Why not? It's not like they'll accumulate many billions of users in that timeframe, so the costs won't skyrocket or anything Facebook is different on that an account can have a lot of data

Data for a million accounts takes up about as much space as maybe a single long YouTube video.

I mean, you can move inactive accounts to a separate table or something if you really want a small performance optimization. Delete them after 20 years. This is a very slow, very long-term problem.

The cost to maintain the database is actually a small part of it; a large question is reducing the "surface area" against attacks as best you can. Perhaps for steam this doesn't matter, but forums, etc have issues with old unused accounts being hacked and used for spam, etc.

You could lock the account and require a higher standard of proof of identity to recover it (e.g. you prove who you are and steam runs a credit report on you and validates your prior phone numbers and addresses against authorization and billing information that they have for the account--that would increase the barrier to require identity theft which is unlikely to be used just to take over steam accounts and spam).

This isn’t really an engineering issue. It’s a legal and financial issue.

If it's about dead people and true long-term, I still don't see the big technical issue, but why not give people 30 years or similar to prevent deletion? People backpacking in the Andes, in jail, in a coma or whatever would be able to respond.

> Long term everyone is dead. If these companies continue to exist, how do they handle this? Will Valve maintain your steam login waiting hundreds of years for a user who will never login?

A typical human lifespan is in the realm of ~80 years.

Maybe they just enable this "feature" only for ~80 year old accounts.