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As Valve’s Steam gaming platform approaches drinking age in the US this year, more and more aging PC gamers may be considering what will happen to their vast libraries of digital games after they die. Unfortunately, legally your collection of hundreds of backlogged games will probably pass into the ether with you someday.
The issue of digital game inheritance gained renewed attention this week, as a ResetEra poster cited a response from Steam Support asking about transferring ownership of a Steam account through a last will and testament. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games cannot be transferred,” reads the reply. “Steam Support cannot give anyone else access to the account or merge its content with another account. We regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred by will.”
Of course, this isn’t the first time someone has asked this basic estate planning question. Last year, a user on a Steam forum quoted a similar response from Steam Support, which said: “Your account is yours and yours alone. Now you can share it with family members, but you can’t give it away.”
Potential loopholes
As a practical matter, Steam has no way of knowing if you have written down your Steam username and password and left instructions to your estate to provide this information to your descendants. When it comes to legal property on this account, however, the Steam Subscriber Agreement seems relatively clear.
“You may not disclose, share, or otherwise allow others to use your password or account unless expressly authorized by Valve,” the agreement reads in part. “You may not… sell or charge others for the right to use your account or otherwise transfer your account, nor may you sell, charge others for the right to use or transfer Subscriptions, except as and as expressly permitted of this Agreement… or as otherwise expressly permitted by Valve.”
However, eagle-eyed readers may notice a potential loophole in the clauses regarding account transfers that are “expressly authorized by Valve.” Steam forum users have suggested in the past that Valve “will not block this change of ownership” through a will if a user or their estate specifically requests it (Valve did not respond to a request for comment).
Giving away all those 3DS and Wii U games to someone else might be difficult for Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil.
There may also be a partial physical solution for Steam users who bequeath an actual PC with downloaded titles installed. In a 2013 Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal article, author Claudine Wong wrote that “digital content can be transferred to the survivors of a deceased user if legal copies of that content reside on physical devices, such as iPods or Kindle e-readers .” But if that descendant wanted to download those games to another device or reinstall them in the event of a hard drive failure, he would legitimately be out of luck.
In addition to personal estate planning, the inability to transfer digital game licenses has some implications for video game preservation work. Last year, Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil spent nearly $20,000 to purchase and download every digital 3DS and Wii U game while they were still available. And while Khalil said he intends to donate the physical machines (and their downloads) to the Video Game History Foundation, subscription agreements mean the charity may have trouble taking legal ownership of those digital games and accounts. “There is no reasonable, legal path to preserve digital-born video games,” then-VGHF co-director Kelsey Lewin told Ars last year. “Limiting library access to physical games may have worked 20 years ago, but we no longer live in a world where all games are sold on physical media, and we haven’t for a long time.”
