Reading time: 2 minutes – Spotted on NME
If you are one of those people who take advantage of sales on the Steam platform to stuff their library with discounted video games “while waiting to have a machine powerful enough to run them”, don’t count on your descendants to finish them. If we are to believe an article published on the site of the British magazine NME, you cannot transmit your dematerialized games, because they are not exactly yours.
It was a user called “delete12345” (we can safely say that it is a pseudonym) who questioned the after-sales service of the gaming platform. “I don’t plan on dying soonhe specifies. MBut when this is the case, could I transfer ownership of my games by will?
The response from the video game platform owned by Valve Corporation, the main portal for selling games for download, was clear: “Steam accounts and games are not transferable. Steam Support cannot give third party access or merge their content with that of another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be passed on in a will.”
This response therefore indicates that a will is not admissible to give a third party access to an account whose owner is dead. But why contact a notary when it is enough to transmit to your descendants an identifier and a password? According to Steam’s terms of service, this is again not allowed: you cannot play with another person’s account, even if they are deceased.
Bruce Willis gets involved
Beyond the fact that the descendants of delete12345 will have to go to the checkout again to play Goat Simulator, this exchange illustrates a recurring problem in the dematerialized content market. In 2012, the media reported that Bruce Willis intended to sue Apple for prohibiting him from sending the contents of his iTunes account to his family. The case turned out to be false, but the question was asked.
What do you own when you “buy” a video game, if you can’t give it away or resell it? The question also arises about the possibility of accessing the code to transform it. If a certain tolerance exists for “mods” on PC, a limit must be set when these transformations allow cheating in multiplayer mode. In reality, everything is a question of terminology and we must stop talking about “purchases” and “owners” of games: we only pay a personalized right of use (or listening for an MP3 and viewing for a film).
More than ten years ago, this concept of material ownership was already considered obsolete for dematerialized products. The generation that has not blown into Nintendo cartridges or rewound cassettes with a pen will know better than the previous one what what we “buy” on these platforms represents. So, you may have paid a little dearly for it. Goat SimulatorNo?
Sorry, delete12345, your bereaved family, gathered around a notary, will not wait with anxiety to know to whom you will bequeath your part of Skyrim and your few seasons of Football Manager 2019. But if you leave them your access codes on a piece of paper taped to your screen, the memory of your video game exploits will be passed on for a few more years, without Steam coming to hold your heirs accountable.
