Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die | Your Steam games will go to the grave with you

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you
Great, then I'll finally have some time to play them....
- finally some cloud gaming
  
  The only cloud gaming I will accept
- Only if you have broadband in the grave with you.

If steam did allow transfers this way, I can imagine it being a new type scam where people fabricate death documents to steal steam accounts.
- Oh for sure, but it's definitely a concern for stuff like this. It's a lot easier for valve to just expect people to pass login info down as a way to pass on an account.
  Valve actually migrating purchases from one account to another risks upsetting publishers, and requires whole new policies on how to verify death and verify who should receive the account. Finally there's the risk of scams and having to resolve them. Overall it's a lot of headache for valve, I'm not surprised they're not jumping to offer it officially.
- True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don't own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.
  GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?
  
  You’ve never owned your games. You owned the media they came on but legally you only ever had a license to use the software. Depending on the license agreement (the thing where most people click “I agree” without reading) you had more or fewer rights, such as transfer of license, but the way things work legally ownership of software seems to mean the more of the copyright ownership. Maybe like a book: you own your copy of the book but you don’t have the rights to print more books or make a movie based on the book.
- Realistically, the transfer would likely need to be set up ahead of time via the account holder. For instance, my password manager has a function to allow me to designate a beneficiary. But importantly, that beneficiary assignment must come from my account before I die. If I die without designating a beneficiary, there’s nothing my family can do to gain access to my password vault. Only the accounts I have designated will be able to gain access.
  In other words, in order to falsely designate a beneficiary, they would already need access to my account. And at that point, they wouldn’t need to deal with death certificates and beneficiaries, because they already have access to my account.
- I'd like you to read what you just wrote very slowly and imagine it's somebody else saying it, just to visualize if it's an absolutey bonkers thing to say.
  
  There's also items in people's accounts

- Gotta have kids for that
  
  New tinder bio: "need a woman to birth me a child that will inherit my Steam account on the day of my demise"
- Between my birthday of 1/1/1901 and unlicensed game inheritance, shit is going to go down in the next 50 years. We'll have AI legal reps for powerful firms requesting a statement of all software licenses by the deceased, challenging them, and then having a court order the rest null.
  I hate that I will be right about that.
- Will valve allow accounts to exist indefinitely? Will they create an expiration policy, like accounts being closed after 100 years
- Steam isn't going to exist until you die anyway. At some point they will exitscam

Life Pro Tip: Register an LLC to buy your steam games under. The LLC will never die and you can transfer ownership of the business entity while it retains control of the steam account.
- That's a lot of effort just to play HuniePop
  
  ya, but as an LLC you get a lot of rights that you didn't have before!
- I kind of want one anyway. Is there a real reason I shouldn't do this?
  
  Disclaimer this was a joke I'm not a lawyer and I have no idea if this would actually work... 😆
  
  As others have pointed out - costs a few bucks annually,and requires beneficial ownership report (free IIRC).
  Otherwise, it’s a tried and true tactic to pass businesses down through generations. An LLC vs. a corp vs a trust is a convo to have w/ lawyer barred in your state but the general premise is vaguely sane.
  
  Personal use of business assets is generally frowned upon by the IRS.
  
  Tldr: Don't do this unless you have a business that requires a steam account for tax purposes. It doesn't need to be successful but it does need to be real.
  Trusts are probably a better option for this sort of thing than a LLC.
  
  You normally pay an annual fee to keep your LLC registered.
  
  Completely depends on your country
- $800/year is a lot to save maybe $1000 worth of games. At least that's what an LLC costs where I live.
  
  Woah, that's expensive AF. I think forming an LLC in my state is like $25 and then nothing except tax burdens on revenue.
  
