Would be kind of funny to see the different stats that would change if a family was able to pass on the full account. Like maybe one child didn’t give a fuck about games (outside of just signing in here and there to keep it alive and update stuff like email and security) and no other activity. But then their kid goes hard into games and see the gaps of time. There would be lots of accounts that may have super awkward stuff like hentai visual novels. lol. But seeing some stupid high amounts of achievements and total hours of play time would be neat.
But not exactly shocking that these digital accounts would not have the ability to go much past your death. Unless we see the very deep change of all companies allowing people to remove a game and basically “gift” it. Which I can’t see happening. Even physically having discs/carts hits a limit after so long. Normal wear of use and the material rotting does mean it is likely those would also not survive past a couple of generations. And that ignores the same issues afflicting the consoles needed to play the media.
So basically the real solution to both the digital and physical passing games (or music/movies) is to rip DRM-less copies and keep the needed tools to either use the game without having the disc or needing to register to a server that is likely gone. Might be a good idea to leave ReadMe instructions along with the iso/rom and copies of the official and community patches that help with new OSes. After that it is basically just down to needing virtual machines or some other PC emulators to run old emulators.
I mostly like Valve, and agree that going too far with Stan-ing over a company is dumb. However I think the majority of people that tend to greatly support Valve comes down to both pushing tech and games forward into better consumer directions, and that they are currently not joining in on the mass enshittification as other companies (but of course all big companies can and will do some level of that given enough time).
With regards to pushing tech, they have done more (in at least the last 10 years) to force Linux to be seen as worth supporting. Their efforts to actually add to projects that were already around has been game changing. And that they kept actually putting time, money, and resources into it even after their initial efforts with Steam Machines and the original SteamOS didn’t gain traction on a mainstream level. The Steam Deck keeps outshining the other options even while being technically less powerful specs and they are putting work in to make sure things like drivers are released to help people that choose to install Windows.
But all the positive stuff will only keep happening so long as people don’t start feeling locked out or cheated. I forget a lot of the time how bad many users hated them back when the original versions of Steam were released. Many of the issues people had and were concerned about were valid and could have tanked Valve if they didn’t do everything they could to address them. If they start pulling shit like EA or really any of the console companies have done. Then it will be their time to see massive losses and get all the hate that is deserved.