Let’s theorize a little. Imagine you’ve been a Steam user for over 15 years.. In all that time, you’ve accumulated more games than you can play in a lifetime, but you still can’t resist the temptation of a good discount. Before Steam, you satisfied your “appetite” for games the old-fashioned way, by buying physical media and calculating when a new shelf would need to be bought, given the risk that the one that was about to expire by then.

The benefits of digital distribution, added to some truly remarkable offerings, made you come alive virtually absolute disappearance of physical support, especially if we are talking about PC games. So from a certain point the shelves stopped filling and instead you started to see your digital collection reach and far exceed the number of titles you had previously accumulated with so much time (and investment).

When you started creating your collection, you were young, you didn’t think much about the future, you were in the prime of life and nothing bothered you. However, as you age, you begin to ask yourself questions that range from the purely existential to the defiantly material. What have I done with my life? How much time do I have left? Why don’t tomatoes taste like tomatoes anymore? And of course, What happens to my Steam game collection on the day I miss it?

A Steam account has an economic value, of course variable, which you can check as we tell you here. However, Steam’s terms of use prevent the sale of accounts, as well as their games, although this may change in the future due to legal issues. However, What happens when you die? Can you inherit your Steam account? Unfortunately, no, as we read in VG247, the legal terms of the platform do not allow this. What’s more, you won’t even be able to give your loved ones your login details unless Valve specifically allows you to do so.

So once again we find ourselves face to face with one of those situations where buying is not owning, another example user licenses gradually impoverished user rights. If I maintain them properly, it’s possible that a game I physically bought for 5 euros at the beginning of the century could end up in the hands of my loved ones, but if I spend 60, 80, 100 or 120 euros tomorrow on a big five-fold edition of A and the day after tomorrow i will be unlucky enough to play in fade to white, the license will come with me. As incredible as it may seem. And yes, it’s only partly Steam’s responsibility, because you can put your hand in the fire by betting that the developers and distributors are also behind these policies.

Which leads me to think of a line that has gained weight over the years: If purchase is not ownership, piracy is not theft.