  Almost 10 times less where I live, but not sure because I don't know which dollars you're referring to
  
  1k worth of games? Oh my sweet summer child
- Register a religious organisation/church worshipping digital media and proclaim that this account is part of religious rituals of your church. In the United States, freedom of religion is a constitutionally protected right provided in the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

just share your login lol
- Gabe is riding to your house in a SWAT van as we speak. Resist, or don't, your death is inevitable either way.
- It's a bit more complicated. Besides the Steam credentials, you also need to share your email and its password. You need to provide your mobile phone unlocked or share its password (for SMS and two-factor authentication).
  
  I'll be dead. They can have all of that.
  
  Better setup some dead-man-switch ASAP just in case.

Do they check? Or can i just give my password to my homie in a letter
"Dear homie,
if you are reading this, it means that i'm on the long path to meet with master Kaio to train my ass off to death in the afterlife. Until we meet again, this is my user and pass of my steam account.
PS: i didn't bought the porno VR games. Someone gifted them to me.
Your bro in eternity,
Siegfried"
- Bro, but what about the credit card receipt for porno VR games, signed by Siegfried? What about the warranty card for the porno VR games, filled out by Siegfried? What about the book "Porno VR Games and Me (This Sort of Thing is my Bag, Baby!)" by Siegfried?
  
  Bro, a real bro doesn't ask these questions.
  
  You just keep the wishlist private and zero it out. You got the answers to those questions. That's private info your bro rusted you to die with.

Oh I didn't own my steam account it was created for my future children. it's a trust.
- Lol. That's hilarious. But unfortunately you never owned the games in the first place. You rented the privilege to play the game for life?...life of the rental company or your life only? Oh man, we gotta go thru the small print on this.
  
  The small print just says "lol gottem"
  
  I understand for the life of the company. But it's not even my steam account. It's my child's who's currently -5 years old (give or take). I did create it on their behalf a decade ago to redeem the free games on their behalf and gift them games I think they'll enjoy.
  
  "Add to Cart", "Continue Shopping", "Purchase for myself", "Purchase as a gift", "Purchase".
  Who knows, one day a court may find these terms could lead people into believing they're buying a game and force some companies to allow us to to trade or resell them (an EU court most probably).
  
  For the life of the trust. Could span generations.

When you're dead but someone has got into your steam account and is about to find all of your anime titty games
- what are these im interested
  
  Try
  Nekopara
  Doki Doki Literature Club
  Boko No Piku
  All great games with lots of tiddy.
- Good one. 🤣

“And to my son, I bequeath my steam account - user is blah and password is blah”
Checkmate steam
- The article goes into that and states password sharing is against the Eula so technically they can kick you off the service if they find out..... IF they find out wink wink
  
  I mean it is not sharing if you are dead, it is bequeathing
  
  Dang, they'll kick my corpse off Steam...
  
  Old and busted: Pretending someone's alive for their Social Security check
  New hotness: Pretending someone's alive for their Steam account
  
  How thwy wanna find out though? Not like my computer can snitch that part (yet).
- blah!@birthday-ssn

Bury me with my backlog.
- And browser history
  
  I have reached a place where I genuinely don't care about anyone seeing my browser history.
  FBI: "Mr. JoMiran, did you spend an hour browsing through Peggy Hill cosmic horror hentai?"
  Me: "Meh. I found most of the tentacle detail work lacking and the exaggerated breast size off-putting."
  
  Nah we deleting that and then denying it
- He died doing what he loved more, creating more backlog.

Who's notifying Valve someone with an account has died? Link the dead person's account to a steam family and enjoy the inheritance.
- You're account is tied to an email address, you just give the email address as well.
- If you will a steam account to someone, there is a chance that there are disputes/claims for the account that need to be settled in court.
- The interesting question is what happens if Valve is still around after all of us are long gone and there are millions of 150+ year old accounts, many under active use?
  
  In a world that isn’t drowning in late stage capitalism what we call that is the overwhelming gift given to us by the generations before us so that we may in turn give it to the next generation. Video games are only a tiny subsection of those gifts compared to everything else we just get handed for free.
  Wealthy US boomers brutally executed that way of looking at the world though, so literally any form of passing on gifts to the next generation other than being rich as fuck and directly leaving an unbelievable amount of money to your kids is unfathomable or framed as unfair or absurd in modern day society.
  
