Planning ahead for your Steam accounts

Lifetime transfer options and steps to take now for Valve Corporation accounts

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(General customer service)

Verified Jul 2026

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:

1
Set up a Steam Family with your household. This is the single most important step: up to 6 members share libraries through their own accounts, with independent saves and achievements. Pick your members carefully because each vacated slot is cooldown-locked for up to a year.
2
Save your Steam Guard recovery code (R-code) with your estate documents. Without the authenticator device or recovery code, your executor will have to go through Steam Support's account recovery process, which is not guaranteed to succeed.
3
Understand that your game library has no legal transferability. The Subscriber Agreement explicitly prohibits transfers by "operation of law" (inheritance). A library with thousands of dollars in games has zero transferable value under Steam's terms.
4
For valuable Community Market items (CS2 skins, rare trading cards): consider selling or trading them while alive if you want their value preserved. Once the account becomes inaccessible, there is no mechanism to extract cash value.
5
Keep your Steam Wallet balance low. Wallet funds are non-refundable and non-transferable. Unclaimed funds may be escheated to state government.
6
For Steam Workshop creators: your creative work's intellectual property may have different inheritance treatment than the account license, but managing or distributing it from the account still requires account access.
7
Do not instruct your executor to delete the account. Deletion is irrecoverable after the 30-day grace period, while an inactive account preserves whatever access Steam Families or direct-login paths still allow.

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.

SimplyTrustSimplyTrust Editorial·

Sources

Data sourced from Valve Corporation primary sources (10 pages reviewed). How we research.