What happens when someone dies?

[eusimeu]

Lets say you die today, in 70 years, does steam purge your account? Just curious.

Thanks.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Not currently, no. The account lives until Valve shuts down. Doesn't mean they won't change it at some point though.

[Ben Lubar]

Why would Steam purge your account?

[eusimeu]

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

Why would Steam purge your account?

You never know.

[HIVEmind]

game over.

[rawWwRrr]

Originally posted by HIVEmind:

game over.

Quite right.

[ꉔꏂ꒐꒒ꇙ]

Originally posted by eusimeu:

What happens when someone dies?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbgQUZ1ViNQ

And your Steam account shall stick around until the end comes for it as well.

[DarkCrystalMethod]

They should probably email you with a notice that you haven't logged on in 10 years so they're going to freeze the account and remove it from the live servers(keeping a copy offline) along with instructions on how to revive the account. That way they can still attempt to keep your account "forever" while not wasting active server space if you're idle. Now google will just straight up delete your account after a year of inactivity and thats harsh. Some people's whole lives are there and it takes 5 years to get through the legal system to figure out who owns what.

[Piston Smashed™]

I've setup family sharing, that way I can still game while relaxing on my fluffy cloud outside the pearly white gates. I'm hoping the WiFi is bloody good because I don't think my Ethernet cable is long enough.

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by DarkCrystalMethod:

They should probably email you with a notice that you haven't logged on in 10 years so they're going to freeze the account and remove it from the live servers(keeping a copy offline) along with instructions on how to revive the account. That way they can still attempt to keep your account "forever" while not wasting active server space if you're idle. Now google will just straight up delete your account after a year of inactivity and thats harsh. Some people's whole lives are there and it takes 5 years to get through the legal system to figure out who owns what.

That seems like a lot more work than just leaving the account that hasn't been touched in a decade untouched.

[DarkCrystalMethod]

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

Originally posted by DarkCrystalMethod:

They should probably email you with a notice that you haven't logged on in 10 years so they're going to freeze the account and remove it from the live servers(keeping a copy offline) along with instructions on how to revive the account. That way they can still attempt to keep your account "forever" while not wasting active server space if you're idle. Now google will just straight up delete your account after a year of inactivity and thats harsh. Some people's whole lives are there and it takes 5 years to get through the legal system to figure out who owns what.

That seems like a lot more work than just leaving the account that hasn't been touched in a decade untouched.

Having to pay for extra server space is a real killer for a lot of companies. If they can identify and 'migrate" a "dead" account to slower cheaper storage they will.

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by DarkCrystalMethod:

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

That seems like a lot more work than just leaving the account that hasn't been touched in a decade untouched.

Having to pay for extra server space is a real killer for a lot of companies. If they can identify and 'migrate" a "dead" account to slower cheaper storage they will.

Steam Cloud is already stored on third party cloud hosting, and it's not like they have a separate copy of each game each person bought. The amount of data for an individual Steam account on Valve's servers is miniscule compared to the amount of data their servers process every minute. We're talking megabytes of mostly numeric data at most.

They can't move stuff that shows up on the Steam Community to cold storage for an inactive account because it can be accessed by other accounts. So unless they're going to start deleting guides made by people who have died, there's no real reason for them to do anything to inactive accounts.

[Chika Ogiue]

Originally posted by DarkCrystalMethod:

Having to pay for extra server space is a real killer for a lot of companies. If they can identify and 'migrate" a "dead" account to slower cheaper storage they will.

Valve store every iteration of every game that has ever been publicly available through Steam. While you can only ever get the most recent build (or those developers have specifically made available through beta branches) using the standard Steam client, you can still access all of those other versions when the Steam client console is activated and the correct command line given. All of that data is taking up far more space than the database(s) that contain user account data. In other words, Valve won't be making any worthwhile cost-cutting by archiving user data, they'd just be creating extra costs in terms of man power and money spent.

[TheLevelCap]

You guys are only going to stop asking this when Valve actually see those posts and update their terms and agreements with a rule about this.

And you know what you guys will do? Cry like idiots creating posts like the ones complaining about licenses.

People already asked that in the past, why create another post about it?

JUST DON'T TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL!!! Or at least ask about it somewhere else.

Edit: thanks for the points btw.

[ᗩSᕼᑘᐺᗩ᙭]

Originally posted by eusimeu:

Lets say you die today, in 70 years, does steam purge your account? Just curious.

Thanks.

Whatever policy is in place right now, likely wont be the same policy in 70 years time.
So no one can answer you, not even the steam development team, as they wont be around then either.