  Half Life 3

Assuming that the world continues to exist in a way that lets me have a steam account at the time of my natural lifespans average end (another... 46 years):
My steam library grows at a slower rate than my mass storage has, and I'm quite confident that one will be able to fit my entire steam library as it currently is on a normal and affordable drive in at most 15 years.
With those two facts in play I can remain confident in my ability to crack everything I own (assuming I even want everything) and safely store it for at-will passing down to as many people as I want.
But thanks for the reminder to not blindly trust you, Valve. Always useful to have those.

Well, if you're stupid enough to tell valve about the death that is
- Hey valve, I died....
  
  "... I got better."
  
  Hey valve, so, Uhr... Funny thing... I'm actually... Uh
  .. kinda dead
- I'm totally 132 years old tho
  
  With the amount of people that made their account with a fake DOB of like 1900 or something to get around mature content I'm sure they already see plenty of users that age lol
  
  Imagine tomb raiders of steam accounts in the future ☠️
  "This account is 132 years old, it is worth it to hack it".

So sad I won't be able to bequeath "Fifty Shades of Fur - Gay Erotic Visual Novel 18+" to my grandchildren

just don't die
- We did it, lemmy!
- just don't die
  So far that's been working for me.
- give your kids your first name. that way they can verify it forever and so on as long as they keep the tradition and last name alive.

They also don’t let you transfer purchases if for instance you’re being stalked
Had a friend lose a thousand games that way
- Friend could have in theory just authorized their steam library on the computer and played them through a different account. The "family sharing" thing.
  
  Don't you have to be friends for that? I believe there was a website that showed your friends list, even if your profile was set to private.
- Wait, what does stalked mean in this context? Aren't you able to block people on Steam?
  
  You can but they can just go to a steam profile site and see your previous names/the id doesn’t change
  And if they have a link to your profile (since it uses the id) they will always find you
  For this case they made her player of the week in a group she wasn’t apart of. It’s still there today but the profile is deleted (hence the question mark)
  Blocking an account doesn’t really solve the trauma of being scared to accept any friend request since it could be this guy
  Steam support did nothing

Once again further diluting the meaning of the words "bought" and "sold"

I really feel like this won't/can't be enforced.
- Just because it is wrong and obviously contradictory to other established precedents doesn’t at this point mean that it won’t be enforced unfortunately.
  
  I get that, but that's just the vibe Valve has to me.
- Less about enforcement than ease of transfer. If I've got a Steam account and you've got a Steam account and I die, Steam won't let you transfer the licenses from my account to yours. You just have to maintain two independent accounts now - accounts with 2-factor authentication that you also have to maintain (so second cell numbers and emails, etc).
  Steam will simply let the administrative burden of juggling extra accounts take these licenses out of the pool.
  
  This. It's absolutely already enforced. Valve simply will do nothing to enable access to a relative that comes asking and most of the currently existing accounts will just fade into the ether because in most cases relatives aren't going to be particularly worried about recovering game accounts of all things when somebody passes away.
- It could be, but I don't think they'll bother.

Sounds ripe for a legal challenge, but neo-ownership of digital-goods is already so fragile.
- digital goods are more like a service at this point. not really property
  
  True for digital goods THEY are supposed to own, but also consider how dominated we are with OUR digital property. I have witnessed how readily tech giants will abuse their position, abuse the power of defaults, weaponize psychology, and feign deletion... even against my lowly grandma. They think nothing of effectively stealing one's digital photos, using them for their own purposes, and giving them to the police, so they can destroy your life and your dog.

