Planning ahead for your PlayStation accounts

Sony Interactive Entertainment's terms state that accounts are forfeited when the account holder dies. Lifetime planning is the only path to extracting value from the account before that happens.

How to protect your PlayStation accounts

Here are 8 steps to protect and manage your PlayStation accounts while the account is active:

Family sharing

Accounts for PlayStation are non-transferable. The practical workaround is Console Sharing and Offline Play on PS5 (or the equivalent Primary PS4 designation). Sony states it "is automatically allowed on the PS5 console you've used to sign in to PlayStation for the first time," and that when it is enabled, anyone who uses that console can "Play your games and media even when the console is offline," play games and media you purchased and downloaded, and "Enjoy some benefits of your PlayStation Plus membership." It is enabled under Settings > Users and Accounts > Other > Console Sharing and Offline Play, and can be active on only one PS5 at a time; enabling it elsewhere turns it off on the current console. A console the family no longer has access to can be deactivated remotely from Account Management, but Sony permits a remote deactivate-all only once every 6 months. This is a de facto household-sharing mechanism, not a transfer: the games remain licensed to the original account, and if that account is closed the shared access ends. Separately, the family structure in the ToS is Family Manager and Child Accounts: Section 12.4 provides that terminating a Family Manager Account generally terminates the associated Child Accounts, but where Sony permits a Child Account to remain open it "will be permitted to use the remaining funds in your Wallet." The close-account support page states the same result from the other direction: "If you're a family manager, closing your account will also close all child accounts in your family."

Frequently asked questions