You Don’t Own The Video Games You’ve Bought: The Death Edition

In my basement at home, I have a handful of old gaming consoles that were left to our family after other family members either got too old to want them any longer or after they passed away. Coming along with them are a handful of games for those consoles. As a result of the physical nature of those products, my young kids at home have been able to play those games on their old consoles and using old controllers.

But if those games had been bought digitally, none of that would have happened. Ars Technica has a short but interesting post about what happens to your PC gaming library after you die. And the answer is essentially this: those games just go away.

The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable” the response reads. “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 isn’t the first time someone has asked this basic estate planning question, of course. Last year, a Steam forum user quoted a similar response from Steam support as saying, “Your account is yours and yours alone. Now you can share it with family members, but you cannot give it away.”

Now, there are obviously workarounds for this sort of thing. I could very easily go into the will we have setup for our family and just jot down my Steam login and password. But that’s not really the same thing, nor does it address the overall issue that exists with the ownership of the digital game library I have. And from a purely logical standpoint, there is little reason why I should be able to will a boxed copy of a game I bought to a family member, but I cannot do the same for the exact same game I bought for the exact same price if it’s digital.

And these same ownership and transferability questions are present not just in matters of our own corporeal existence, but on matters of game preservation as well.

Beyond personal estate planning, the inability to transfer digital game licenses has some implications for video game preservation work as well. Last year, Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil spent nearly $20,000 to purchase and download every digital 3DS and Wii U game while they were still available. And while Khalil said he intends to donate the physical machines (and their downloads) to the Video Game History Foundation, subscriber agreements mean the charity may have trouble taking legal ownership of those digital games and accounts.

“There is no reasonable, legal path for the preservation of digital-born video games,” VGHF’s then co-director Kelsey Lewin told Ars last year. “Limiting library access only to physical games might have worked 20 years ago, but we no longer live in a world where all games are sold on physical media, and we haven’t for a long time.”

There are obviously differences between a digital and physical product. But game publishers mostly ignore those differences entirely. A physical copy of a game typically costs exactly the same dollar amount as a digital copy, despite the lack of a need to pay for the physical medium and packaging costs. Copyright laws apply to both equally.

So why aren’t customer rights around ownership and first sale doctrines likewise still applied to this content that has been “bought,” at least such that my kids or a charity of my choice can inherit my game library in the event that I get run over by a car?