Planning ahead for your Steam accounts
Lifetime transfer options and steps to take now for Valve Corporation accounts
(General customer service)
Valve Corporation'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.
Steam Families (launched in beta March 2024 and rolled out broadly September 2024, replacing the older Family Library Sharing and Family View features) allows up to 6 people in a household to form a family group and play games from each other's libraries. Each member has their own account, earns their own achievements, and saves their own progress to Steam Cloud. Members are classified as adults or children; any adult family member can manage invites and apply account restrictions, and adults can purchase games for children in the family. Adults can leave a family at any time but must wait 1 year from the date they joined the previous family before creating or joining a new one, so a vacated slot is effectively cooldown-locked for up to a year. Children cannot leave the family themselves and must be removed by an adult in the family or by Steam Support. Steam Families is the only practical estate-planning mechanism on Steam: if the deceased was in a family group, other members retain access to the shared library through their own accounts as long as the deceased's account remains active and in the family.
How to protect your Steam accounts
7 lifetime planning steps for your Steam accounts:
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
An inventory listing the Steam account lets a fiduciary identify it and act on it through the operator's official channels.
Steam does not offer beneficiary designations, so there is no program-level mechanism for directing accounts to a specific person at death.
Sources
Data sourced from Valve Corporation primary sources (10 pages reviewed). How we research.
(General customer service)
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