What happens to my Steam account when I die

Nothing transfers, and nothing happens automatically. Valve's Steam Subscriber Agreement calls an account "strictly personal", the games inside it are licences rather than property, and in May 2024 a Steam Support agent told a user in writing that an account "cannot be transferred via a will". What decides the real-world outcome is duller than the contract: whoever still holds your email inbox and your Steam Guard device can keep signing in.

Does Valve allow a Steam account to be inherited?#

No, and the wording is unusually blunt. Section 1(C) of the Steam Subscriber Agreement states that "Your Account, including any information pertaining to it (e.g.: contact information, billing information, Account history and Subscriptions, etc.), is strictly personal", and that you "may therefore not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account".

Section 9(B) closes the obvious workaround of unlinking a game and re-registering it somewhere else: "Subscriptions are not transferable, and even if your access to a Subscription for a particular game or application is terminated, the original activation key will not be able to be registered to any other account, even if the Subscription was obtained in a retail store."

Valve's help pages repeat it without the legalese. The FAQ on account merging says plainly that "Steam accounts can not be merged together" and that "Steam game subscriptions / CD keys are nontransferable and cannot be reset / moved between Steam accounts." The same page notes your SteamID and Steam Account Name "can not be changed, even by Steam Support staff members" — so there is no supported way to quietly rebadge an account in someone else's name.

The agreement currently in force is dated 20 April 2026 and is a contract with Valve Corporation in Bellevue, Washington.

Do you actually own the games in your library?#

Not in the sense that would let an executor list them on an inventory. Section 1(B) defines what a purchase buys: "the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as 'Subscriptions.'" Section 2(A) is more direct still: "The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services." That licence "ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license."

A library, then, is not a stack of things sitting next to an account. It is a bundle of access rights that only exists while the account exists.

Steam Wallet funds get the same treatment. Section 3(C) says they "do not constitute a personal property right, have no value outside Steam", are "non-refundable and non-transferable" (subject to a cross-reference to Section 3.I), and "have no cash value and are not exchangeable for cash". The one crack of daylight is a single sentence in the same section: "Steam Wallet funds that are deemed unclaimed property may be turned over to the applicable authority."

Does the agreement really ban all transfers "by operation of law"?#

This is the part worth getting right if you are reading secondary write-ups. The phrase "operation of law" — the mechanism by which property moves to an estate without anyone signing anything — appears exactly once in the agreement, in section 3(D), "Trading and Transactions of Subscriptions Between Subscribers", and it is scoped to marketplace items: "You also understand and acknowledge that Subscriptions acquired in any Subscription Marketplace are license rights, that you have no ownership interest in such Subscriptions, and that Valve does not recognize any transfers of Subscriptions (including transfers by operation of law) that are made outside of Steam."

That covers Community Market and trading items. If you see it quoted as a blanket ban across the whole agreement, check the section it sits in. The blanket restriction on accounts lives in 1(C), and it does not use that phrase at all.

Has Valve ever said anything directly about wills?#

Once, informally, and it is worth being precise about what the source actually is. In May 2024 a user asked Steam Support whether they could leave their account in a will and received the reply: "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." TechSpot reported it on 27 May 2024, and PCWorld covered the same exchange the following day.

The primary artefact is a screenshot of one support agent's ticket reply, posted by a ResetEra user (TechSpot names them as delete12345) in a thread on that forum. Valve has published no press release, blog post, or bereavement policy on the subject. So the honest attribution is "a Steam Support agent told a user", not "Valve announced".

Two claims that circulate alongside this story do not hold up:

• The "2013 Valve statement." It is repeated widely as precedent, but it traces only to secondary write-ups that cite no primary source, and the contemporaneous 2024 coverage does not rely on it. Treat it as folklore unless someone produces the original.
• Bruce Willis suing Apple over his iTunes library. TechCrunch reported in 2012 that the story was untrue and that his wife publicly denied it. It still gets attached to Steam articles as a colourful lead.

