Unfortunately for many PC gamers, Valve has said people can’t leave their Steam accounts to others in their will.
In a recent ResetEra post, user delete12345 shared the news they’d learned from Steam Support. They asked, “I don’t plan on dying anytime soon, but when I do, could ownership of my steam account be transferred via a will?”
The response was decisive. “Steam accounts and games are non-transferable. 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.”
“Your backlog dies with you”, one user replied under the post. “This does bring up an interesting question of the value of what we own in a near digital future,” stated another.
If you’re planning on simply sharing your password with your loved ones before you pass, that technically goes against Steam’s terms of service and could likely get the account banned, but the company would never know if you wrote the information down on a piece of paper and taped it to your PC.
This all reasserts the troubling truth that you don’t truly own your digital libraries. At best, you’re renting the games, music, films, and TV shows from the platform distributors. Still, Steam can’t prove a bunch of 135-year-olds aren’t still playing games.
For now, the best way to share your games on Steam are via its Families plan, which allows six people to share each other’s game libraries and play even when they’re all online. For multiplayer games you need multiple copies, but all six people could play the same single-player title at the same time with no issues.
In other news, Konami has announced a new Silent Hill Transmission later this week, where we can expect updates on the series’ upcoming games and film.