We’ve all got to die sometime. But whatever you think awaits us after death, it’s unlikely to involve a suped-up gaming PC, a fiber connection, and tons of digital video games.
Last week, a Steam support representative said that in addition to not being able to transfer your account to another person, you also can’t leave it to your beneficiaries.
But this policy against the inheriting of PC games might be in violation of a relatively recent United States law.
Part 1: Steam says you don’t own your games
A ResetEra poster named delete12345 asked a Steam support representative if they could transfer the ownership of their Steam account after they died through their will.
As Ars Technica reports, the unnamed support rep replied with a short message saying that Steam’s account transfer moratorium remains in effect post-mortem:
“Unfortunately, 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.
This is fairly boilerplate as far as online accounts go, and Valve’s position that Steam accounts and games can’t be transferred under any circumstances has been known about for some time. (People still do transfer their accounts, of course, by simply sharing their login details. In fact, you can look online and find Steam accounts being sold right now, in brazen violation of the policy.)
But the question of a Steam account being passed on to a family member after death seems like a relevant one. After all, Steam as a storefront has been around for nearly two decades now, and plenty of people have amassed collections of hundreds or even thousands of game titles. Even now, there are gamers who have passed away and left behind valuable collections that are gathering digital dust, which their family members would surely like to access.
Valve’s terms of service for Steam are called the Steam Subscriber Agreement. The message is clear, if verbose, on the subject of ownership, just in case calling the whole thing a “Subscriber Agreement” didn’t hammer home the idea. You can read the whole thing here, but allow me to sum up the relevant points:
- When you “buy a game” on Steam, what you paid for is actually an agreement to access a digital good. It’s a “subscription” in a purely legal sense—even if it’s a one-time payment—and Steam’s side of the agreement is to give you access to those digital files, not to confer or transfer ownership of them.
- Your Steam account can’t be transferred to another person. Ever. Period. Selling your account is expressly forbidden. If another person logs in with your username and password—even if they change the password and the payment info—Valve can delete the account as a violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement. This is fairly common for all kinds of online accounts.
- Valve and its partner publishers and developers own everything in your Steam account, including the games and their contents. Your “subscription” is a limited license to access those games, not ownership of the games (even in the form of a copy).
- The Steam Subscriber Agreement includes an arbitration clause. Basically it says that you can’t sue Valve if you have a problem, even in a class-action suit (the kind that often includes hundreds or thousands of claimants represented by a single legal team). Instead, you agree to use an arbitration process. This is another very common bit of terms-of-service fluff, and it may or may not be legal depending on the situation. In the United States, you can always sue someone in civil court, but this arbitration clause might stop any such lawsuit in its tracks.
Got all that? Okay. Here’s where the other shoe drops…
Part 2: Some state laws allow descendants access to your Steam account
Valve’s position—that users can’t transfer their accounts even as part of a will—may not be legal in the United States. The relevant law here is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), as explained on the Steam subreddit by user Slawrfp.
The RUFADAA is an updated law that attempts to address the thorny situation of someone dying and their relatives or beneficiaries needing access to their digital accounts. The goal is to give an executor a legal means to log into accounts to get necessary information. (An executor is the person in charge of distributing your assets after you die. It could also be a government agency if no one is specified in a will.)
As Trust & Will explains, the RUFADAA is not an active federal law but rather a framework that individual US states can add to their own laws, and individual state legislators can—and have—tweaked the law to their liking. The law (or some variation of it) has already been enacted by 47 states, and it’s currently being put through the legislative systems in California and Massachusetts. Only Louisiana hasn’t taken it up.
In short, the RUFADAA provides a legal framework for users to transfer access to their accounts to another person after their death. With it in place, a person isn’t breaking the law if they’re accessing a dead person’s digital info, even if that info is stored on a digital service, as long as they have permission via a will or some other document.
That includes the transfer of “digital assets,” which should include access to the games inside a Steam account, even if the Steam account confers no ownership of the games themselves.
Part 3: …but those laws still bow to TOS
So, most Americans can transfer their Steam accounts then, right? Not so fast! In reading through the Pennsylvania version of the RUFADAA, which should be more or less identical to the version in other states, you get this little gem (emphasis mine):
The legal duties imposed on a fiduciary charged with managing tangible property apply to the management of digital assets…except as otherwise provided in section 3904 (relating to user direction for disclosure of digital assets), is subject to the applicable terms of service.
…
A fiduciary with authority over the property of a decedent, protected person, principal or settlor has the right to access any digital asset…which is not held by a custodian or subject to a terms-of-service agreement.
Disclaimer: I’ll sum it up with the usual proviso that I Am Not A Lawyer and this is not legal advice, merely one dumb tech writer’s attempt to understand a thorny legal issue.
As far as I can tell, it’s certainly possible to legally pass down access to your Steam account via a will if you live in one of the states that has enacted the RUFADAA. As of this writing, that should mean most Americans; in the future, probably all Americans.
But—and this is a Big But—someone who actually uses that access would still be in violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Valve could, according to its own self-written rules, revoke access or delete that account at any time.
And even if an executor could legally access a Steam account without running afoul of Steam’s systems, the account doesn’t actually contain any property—physical or digital—no matter how much was spent on games or how much those games might be nominally worth.
If someone wanted to fight this legally, they’d have to get over the hurdle of that binding arbitration clause in the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Not an impossible task, but certainly a difficult one. (That’s kind of the point of arbitration agreements.)
The concept of digital assets and digital ownership might seem straightforward, but the legal framework of the United States (and many other countries) is still catching up to the information age. It seems inevitable that the issue of passing down access to game store accounts and the “games” within will come under closer legal scrutiny.
