This policy is literally against the law in the EU… Wait… double checks notes In the… US? huh… normally it’s the European Union protecting us from big tech bullshit
Not right now. But in the future if companies keep getting away with everything they may introduce some kind of bio-identification: eye scan, face id or fingerprint. And lock your account only to that. Preventing from every form of sharing.
I mean, it’s still against it. But I can’t see how they’d enforce it, unless valve starts demanding IDs. I’m afraid for a post-gaben era where Valve might just do that…
Why would you trust steam? Valve famously invented lootboxes and tried to do the NFT market thing before NFTs were big. They are the strongest DRM on the market. What makes you think they’re not just as greedy?
LMAO you have got to be shitting me. It is the bare minimum for DRM, it’s weak as fuck and games protected by Steamworks DRM are cracked almost immediately by casuals
Valve didn’t invent lootboxes. The concept has physically existed for decades, they’re called trading card packs or kinder eggs or gashapon. The latter is the inspiration for what became known as lootboxes. The first “lootbox” was actually in the Japanese version of MapleStory in 2004 and it spread in eastern markets (because pay to win is more normalized there) and in mobile games. It wasn’t until 2009 when EA added card packs to FIFA. Hard to say if they were inspired by the lootboxes from the east of the insane football trading card market in the west, or by both. It was only after a year and a half later in 2010 when Valve added loot boxes to TF2. So Valve definitely didn’t invent lootboxes, they weren’t even the first in the west to use them. You could argue that they popularized loot boxes but even there is an argument to be made that Overwatch was a much bigger cultural hit than TF2 or CSGO or EAs FIFA games and normalized lootboxes.
I don’t mind the “Valve is bad” narrative, but at least keep your facts straight. The “strongest DRM” is also BS but others have already somewhat covered that part.
I think this is more of a defence against scammers honestly, with a convincing enough scam you could make valve belive an account holder was dead and you’re a family member wanting to transfer their account to yours.
Hell, I saw my dead friend’s account message me in Russian, contacted support about it, and all they could do was remove the hacker’s access, not even lock or delete that account.
And how could they? Unless you have your full name, address, and other identifying information somewhere on your account (strongly ill-advised, obviously) Valve can’t cross check it with a death certificate and take action, for all they know you could be cooperating with the hacker or submitting fake information to “prank” your friend by getting their account removed.
Allowing account transfers would open a whole new can of worms.
Just write down the password and login if you know you’re going to go. I don’t think Valve under Gabe would have issues with that. Though I do worry for its future