To be absolutely clear, this is not new. Steam accounts being non-transferrable and not your property has always been how Steam's terms work. It's not even the first time the death situation comes up.
Because digital ownership sucks, and that absolutely, very much includes Steam. If you can't keep an offline copy you don't own it.
But honestly, given the new family groups Steam came up with this gets weirder now. Other accounts that are more closely tied to hardware are one thing, and I do wish we had a more effective and reliable way to hand over passwords and credentials to relatives in case of emergency, but it's so weird that now your mom can have an accident and you slowly see the games she was sharing with you over that system fade away as her account gets shuttered. It's such a grim, sci-fi distopian piece of minutia. This is not a great timeline we landed on.

Does this apply to developer accounts? Because if so this would be dumb as fuck.
- I'd argue that it's dumb as fuck either way.
- Does steamworks not have a notion of a parent organization or enterprise? That’s what most other design and development tools do.
  If someone leaves, the parent enterprise remains, and new people can be added to the enterprise and can be granted rights over the content.
- What if you setup an account for a company? There's so many questions.

So you can inherit a house, but not a freakin' game... is that even legal?
- The issue is that steam (like the other stores except gog) doesnt sell games, they sell licenses.
  
  Depends on what country you live in. Just because they call is that doesn't mean the law and courts will see it their way.
  Relatedly, check out www.StopKillingGames.com. When you buy a game without an expiration date on the box it either is illegal or should be explicitly made illegal to destroy your copy of the game when the company shuts down their servers. Stop Killing Games is a campaign to stop this from happening, and it's actually getting some progress like being noticed and picked up by politicians. If you know Freeman's Mind, Civil Protection, or Ross's Game Dungeon, this campaign was started by Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) who made all of those.
  Edit: quote from the FAQ in the website:
  Q: Aren't games licensed, not sold to customers?
  A: The short answer is this is a large legal grey area, depending on the country. In the United States, this is generally the case. In other countries, the law is not clear at all, since license agreements cannot override national laws. Those laws often consider videogames as goods, which have many consumer protections that apply to them. So despite what the license agreement may say, in some countries you are indeed sold your copy of the game license. Some terms still apply, however. For example, you are typically only sold your individual copy of the game license for personal use, not the intellectual property rights to the videogame itself.
  
  shrugs framing it this way feels like a finance industry tactic where business people attempt to seem intelligent and beyond the public’s capacity to understand by taking concepts and renaming them to finance concepts and then pretending their grift is different than every other con man’s grift in history.
  Steam sells games, that is far as I need to zoom in, any farther and business bros are just wasting my time with their sandcastles made out of PowerPoints and economic spiritualism that is grounded in absolutely nothing other than absolving the person running the business for the harm they may enact in doing so.
- Well you're really just inheriting a subscription to the house, you have to keep paying the annual fees or the state takes it away from you.
- You don't inherit a lease to a house your parents rented.
  Not that I'm happy with "buying" a game actually being "getting a license" instead of actually owning it. Gamepass and the like should be the renting model, not when you pay a game full price.

Rare steam L

EU, do your thing
- not sure what EU should do here
  
  https://publicknowledge.org/eu-court-when-you-buy-software-you-own-it/
  The EU has already taken care of it.
  The Court of Justice of the European Union found that a
  copyright owner exhausts the right of distribution to a copy of a computer
  program once he sells, or authorizes the sale of, the copy. This means that whoever purchased the
  computer program can resell it and the copyright holder cannot control the
  resale of the copy. The Court found that
  this exhaustion principle applies whether the copy is on a tangible medium like
  a CD-ROM or DVD or an intangible download from the Internet, and it also
  applies to corrected and updated programs that the copyright owner sells. Furthermore, the Court made clear that contract
  clauses that deny the customer the right to transfer his copy of the computer
  program are void.
  
  When you buy something you should be able to pass it on or sell it to someone else. This "the software not sold, only licensed" BS should be illegal. Either you rent with a monthly fee, or you buy it and own it. Owning something means you can sell it to someone else.
  
  Regulate digital purchases.
  
  Work into immortality, ofc.

