What happens to your games after you die depends on the store of your choice

Not all video games go to gamer heaven when you die. Some will remain here on earth, passed on to your surviving relatives – as long as you include it in your will.

The question of what happens to your game libraries when you die is still relatively new, a product of the digital-only era. Not only digital makes up a large portion of video game salesbut some shops will reportedly no longer sell physical media such as video games. All of this is to say that you should start thinking about passing on your library – otherwise it could languish on your password-protected Steam account.

A Steam customer service representative told the ResetEra forum user delete12345 that you can not pass your Steam library on to someone else. (That is, unless you give them your account info and password, which is technically against Valve’s terms of service.) When you buy a game on Steam, you’re purchasing a license to use that game — you don’t actually own a copy thereof.

But Steam isn’t the only platform that sells video games. Polygon contacted 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 appropriate legal permissions – that is, proof of legal transfer in a will – both stores will attempt to honor these requests.

A GOG spokesperson told Polygon that, with a court order in place, the company is “prepared to address such a situation and preserve your GOG library – but currently it can only do so with the assistance of the legal system.” That’s because GOG doesn’t collect much personal information, making it difficult to establish a relationship between someone claiming an account and the original account owner.

Here is the full statement from GOG, who created it after receiving several questions from users:

Because this is a particularly delicate issue and there is little to no existing legal guidance on the issue of video game preservation, we would like to address this appropriately so that you, and every other member of the GOG community, you can be sure of what could happen to you. games in case of unexpected events, such as death.

As you may know, GOG does not collect enough information to actually identify a particular person (such as first and last name) or their family or marital status. For this reason, we cannot determine that anyone is related to a particular user or that a particular user is deceased.

In general, your GOG account and GOG Content are non-transferable. However, if you are able to obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your personal GOG account, the digital content associated with it must take into account the EULAs of specific games therein, and that specifically references your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we will do our best to make this possible.

We are prepared to address such a situation and preserve your GOG library – but currently we can only do this with the help of the legal system.

However, GOG does not use DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology, which means you can store your purchased games on an external hard drive and pass them along with ease.

When it comes to indie distribution platform Itch.io, there is no formal policy, according to founder Leaf Corcoran. Itch.io accounts are linked to email addresses, he said, so if a survivor has the account’s password, that’s fine. Itch.io will not revoke access. But if that person not have access to the email address, that is a security issue unless there is “conclusive evidence” that it is theirs.

Corcoran doesn’t believe an Itch.io user has ever contacted the company’s support line about recovering an account for someone who died, but he said he would try to help if the person could prove he/she should have access: “I think that’s a pretty unique case, so it’s possible that we’re going out of our way to help the applicant prove that he or she should have access to the account.

Again, that proof would probably have to be through a legal document, such as a will.

Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, ValveAnd Epic games store did not respond to Polygon’s request for comment, so we looked to their respective terms of service for answers. All of these companies have a similar policy: the games you license are non-transferable. Transferring your games to another person via a will is still seemingly a unique situation that many companies have not yet had to deal with. They may be willing to make exceptions with legal proof of inheritance, or if forced to do so by a court. GOG’s End User Agreement also states that you cannot share or transfer your GOG account or content, but in practice GOG is willing to do so under the right circumstances.

One possible way around this is to include the devices your games are stored on in your will. Lawyer Claudine Wong wrote in 2013 in the Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal that “digital content is transferable to the surviving relatives of a deceased user if legal copies of that content reside on physical devices, such as iPods or Kindle e-readers.” Presumably this also applies to your laptop or video game console, should you stay logged in or have the password. “So far there is no doubt that the devices and the works attached to them can be passed on,” Wong wrote. Yet Wong’s research is more than a decade old at this point: technology and businesses have changed tremendously, and information about digital wealth planning is still limited.

Wong suggested that regardless of the legality of it all, you should still write these kinds of things in your will. “(An) estate plan is an expression of what he wishes would happen after his death, and knowing what he wanted gives his family compelling arguments against the service providers,” Wong said.

It may all sound like a joke – writing your video games into your will – but it’s an issue that will continue to arise as things move more and more online. For example, what happens to your TikTok account? Your email address? Your Steam, GOG, or Epic Games Store accounts probably have more value than either: just 20 AAA video games cost more than $1,000 in total. And your game library is also something personal that someone else might cherish. Regardless of how this plays out personally, digital-only video games – and their copyrights and licenses – pose an enormous challenge for conservationists.

Anyway, 100 years from now, I hope my descendants will like my gaming laptop.