do those marketplaces get the rights to distribute any games... this is something all Steam rivals struggle immensely with, and it's not a coding problem at all.

The expensive part of a storefront is not the UI front-end. And of thars all you care about, we have quite a few front ends that can do that job.

To play devils advocate, Steam has one of the most generous sharing functionality on all digital media. Steam Families.

The whole "we prohibit transferring accounts from dead people" is likely just a catchall to prevent liability and responsibility when people say "oh my brother cheated on my account" or "my brother said XYZ on Steam forums".

Why would Steam be unable to tell an event like cheating or saying something on a forum took place before you received ownership of the game? This is a trivial problem to solve, it doesn't necessitate everyone forfeiting all their digital possessions.

The same reason you can be pessimistic?

Maybe if you look for evidence to be pessimistic, you find that, and if you look for evidence to be optimistic you find that.

I'd rather choose the more positive, hopeful perspective than the negative, downer one. What about you?

What evidence is there to be optimistic about?

Can't you download your game off steam and play it forever; and if it can't connect to the service, it will just let you play offline?

Sure, that loses out on the ability to transfer it to a friend, but it's better.

Some of them do, the Total War games I play the most require weekly online activation.

But that's just using what you payed for, it only very slightly overlaps with what actually owning something entails.

Is that online activation Steam or is it a third party thing? Steam allows selling games that have external DRM like that. I think they, themselves, don't do it.

That doesn't invalidate your other point.

Steamworks, the integration library for games to interact with Steam features, has an optional DRM component. It's not a particularly impressive one, so it's more about stopping people copy/pasting their steamapps folder than stopping dedicated pirates, hence why so many publishers use alternative solutions.

Steam haven't put shenanigans like this because they have many competitors and PC users would leave them, the have built trust within the gaming community

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