One more silence is worth naming: the words "death", "deceased", "estate", "heir" and "inactive" do not appear anywhere in the Steam Subscriber Agreement. There is no clause, so there is no policy to look up.

What happens in practice, then?#

The contract says one thing. Steam Guard decides the rest. Valve's own description: "When Steam Guard is enabled on your account, you'll need to provide a special code to login from an unrecognized device", and "you'll either receive an email with the special code or you'll get it from the Steam Mobile app on your smartphone". Whoever controls the contact inbox or the phone running that app can complete a login from a new machine.

Recovery is also more forgiving than people expect. Valve states you can "always contact Steam Support for account recovery even if you've forgotten the account's email address, password, and phone number". The check at the end of that road is Proof of Ownership, which Valve defines as payment-based rather than identity-based: it "is established by submitting payment information previously used on the account or providing retail product codes that have been activated through Steam". For a credit card, the page asks for the card type, the name registered to the card, the billing address, city and postal code, and the last four digits — explicitly not the full number.

Read that carefully, because the gap it opens is the whole story. Someone holding old card statements may pass a Proof of Ownership check. That is account recovery, not inheritance. The account still belongs to its original holder on paper, the SteamID never changes, and nothing about the situation has been made legitimate by working.

Is quietly handing over your password a clean workaround?#

No, and this is where a lot of practical advice goes wrong. The same section 1(C) that blocks transfers also says: "You may not reveal, share or otherwise allow others to use your password or Account except as otherwise specifically authorized by Valve." Valve repeats the instruction in ordinary language in its Families FAQ, in the answer about family members cheating: "never give your password to anyone".

So the credentials route is not a loophole the agreement forgot to close. It is a breach that usually goes unnoticed — which means it works right up until the account is flagged, and Valve owes the person holding your password nothing when it is.

Do Steam accounts get deleted if nobody signs in?#

There is no published inactivity-deletion policy, and the word "inactive" never appears in the agreement. The only documented route is one the account holder starts themselves. Valve's Account Deletion FAQ describes it: the holder requests deletion, Steam Support asks that they "provide comprehensive Proof of Ownership prior to fulfilling the request", and then "The account will then be restricted from making purchases and using community features for 30 days while it is queued for deletion." The request can be cancelled inside that window.

After that it is final. Valve: "Account deletion is permanent. If you delete your Steam account, game licenses, community profile, gifts, inventory items, wallet funds, and other associated information will be deleted permanently and will not be recoverable." Deleting also frees nothing up — "A CD Key cannot be registered more than once", and "Account names are unique and can only be used once, regardless of whether an account has been deleted."

What is a Steam library actually worth?#

There is a real number, and Valve hosts it. Signed in, your AccountSpend page reports lifetime spend on the account. The headline field is TotalSpend; a separate OldSpend field covers spend before 17 April 2015 and is already counted inside TotalSpend rather than added to it, alongside a few narrower fields. The broader account data hub shows the rest of the personal information Steam holds. Both pages require you to sign in.

The community also uses the SteamDB account value calculator, which estimates a library's value from Steam store prices rather than from what you actually paid. Treat it as an estimate, not an appraisal.

Either way, keep the vocabulary straight. Spend is a record of money that left your account. It is not resale value, because section 1(C) makes selling the account a breach. A five-figure spend figure and a zero-value estate asset are not a contradiction — they are the same fact seen from two sides.

Can Steam Families work as a handoff plan?#

It helps while you are around, and it stops helping precisely when you would need it to keep going. Valve describes Steam Families as "a collection of family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View", launched out of beta in Valve's own announcement post.

What it gives you:

• Up to 6 members, "intended for a household of up to 6 close family members".
• "Access to all games owned by family members."
• "Ability to play a family member's game simultaneously, even if another game is being played" — though not the same copy. Valve's example: "If two of you would like to play Portal 2 at the same time, someone else in the family will need to purchase a copy of the game."

