Your Steam Library Dies With You

Modern gamers who have fully embraced digital gaming may believe that the titles they’ve purchased will belong to them in perpetuity. But if anyone is hoping to pass on their Steam backlog to their next of kin, it turns out that Valve doesn’t allow the rights to be transferred. In other words, your Steam library dies with you.

Via Ars Technica, a user on ResetEra posted a reply that they received from Steam support regarding their question about passing on their Steam library through a will. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable,” replied a representative from Valve. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”

Some gamers have put a considerable amount of money into their Steam libraries, and it may be disheartening to hear that those games could simply be gone following the death of the Steam account owner. However, the easiest workaround may be to simply pass on the username and login info to potential heirs without informing Steam. The thorny issue of who really owns the digital games would remain, but at least the titles would still be playable.

An additional way to preserve Steam games is to pass down any computers that already have the titles downloaded. However, without access to the original Steam account, those games wouldn’t be available for installation on a different device or even accessible for reinstallation on the computer they’re currently on in the event of a hard-drive crash or other system failure. For that reason alone, this may not be an optimal solution. But until Valve offers users a better way to pass on their games, there aren’t many other options available.