Transfer games to family members

[Heater]

I think a great feature would be to allow me to transfer games to an account that is somehow linked to mine. I understand that Family Share allows me to share games with my kids, however, my daughter will eventually reach an age where she wants to play games with me, or chat with her friends. As it stands now, half my steam library is kids games that I will never play. So one day, I will have to make a new account for her, which will allow her to play mulitplayer games with me, and also chat with her friends. I would love for me to able to transfer all the games I've bought her so I can do this sooner, rather than later. I would really hate to repurchase most of these as I have no use for them in my account.

Now, I realize the argument may be that this feature can be abused by people trying to game the system somehow, but I would be totally okay with restrictions on this, like once you transfer a game, you have to wait 'x' amount of days before transferring again. Or...you can only transfer games to accounts that are linked to your account (which is not a current steam feature)

[Gwarsbane]

Never going to happen. If you had bothered you use the search function first you would have discovered this has been asked for many times and rejected many times.

Devs/publishers and valve would lose a crap load of money because why should I buy a game from them for 50 bucks, when I can wait a month a buy it off someone for 30 bucks via paypal and have none of that money go to devs/publishers and valve?

And then I play it for a month till I beat it, and then sell it off for 25 or 30 bucks and make most if not all of my money back and the devs/publishers and valve still get no money....

Thats the problems. If this was brought in, many devs/publishers would leave steam to go to some place that doesn't offer such a feature.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Steam is highly unlikely to allow permanent transfers of games (or technically, game licenses) from one account to another. This is because:

1. A hijacker/scammer/etc. could take control of an account, then transfers the games without the proper owner's permission. If there is no recourse for this, then the owner has permanently lost some games. If there is a recourse for this, then the owner may be able to get their games back, but (so-to-speak) legitimate transfers could be affected by people abusing this recourse in order to get their games back or deny others their games, leading to a lot of he-said-she-said problems that Steam Support would not like to have to resolve.

2. Allowing permanent transfers of game licenses means that a secondary market for games will arise. (It will arise no matter whether Steam officially supports it, because there is demand for it.) The secondary market will of course be a way for people to get games for cheap. This now means that the primary market -- selling games directly from developer/publisher to customer -- will now have to compete with the secondary market. A lot of primary market sales that were people buying at these deep discounts that Steam is famous for, will instead go to the secondary market. This will make developers/publishers unhappy, and become almost like a legalized form of piracy, since they cannot get the revenue from these sales (and even if Steam limits this to financial transactions, and the publishers do get a cut of the revenue, the discounts won't be as good because now you have several sides all trying to get money for the copy of the game, and the publishers will get less of it.) And when publishers/developers are not happy, they will stop selling their games on Steam, and Valve will be unhappy since they make less money and so will many other customers be unhappy because Steam will have fewer new games for sale.

3. There is no such thing as scarcity for digital products.

[v1ctuh]

You can either give your daughter your account and you make a new one, or rebuy those games for your daughters new account.

[Heater]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

Never going to happen. If you had bothered you use the search function first you would have discovered this has been asked for many times and rejected many times.

Devs/publishers and valve would lose a crap load of money because why should I buy a game from them for 50 bucks, when I can wait a month a buy it off someone for 30 bucks via paypal and have none of that money go to devs/publishers and valve?

And then I play it for a month till I beat it, and then sell it off for 25 or 30 bucks and make most if not all of my money back and the devs/publishers and valve still get no money....

Thats the problems. If this was brought in, many devs/publishers would leave steam to go to some place that doesn't offer such a feature.

I dont care if there are numerous requests. Im making one in hopes Steam will see there is a valid need and justification for such a feature. You also didn't obviously read my post. I stated that I understand a feature like this can be abused by people "re-selling" digital content, which is why I mentioned a possible feature like "family accounts" that I can tie a family members account to mine, that way games cant just be sold to friends.

If steam wanted to implement this with certain security features to prevent reselling to friends, they could. Ive spent 100s of dollars on games for my young daughter. She will eventually reach an age in a year or 2 where she will need her own account. Why should I repurchase those games again when I bought them FOR her and never played them?

[Heater]

Originally posted by VKLBR:

You can either give your daughter your account and you make a new one, or rebuy those games for your daughters new account.

So it makes sense to spend a few hundred dollars to rebuy games Ive already bought? That will just sit stale on my account and never be played again? Also, I have almost 200 games on my account, not just gonna give my account up either, thats ridiculous.

They need to implement a digital license transfer feature for family members as the family share feature just isnt good enough. It works ok now for her to use my account, but screws me when I reach a point that she needs her own account.

[Hannibal]

And if they did that game companies would go out of business. What do you think they do? Work for free? Do you work for free?

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Originally posted by heater:

Originally posted by VKLBR:

You can either give your daughter your account and you make a new one, or rebuy those games for your daughters new account.