What it does not give you, in Valve's words: "Ownership of games remains with the purchaser; new purchases appear in your collection." Sharing is not succession. The cooldowns make that structural — adults leaving a family "will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family", and "each Steam Family slot has a cooldown of one year before a new member can occupy that slot." Valve also checks household co-location: one listed reason you cannot join is that "Your account activity does not show that you are part of the same household as the existing members."

Progress does not move either: "Save games, achievements, and other progress are tied to a single Steam account." And there is a risk clause worth reading before you widen access — "Your Steam Family privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a member of your Steam Family playing a game from you cheats or commits fraud."

Which games cannot be shared through a Steam Family?#

Per Valve's FAQ, sharing excludes "Games that require an additional third-party key, account, or a subscription in order to play", "Free to play games and any purchased DLC for those games", "Games or DLC that is restricted in your or the other family member's region", "Games that do not support the other family member's operating system", "Games that the publisher has marked explicitly as unavailable for sharing", and "Games marked as private by the original owner."

How does Steam compare with Apple, Google and Microsoft?#

Platform	Named-contact route	What the contact can reach	What stays out of reach
Steam	None published	Nothing; no bereavement process exists	The whole library — licences are non-transferable under SSA 1(C)
Apple	Digital Legacy; "You can have more than one Legacy Contact"	"photos, messages, notes, files, device backups, and more", using an access key plus a death certificate	"movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account", plus iCloud Keychain payment information, passwords and passkeys
Google	Inactive Account Manager; "You can select up to 10 people to receive this data" after a waiting period you set	A list of the chosen data and "a link they can follow to download the data"	Google also "reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you're inactive across Google for at least two years"
Microsoft	OneDrive Digital Legacy; a designated trusted contact, read-only, 72-hour wait after entering the code	Files and photos in the OneDrive account	The page does not extend this to Xbox games or Microsoft Store purchases

Two things fall out of that table that the usual "Apple has legacy contacts, Steam doesn't" framing hides.

First, the Microsoft code is designed to survive you: "The sharing code does not change and does not expire", so it can be written into a will without going stale. Without it set up in advance, Microsoft says that "For privacy and other legal reasons, we are generally unable to provide information to non-account holders", and the legal route requires that Microsoft "must first be formally served with a valid subpoena or court order" — with no guarantee of access even then.

Second, and more useful for Steam owners: Apple's legacy route hands over your files and excludes your purchased media. Microsoft's covers files and says nothing about games. Nobody in this table passes on a licensed library. Steam is the strictest of the four, but on games specifically it is closer to the industry norm than the comparison implies.

Does the law disagree with Valve?#

Sometimes, and it depends where you are.

In the United States, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — a model act promulgated by the Uniform Law Commission in 2015 — "provides a legal framework for users to transfer access to their accounts to another person after their death", as PCWorld put it. Enactment tallies vary a lot between summaries: PCWorld's article says 47 states, while other summaries put it closer to 38 jurisdictions, so check the Commission's own enactment map rather than any number in an article. The catch is in most state versions: fiduciary rights are subject to the applicable terms of service, which is how a platform's agreement can override the statutory route in practice.

Elsewhere courts have gone the other way. On 12 July 2018 the German Federal Court of Justice ruled in Case No. III ZR 183/17 that a deceased user's Facebook account passes to her heirs under the universal succession principle in Section 1922(1) of the German Civil Code — the contract with the platform transferring to the heirs much as a diary or a bundle of private letters would.

The lesson is not "Valve is wrong". It is that a terms-of-service answer and a legal answer are different answers, and only one of them is enforced by the login screen.

What should a Steam owner actually do now?#

No trick recovers a library. What you can do is remove the guesswork for the person who ends up looking at your account.

