What happens to your games after you die depends on your store of choice
Not all video games go to gamer heaven when you die. Some will stay right here on Earth, passed along to your next of kin — as long as you put it in your will.
The question of what happens to your game libraries when you die is still a relatively new one, a product of the digital-only era. Not only does digital make up a big portion of video game sales, but some stores will reportedly no longer sell physical media like video games. All this is to say that you should start thinking about passing your library on — otherwise, it might end up languishing on your password-protected Steam account.
A Steam customer service agent told ResetEra forum user delete12345 that you can’t pass down your Steam library to another person. (That is, unless you give them your account information and password, which is technically against Valve’s terms of service.) When you purchase a game on Steam, you’re purchasing a license to use that game — you don’t actually own a copy of it.
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But Steam is not the only platform that sells video games. Polygon reached out to Valve, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony Interactive Entertainment, GOG, Itch.io, and Epic Games Store to ask about their policies. Distribution platforms GOG and Itch.io responded: With the right legal permissions — i.e., proof of legal transfer in a will — both stores will try to honor these requests.
A GOG spokesperson told Polygon that, with a court order, the company is “willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library — but currently [it] can only do it with the help of the justice system.” That’s because GOG doesn’t collect a ton of personal information, making it hard to establish a relationship between someone claiming an account and the original account owner.
Here’s GOG’s full statement, which it drafted after receiving several queries from users:
As this is a particularly delicate matter with little to no existing legal guidance on the issue of video games preservation, we’d like to address it
Read more on polygon.com