So it makes sense to spend a few hundred dollars to rebuy games Ive already bought? That will just sit stale on my account and never be played again? Also, I have almost 200 games on my account, not just gonna give my account up either, thats ridiculous.

They need to implement a digital license transfer feature for family members as the family share feature just isnt good enough. It works ok now for her to use my account, but screws me when I reach a point that she needs her own account.

Alternatively, you should buy DRM-free, then each game can work like you give her a game disc and she can play it because you're already long done with it and aren't playing it anymore.

[Hannibal]

Ive always bought my grandkids games i already own. You must be lost on how licensing works, its not transferable. The other thing is you point to steam as if they should do this. Its not up to them, it would be up to each dev and publisher. Steam is the store, they dont own the games to give them away.

[Heater]

Originally posted by ӇƛƝƝƖƁƛԼ:

Ive always bought my grandkids games i already own. You must be lost on how licensing works, its not transferable. The other thing is you point to steam as if they should do this. Its not up to them, it would be up to each dev and publisher. Steam is the store, they dont own the games to give them away.

I bought the game FOR her, but because steam is required to play the game, I dont think a 6 year old needs their own account so I of course put it on my account. You act like I am trying to sneak one over on steam. The games I bought for her, are hers...but I redeemed them on my account cause of her age. Now that shes older, I feel it would be nice if I could somehow transfer them to her own account.

You must be lost on how steam works....steam is NOT a store, steam is a platform that is required to run some the games. If it was just a store, I can purchase the game, and give my daughter the license code to install it and play it however she wants without steam.

[Heater]

Originally posted by ӇƛƝƝƖƁƛԼ:

And if they did that game companies would go out of business. What do you think they do? Work for free? Do you work for free?

Again, I already bought the fricking game, why should I buy it again. Did you know origin can transfer games? I know this because I accidentally had 2 accounts, and was able to transfer battlefield 4 from one account to another.

[SpunkyJones]

Originally posted by heater:

Originally posted by ӇƛƝƝƖƁƛԼ:

And if they did that game companies would go out of business. What do you think they do? Work for free? Do you work for free?

Again, I already bought the fricking game, why should I buy it again. Did you know origin can transfer games? I know this because I accidentally had 2 accounts, and was able to transfer battlefield 4 from one account to another.

Your transferring a Electronic Arts game across its own system. Will not happen on steam who is dealing with numerous developers.

[Heater]

Originally posted by SpunkyJones:

Originally posted by heater:

Again, I already bought the fricking game, why should I buy it again. Did you know origin can transfer games? I know this because I accidentally had 2 accounts, and was able to transfer battlefield 4 from one account to another.

Your transferring a Electronic Arts game across its own system. Will not happen on steam who is dealing with numerous developers.

Still dont see why this cant be done. What if I create a second account, I own both accounts, but simply want to keep them separate. Its just frusterating knowing I bought all the games in my account, some for my daughter who was too young at the time, and now I am stuck with them on my account forever.

[Gwarsbane]

According to Electronic Arts, no its not possible to transfer games from one account to another....

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Can-we-transfer-games-from-one-Origin-account-to-another/td-p/1920505

No, it's not possible to transfer games between accounts owned by different players.



Each games comes with a single playing license for one account only.

Granted that was from 2013, maybe somethings changed since then, but I can't find anything official that says you can transfer a license for a game from one origin account to another.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by heater:

Originally posted by SpunkyJones:

Your transferring a Electronic Arts game across its own system. Will not happen on steam who is dealing with numerous developers.

Still dont see why this cant be done. What if I create a second account, I own both accounts, but simply want to keep them separate. Its just frusterating knowing I bought all the games in my account, some for my daughter who was too young at the time, and now I am stuck with them on my account forever.

And Valve has no way to actually confirm that you are actually the owner of both accounts. Its easy to spoof IPs and stuff like that. And what if someone gets on your computer, makes a new account, tansfers everything over and then locks you out of the second account.

Again its never going to happen on steam because of how much money they would lose.

It doesn't matter how old your kid is, you could have made an account that you control, and put all your kids games on it and then once shes older, you actually give her control of that account.

[Heater]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

Originally posted by heater:

Still dont see why this cant be done. What if I create a second account, I own both accounts, but simply want to keep them separate. Its just frusterating knowing I bought all the games in my account, some for my daughter who was too young at the time, and now I am stuck with them on my account forever.

And Valve has no way to actually confirm that you are actually the owner of both accounts. Its easy to spoof IPs and stuff like that. And what if someone gets on your computer, makes a new account, tansfers everything over and then locks you out of the second account.

Again its never going to happen on steam because of how much money they would lose.

It doesn't matter how old your kid is, you could have made an account that you control, and put all your kids games on it and then once shes older, you actually give her control of that account.

well, it started out that she would paly games i already owned on my account, so i definitely regret not making her own account a few years ago, but i never thought about the future of the games not being able to be transferred and such.

seems my only option to hope to see such a feature was to request here in this type of forum