With gog? of course i can. I have the files and i can give them to my family. They can then play them.

The fact that I'm "buying" a license holds as much weight in this issue as the countless eulas and privacy policies i supposedly agreed to.

We "endusers" live in a world were we are compelled, yes compelled, to enter legal agreements to do anything, and where these terms are dictated and changed unilaterally. Terms like these should and are meaningless yo everyone except for courts that foolishly hold them valid. For everything else, they should and are ignored.

You can technically but not legally. You can share your steam credentials too, just not legally

Im saying "legally" doesn't matter to anyone other than lawyers and judges who don't understand the concept of consent.

Steam is not the same since you dont truely own the games you buy.

Your sentence make 0 sense, you don't truly own the game you buy on ANY platform

I should have been more precise:

From the legal perspective, you don't truly own the game on any of the platforms.

From the technical perspective, the moment the game is on my PC I can run it.

For passing games to your heir legally, there is no way.

For passing games illegally both steam and gog work. For steam, you can download the steamdll and backup all your library and be good to go. For gog you don't have to do that, but if we are talking of illegally backing up all your games for after you die, you are good. As long as you are alive, you can play both gog and steam games for as long as you want.

Interestingly, you can illegally share games with your family in both platforms when you are alive, but you CANNOT legally share your gog games with your family, only Steam ones.

You can pass your game collection to your children. Just download them and put them on a USB drive. I guess you won't get updates that way, though.

That's illegal. You can technically but not legally

You mean legally? Because technically in GoG you can.

Technically legally no.

"Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else."

What if my trust or business buys it? My trust/business is a legal individual that can be passed down to other owners over time?

You'd be in breach of the terms.

It's usually legal to breach terms.

How so? Companies and trusts are legal persons, just like anyone else...

That transfer would breach the term prohibiting transfer.

It's not a transfer. If a trust owns a game, then the trust owns the game. A transfer of trust is not a transfer of ownership of the trust's property.

Now, moving a steam account into a trust might be a breach, if they care. Even using a trust to buy a game might also be a violation of some form, perhaps, buried in the toc.

But the trust itself is a legal entity and it can own things. Just because the people behind the trust changes doesn't mean it was a transfer on the public side of the trust.

The trust won't own the game.

> Now, moving a steam account into a trust might be a breach

Morever, it can't happen. Accounts are non-transferrable.

> Even using a trust to buy a game might also be a violation of some form, perhaps, buried in the toc.

Right at the top, actually. GOG, not Steam: "This license is for your personal use."

The account isn't the software. Software are files.

"GOG content" is the software.

From a purely technical perspective, gog offline installers make it trivial to preserve your collection.

It may not be legal, as I said.

Legally. Technically you can just share your password with any of your family

What I mean is that for most (all?) GoG games you can download an offline installer.

So you CAN pass your collection over to your heirs on an hard disk.

Whether this is legal it’s a different matter.

No it's not different, the whole point is the legality. You can still pirate all your games, you can still give the password of your account to your heirs, and you can still download all the steam games and provide the crack to "unlock" steam and it will work, but not legally.

GOG is very clear on this: you CANNOT provide the installers to anybody, those are for yourself only. It is easier, for sure.

It's still a terrible situation that should be solved legally.