We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.
Why would you just give money to an entity which is bound by bad laws, no matter how good it is right now?
The fact that I'm "buying" a license holds as much weight in this issue as the countless eulas and privacy policies i supposedly agreed to.
We "endusers" live in a world were we are compelled, yes compelled, to enter legal agreements to do anything, and where these terms are dictated and changed unilaterally. Terms like these should and are meaningless yo everyone except for courts that foolishly hold them valid. For everything else, they should and are ignored.
Steam is not the same since you dont truely own the games you buy.
From the legal perspective, you don't truly own the game on any of the platforms.
From the technical perspective, the moment the game is on my PC I can run it.
For passing games to your heir legally, there is no way.
For passing games illegally both steam and gog work. For steam, you can download the steamdll and backup all your library and be good to go. For gog you don't have to do that, but if we are talking of illegally backing up all your games for after you die, you are good. As long as you are alive, you can play both gog and steam games for as long as you want.
Interestingly, you can illegally share games with your family in both platforms when you are alive, but you CANNOT legally share your gog games with your family, only Steam ones.
"Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else."
Now, moving a steam account into a trust might be a breach, if they care. Even using a trust to buy a game might also be a violation of some form, perhaps, buried in the toc.
But the trust itself is a legal entity and it can own things. Just because the people behind the trust changes doesn't mean it was a transfer on the public side of the trust.
> Now, moving a steam account into a trust might be a breach
Morever, it can't happen. Accounts are non-transferrable.
> Even using a trust to buy a game might also be a violation of some form, perhaps, buried in the toc.
Right at the top, actually. GOG, not Steam: "This license is for your personal use."
It may not be legal, as I said.
So you CAN pass your collection over to your heirs on an hard disk.
Whether this is legal it’s a different matter.
GOG is very clear on this: you CANNOT provide the installers to anybody, those are for yourself only. It is easier, for sure.
It's still a terrible situation that should be solved legally.
To disrupt this natural tendency, you need an external influence which is not beholden to this scoring function. A good example (but not the only one) of such an external influence would be government regulations.
You could try to influence the cycle as consumers, but there are two significant roadblocks for this approach. Firstly, consumers are highly decentralized, and heterogeneous in their beliefs and actions. Sure, _you_ may understand and believe that a licensing model is bad, but how about the billions of others who are less politically engaged? The second is that consumers operate largely in the same profit driven system as the corporations we're trying to change. It takes a very principled individual to buy gta 6 at a 50% markup just so they can -own- the game rather than just rent it indefinitely.
I don't know of any instances in history of consumers making any meaningful impact in this way. Tons of examples of government regulation effecting meaningful change though.