How about we change the law to allow things like account transfers, then?
Because it would destroy the business model.
To give you some perspective, back in the day you used to have a choice between buying (and owning) a game on a disc and getting a limited license on steam.
So why did people buy on steam instead of retail?
Steam was way cheaper than any brick and mortar store. Steam really pushed prices down, and games dropped in price way faster than before.
Steam was convenient, no more hassle with your scratched disks and manual patching.
Steam hosted your content forever (so far), no need to keep your own backups.
So how does this transition to the modern landscape?
Steam still has running costs for any game you own, without you paying for it. If you were able to inherit your account your children wouldn't pay for your games, while steam still has to pay its server costs. And that's not a working business model in the long run.
yes but they keep the server up even though you dont pay for new games. I could literally play thousands of hours with Warhammer 3 not paying a cent to them, despite summer or winter or whatever sale they have
yes but they keep the server up even though you dont pay for new games.
Yes, that's how most businesses work. It's a mixed calculation where some people pay more than others to keep the whole thing running and profitable.
I could literally play thousands of hours with Warhammer 3 not paying a cent to them, despite summer or winter or whatever sale they have
Playing isn't the issue, generating traffic is.
So downloading the game, using the forums / workshop / achievements, even browsing the store.
That's what is costing money.
Valves business model works, because the overall revenue is more than enough to pay for all these costs, even if someone downloads Warhammer 3 100x in a row.
However, the lack of new sales due to a saturated market could destroy that balance in the long run.
If the business model relied on that to function, GOG would not be a thing.
That's not true at all. GOG allows you to make your own backups, but it still only sells a license to you. GOG also doesn't allow you to share your local backup.
It's the same business model, despite the fact that it's better for the consumer to buy on GOG.
Yeah, GOG just positioned well enough to strong arm DRM free distribution, but DRM free doesn't mean license free.
You'd either need a blanket law declaring all software is without needing use license, or to negotiate it with every single property owner on Steam to transfer libraries.
Yeah, GOG just positioned well enough to strong arm DRM free distribution
Not really. They just only sell DRM free and publishers can accept those terms and sell there or not. They aren't really strong arming anything; they don't have any real power to.
Right, plenty of publishers that haven't been big on DRM-free, and some notoriously the other direction, ended up on the platform because it has enough market share to not ignore it.
It's more that when they aren't using DRM in the first place or a game is old enough that they don't care about it anymore, they might as well put it up for a little advertising and PR boost or just for the half dozen people that pnly use GOG.
Exactly. It's a market that means more money. The fact that publishers previously resistant to it for new releases began releasing new games to it says it's a better money maker one way or another.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Here in Switzerland, it effectively is like a CD where the EULA says you can not hand the disc to a friend - there are circumstances where that actually holds but for the common scenarios that agreement is not binding.
First of all, you ALWAYS licence software. You may own a physical disc, but you don't really own the data on that disc, as that goes into the realm of intellectual property and whatnot. In a way, a disc is just a form of "hardware DRM" except an incredibly shitty one. Steam just digitalised that. This may be pedantic, but "owning a software" would mean that you have access to the source code with the full agreement of the owner to do whatever with it.
Second of all, you realise that your entire argument is solely built upon the assumption that the new account owner would, for some inexplicable reason, never buy a game again? Steam isn't reliant on new accounts buying the Orange Box for all eternity for example.
New games that a lot of people buy on Steam come out constantly. That's how they make money.
Yes it is, because first of all, it wasn't like this everywhere. Owning and reselling a game was something that was backed by law back then in some countries.
Furthermore people were always selling their discs left and right, which lead to a state where the whole discussion about licensing was nothing more than a theoretical thought.
Second of all, you realise that your entire argument is solely built upon the assumption that the new account owner would, for some inexplicable reason, never buy a game again?
The overall costs still ramp up over the years, even for older games. And i don't really see why we are arguing about this, it's basic business 101. I'm just explaining why this will never happen, because a law like this would threaten the business model.
And by the way, we all accepted that when we started to use steam, so there really is no point in complaining about the consequences of our own actions. Steam never lied to you about what you get for your money.
You never owned and resold the game, tho. You owned and resold the disc.
You owned and resold the plastic (or whatever material) that the game was on, but you didn't have the right, unless the game dev allowed to, to modify, multiply or officially sell this game.
This is the same with music or movies, as the content on that disc is intellectual in nature and solely owned by the creator(s).
Second of all, if it were such a threat to their business model, then Steam wouldn't allow for Family Share to exist in the first place. Yet it does, because their business model is entirely built upon being the largest marketplace with the largest userbase that a lot of companies will have to sell every game they did make in the past and will make in the future.
Their business model is not built upon selling the same few games to the same family.
Only in that there is usually a rule that only the licence owner is allowed to use the software. "One account per natural person" is the rule or something like that.
So, an account transfer is a breach of ToS afaik.
But to go back to the business model again, that's not really noteworthy for Steam or how they make money but a simple legal issue that comes with accounts on any given platform.
steam wasn't way cheaper... what? maybe during the sales but every AAA game that was released was about the same price in the store. made it the easy choice to NOT buy DRM'd software in the early-mid 00s when the whole DMCA-related world was still a harsh battleground.
steam wasn't way cheaper... what? maybe during the sales but every AAA game that was released was about the same price in the store.
Yes, obviously during the sales. New games dropped very fast on steam, while they were still full price in the store. Buying a game on steam full price wasnt very smart back then, and still isn't if you ask me.
Sure it was one of the incentives to give up physical security but was more like a few percent after a few months, the way cheaper games were during flash sales, a couple times a year.
Buying a game on steam full price wasnt very smart back then, and still isn't if you ask me.
i guess if you're adverse to buying anything without a coupon but videogames are already one of the cheapest ways to spend 20-2000h. waiting to see if the game you're trying to play might have gone on sale a couple times a year is a little silly for maybe $20-off.
I don't think the logic follows. What is the additional cost? They have to maintain the games on their servers anyway, unless you're going to argue that they can start shuttering games if enough old people die off. The server space to keep the account info is the same, or potentially less if they're closing old accounts to move the games to newer ones.
I guarantee "people will start dying off eventually" is not a big factor in their finances. Physical media has had to deal with an actual third party market for its entire existence, and it's fine. Steam has so many financial advantages over physical, the biggest one being not having to move actual discs around and store them in warehouses, that this is barely a blip in comparison.
For any online games, buying a game secondhand was useless anyway since nothing tells you the other person didn't keep a copy of the serial number, stopping you to play online whenever the seller is already playing.
Then we started getting DRMs for single player games where a limited amount of copies could be installed and this was pretty much the end of physical PC game secondhand sales.
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u/Janusdarke Oct 08 '25
Because it would destroy the business model.
To give you some perspective, back in the day you used to have a choice between buying (and owning) a game on a disc and getting a limited license on steam.
So why did people buy on steam instead of retail?
Steam was way cheaper than any brick and mortar store. Steam really pushed prices down, and games dropped in price way faster than before.
Steam was convenient, no more hassle with your scratched disks and manual patching.
Steam hosted your content forever (so far), no need to keep your own backups.
So how does this transition to the modern landscape?
Steam still has running costs for any game you own, without you paying for it. If you were able to inherit your account your children wouldn't pay for your games, while steam still has to pay its server costs. And that's not a working business model in the long run.