Seems like a shitty hill to die, sacrificing entire generations of family remaining on your platform over old obsolete games on a subscription service. Tell me the video game industry is stale without telling me the video game industry is stale.
- I'm pretty sure they are legally forced to do this. Also, the moment you allow people to inherit accounts, you're inadvertently sanctioning account transfer and sale. They can't really enforce this amd they know it, so nothing really changed.
  
  Precisely. They never check that you are who you say that you are or that you are in fact still alive, so this "rule" is unenforceable. Case in point, many years ago I told Valve that my birthday was Jan 1st 1916, the earliest date it would let me select when I get prompts to input my age for mature-rated content. It still remembers that and autofills it for me on every age-restricted game page I land on in the discovery queue. If it were true, I'd be a 108 year old gamer right now, which isn't impossible but would probably raise some eyebrows at Valve if they ever had the intention of enforcing the "no passing down your account to other people" rule as it would be highly likely that I would be dead and my successors are the ones actually spending 7 hours on the weekends binging TW: WH3 and Stellaris.
  
  It's the executors job to handle the inheritance, which is very different to transfer and sale. Insurances and services of all types handle inheritances, and they ask for documents specifically only available in such circumstances to verify it. It really is due to unwillingness on behalf of Steam
- Especially when you can just go to steamunlocked on the clearnet with just a web browser

I’d like to see them try stopping me giving my kids my password.

What they dont know wont hurt you
- But I want to hurt them, a lot
  
  Then do it anonymously

I had been literally planning on putting my Steam account in the will...
- Fr, mine is worth a good $6000+...
- What if you do it a roundabout way? Record your Steam and email login info and include the paper that has it in the will. You're not giving them the account, just a piece of paper. What they do with it is up to them.

My family plays the games under my account now. I imagine not much will change when I'm dead.
- Put your passwords in your will
  
  Pretty sure I'm good. Account email is a forwarder to a family domain and they have access to everything relating to the account. For all intents and purposes, it's just me logging in from the grave.

This is annoying as we buy everything under my wifes account and we hook up mine with family sharing.
- Same but under mine, we are starting to split who buys a bit more now since our kids want to play different games at the same time. Time to start spreading them across 4 accounts soon
  
  IIRC, they are in beta testing to allow multiple people play multiple games from same account at same time, and you can now buy multiple licenses for your account so can both play same game at same time on same account . Don't ask me the specifics, I only know that I can buy multiple licenses for my account currently.
- Do you have your wife's password?
  
  No. I realize its an option but its sorta creepy to me. Its like opening the other persons mail.

So thats why they say not to give your password to anyone.

Then come fucking stop me

Soon they’ll clarify their philosophical stance on identity & claim a person changes so much from moment to moment that yesterday-you doesn’t exist anymore, & therefore must pay again
- At some point, Gabe is going to sell the company and/or die. The company will be transferred to a hedge fund. And then you'll see a bunch of evil IT bros come up with increasingly sadistic means of cannibalizing the user base for profit.
  Drink the Mountain Dew Verification Can to continue, etc, etc.
- Somewhere there is a hyper capitalist parallel Universum where buddhism is the mainstream western religion and this stance is enforced rigorously.
- I just started Talos Principle the other day and this reads like something that computer that keeps arguing with me about personhood would say

Bring back big boned Gaben
- His heart got smaller too

whatever im not even playing them when im not dead

Can you be in the steam family group with a dead person?
- Yea but you need the owner account to authorize the computer. So next time you upgrade or wipe your gaming rig you'd be screwed unless you find a bypass and if you're working that hard, just have the password+mfa
  
  Check out the new Steam Family Beta. My friends and I are now a polyamorus "family" as far as Steam is concerned. I can play their games, they can play mine, didn't have to touch each other's computers, and live in separate households.

