The Eternal Gamers' Dilemma: Can You Pass on Your Virtual Legacy?

On any given day, in the rapidly expanding virtual realm of digital gaming, a gamers’ thoughts can be consumed with the same question: what happens to your Steam account when you die? Can you make sure your collection of games continues onwards, or is everything lost in the void? This is no idle concern. It raises questions about the nature of digital ownership, privacy and inheritance. Let’s explore how to pass on your digital gaming legacy.

Understanding the Restrictions of Digital Ownership

Do You Really Own Your Steam Games?

Steam is the world’s largest gaming platform, and it operates under a straightforward-if-draconian tenet: when you ‘buy’ a game, what you are really doing is subscribing to a digital good for the rest of your life. This subscription, though paid for upfront, is in fact a loan, and it is never yours to own. As the Subscriber Agreement on Steam makes clear, if you were to die with this ‘subscription’ on your plate, it would be pretty much impossible for anyone else to inherit it. Why does it matter?

The CHARGE of Account Non-Transferability

Steam’s blanket policy – you can’t transfer your account to another living or dead human – is hardly earth-shattering. It’s pretty standard stuff for online accounts. But for gamers who might have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of game time building their libraries, the ramifications can be severe. The policy forces large collections of games to die with their users. That would be okay if there was no viable way around it. But while technically against Steam’s policies, sharing logins is rather widely known to work, and pretty widely used, with the punishment being the potential termination of your account.

A Glimmer of Legal Hope?

The CHARGE of State Laws vs. Steam's TOS

There is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law that seeks to empower executors with the legal right to access and transfer digital accounts after somebody’s death. Since then, the RUFADAA has been adopted by the vast majority of US states. And so, with all that, one can be forgiven for thinking that gamers would finally be free to bequeath their digital goods. But then there’s the ‘but’.

The Legal CHALLENGE of Transferring Digital Access

Despite the fact that the RUFADAA theoretically allows your digital assets to pass after your death, Steam’s TOS could be an insurmountable obstacle. Steam’s TOS is an agreement between Steam and its users (you, essentially) that all Steam users accept on use. In a catch-22, the TOS, as legally binding as any ordinary contract, forbids users from ‘selling, assigning, transferring or otherwise conveying or granting an interest in or to’ their Steam account, or any access to it. In legal purgatory, the would-be digital inheritor faces a catch-22: either hack through the TOS, or risk losing a loved one’s digital legacy.

The Battle for Digital Legacy: Is It Worth the CHARGE?

Weighing the CHARGE of Legal Action

For anyone who thinks they can inherit their digital assets from the battlefield of the courtroom, it is a daunting trek – not least of all because of Steam’s arbitration clause, which steers all disputes into an arbitration process. A treacherous roadblock to getting a traditional case in court for anyone who wants to inherit their digital games and assets.

The Future of Digital Ownership and Inheritance

And yet, on the cusp of a new age of digital ownership and inheritance, we’re still left wondering how (or whether) digital assets can be transferred in the first place. While the RUFADAA and its legal counterparts provide some much-needed hope, the spectre of TOS agreements overpowers the possibility of actually owning and bequeathing many of our digital identities.

The Final CHARGE: Understanding Digital Inheritance

It’s the kind of ’stuff’ that, as digital ownership and inheritance is thrown into turmoil, the growing number of gamers, online antiquities collectors, or sufferers of Gamer’s OCD and their families, be they friends, relatives or legal guardians, are going to have to navigate an intricate web of rights, responsibilities, vested or contractual ownership, behavioural norms and emotional commitments over the coming decades. Already, as technology offers us new kinds of relationships and promises to revolutionise digital life, we can see that the questions surrounding digital assets, ownership and posthumous access will only escalate and become more pressing as we digitise our lives. Reconciling the immateriality of digital goods with the human desire to control the legacy we leave behind represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of ownership, value and legacy.

Perhaps the only road map we have is to consider what we’re willing to accept for our digital legacies­­ — and to push for laws and societal norms to be adjusted to our digital realities. The issue isn’t just about who gets the keys to a digital gravesite or online gaming account; it’s who owns our digital selves.