• Pull your real number. Open AccountSpend once and write down lifetime spend. It is the figure anyone valuing your affairs will ask about, and the one they cannot get without you.
• Write down where the account lives, not the password. Which email address it uses, which phone runs the Steam Mobile app, and which card paid for it — that last one is what a Proof of Ownership check asks for.
• Decide, in writing, what you want to happen. "Let it go quiet" is a legitimate instruction and spares someone a month of tickets. So is "try recovery, the card was the Visa ending in 4412."
• Set up Steam Families for the people you actually play with — while you are here to use it. Just do not file it as a succession plan; the one-year slot cooldown and Valve's "ownership remains with the purchaser" line rule that out.
• Use the real legacy tools where they exist. Apple, Google and Microsoft all have one. Steam does not, so the plan has to live outside Steam.
• Do the same pass on everything else. Steam is one line in a much longer list; the same reasoning applies to every online account you hold and what happens to each one.

The thread running through all of this is a handoff problem, not a legal one. Your instructions need to reach the right person at the right moment, without your passwords sitting in a document waiting for that moment. That is the gap Proceedly is built for: a regular check-in, a grace window, and someone you name who confirms before your encrypted plan reaches the people who depend on you — holding your instructions and where the keys live, never the passwords themselves.

Steam inheritance FAQ — what else do people ask?#

Can I leave my Steam account to someone in my will? Not through any route Valve supports. The agreement makes accounts strictly personal and non-transferable, and a support agent told a user directly that an account "cannot be transferred via a will". You can leave instructions about it; you cannot leave the account itself.

Can Steam Support transfer my games to my partner's account? No. Valve's own FAQ says accounts "can not be merged together" and that subscriptions and CD keys are "nontransferable and cannot be reset / moved between Steam accounts".

If my account goes untouched for years, will Valve delete it? There is no published inactivity-deletion policy, and the word "inactive" does not appear in the agreement. The only documented deletion route is one the holder requests, with comprehensive Proof of Ownership and a 30-day cancellable queue. Google, by contrast, does reserve the right to delete accounts inactive for at least two years.

Can someone just keep using my account after I go silent? Technically, often yes — Steam Guard codes go to the contact email or the Steam Mobile app, so whoever holds either can sign in from a new device. It also breaches section 1(C), which forbids revealing or sharing your password.

What about my Steam Wallet balance? The agreement says wallet funds have no cash value, are non-transferable, and do not constitute a personal property right. It does add that funds "deemed unclaimed property may be turned over to the applicable authority".

Does Steam Families let my family keep my games? No. Members can play each other's games, including at the same time, but "Ownership of games remains with the purchaser". Membership rests on an account that stays where it is, and family slots carry one-year cooldowns.

Do my achievements or saves move to another account? No. Valve is explicit: "Save games, achievements, and other progress are tied to a single Steam account."

Sources — where does each quote above come from?#

• Steam Subscriber Agreement — Valve Corporation, last updated 20 April 2026 (sections 1(B), 1(C), 2(A), 3(C), 3(D), 9(B))
• Steam Families User Guide & FAQ — Valve
• Steam Families is here — Valve announcement post (the earlier March 2024 beta post, "Introducing Steam Families", is superseded by this one)
• Account Deletion - Common Questions — Valve
• Providing Proof of Ownership — Valve
• Recovering a Lost or Forgotten Steam Account — Valve
• Steam Guard — Valve
• SteamID, Steam Account Names, Merging Accounts and Deleting Accounts — Valve
• Account spend and the account data hub — Valve (both require sign-in)
• Steam Account Value Calculator — SteamDB, community tool
• Can you bequeath your Steam account? Maybe, but there's a catch — PCWorld, Michael Crider, 28 May 2024
• Valve confirms your Steam account cannot be transferred to anyone after you die — TechSpot, Kishalaya Kundu, 27 May 2024
• ResetEra thread where the support reply was posted
• Bruce Willis Isn't Suing Apple Over iTunes Music Ownership Rights — TechCrunch, 3 September 2012
• Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Revised (2015) — Uniform Law Commission
• Germany: Federal Court of Justice rules digital social media accounts inheritable — US Library of Congress, on BGH Case No. III ZR 183/17
• How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account — Apple
• About Inactive Account Manager — Google
• Preserve your digital legacy with OneDrive — Microsoft
• Accessing Outlook.com, OneDrive and other Microsoft services when someone has died — Microsoft
• If you need access to the account, seek legal guidance — Microsoft