Imagine if it said "Epic" instead of "Steam" in the headline.
- No one give af cuz Epic sucks?
- Exactly what I was thinking, people would be mad as hell. Heck, a few months ago I made someone realize they didn't own their games on Steam because they were complaining about Epic and it blew their fucking mind.
  
  There are two and only two things that makes Epic Games a pariah.
  (1)Exclusive content on PC should be shunned so hard that it's not even a fucking option. You can explain away exclusively on PS3 because of its unique hardware, but it's just a naked monopolistic power grab on PC.
  (2) Epic game store sucks on every level. It's a pigs 3 week old rotting corpse compared to Valve's packaged ham.
- Whew, that’s much better. I’ve always avoided the Epic store like the plague so nothing lost!

All I have to do is leave the username and password to my steam account and email address to someone else in my will. 🤦‍♂️
- Shhh take your sensible nonsense somewhere else, we want outrage and shitting on everything here
  
  Having a workaround doesn't mean there's no problem

So is a flat rate life rental rather than a purchase, the nth stuff that is not of your property but a concession...

But I was already planning on leaving mine to my son.
Guess he just gets my username and password.
Note to self, turn off 2fa before I die
- I left the 2fa on! Too la

This is Valve thinking ahead - when we invent the ability to respawn, we can just log back in like death never happened.

What Stream support have sent that person is probably an accurate representation of what happens when you apply their policies as written. Write another article if they are seen enforcing it.
Luckily, SteamDRM is usually easy to bypass, so if that happens one could prepare accordingly.
- These days a will should include documentation of logins. No need to bypass Steam DRM when my relatives have my phone's PIN and email credentials to just access all games. Pretty sure my local laws cover digital inheritance.
  
  Yeah, my point was, if they do try to enforce their policies, we could probably find a way to work around it. It's probably cheaper and easier than for your heirs to test those digital inheritance laws in court.
- The difference is that your Steam account is probably holding thousands of dollars in value while your pirated copies of Steam games are worth nothing. And presumably that whichever of your grandchildren gets nerdy gran's stash will likely not care to reverse engineer your warez archives just to play Bioshock again in 2075.
  It's not about access to the games, it's about whether you own what you buy.
  
  I personally don't value them differently, but I see your point.
  The wonky ownership of these games is actually the reason I've been pretty much exclusively buying stuff on GoG for a few years. I don't know their stance on inheritance, but at least the hypothetical grandchild won't need perpetual access to the account to keep playing the games.
  In the end, clear legislation is kinda the only thing that can resolve this mess.

Do you think Valve is going to start deleting accounts over 100 years old?
- Do you think Valve is going to start deleting accounts over 100 years old?
  If Valve actually counted how old my account is, they'd stop asking me how old I am for mature games.
  
  Valve can’t count to 3
- So that’s why Betty White died at 99, they were going to take her games away!

GOG

Means you don't own anything then. It is a lost autonomy. Once lost, you will only lose more with time.
- Criminals can claim a lot of things but that is not democracy which requires citizens which requires autonomy. Anyone stealing individual autonomy is a traitor.

- My death insurance gonna be real big if steam refunds all games. Family gonna be rich Steam sale is crack

It's unlikely that would survive a lawsuit. If they claim the games have value, as evidenced by then having a price, then that value can be transferred.

Just don't tell them lol. My friend in school gave me his steam account that had some games on it that I had no money for and he wasn't using it anymore. Still my main steam account 8 years later.

Your Steam games will go to the grave with you
Just like my porn!

Lol and what's stopping me from just giving them my account info
- Absolutely nothing... This article literally just says that somebody on an internet forum pointed out that what might happen is that if your account has been around longer than the average lifespan then they'll investigate and maybe terminate it after determining it's no longer owned by the original account owner. Valve today doesn't have the support capacity to perform this kind of investigation. Valve in 50-60 years will be an entirely different beast. This speculation means nothing.

Damn, I guess I am living forever now.

Tough shit. Someone needs to enjoy the games.
And who says you have to notify Valve with what you do to your account?