GOG will transfer your dead relative’s game account, but only with a court order
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
This is exactly what I fucking hate about "ownership" of digital goods. It's just done at the pleasure of some corporation deigning to let you (or your survivors) access what you already bought and paid for. Sometimes things disappear because of some IP lawyer shit behind the scenes. Sometimes maybe you move to a region where you're not allowed to watch your movie or play your game.
I think it's high time we had laws that govern digital purchases so they have the attributes of true ownership: you can give them away, you can loan them out, you can sell them, you can put them in your will. Otherwise it's really just a rental.
Corporations will absolutely say they're "bound by general law" when the vagueness suits them.
I think it's high time we had laws that govern digital purchases so they have the attributes of true ownership: you can give them away, you can loan them out, you can sell them, you can put them in your will. Otherwise it's really just a rental.
Corporations will absolutely say they're "bound by general law" when the vagueness suits them.
Last edited:
Upvote
141
(142
/
-1)
Or...just put your id and password to [whatever password manager you have] in your will and call it done.
Upvote
137
(137
/
0)
Ooooh I know what article I'm going to talk to Lawyer Wife about over dinner tonight and pick her brain. Granted this isn't her area of practice (estate law), but she does deal with tech law all the time as she works for an algorithmic trading house, so she might know some of the tech side of things.
Upvote
47
(48
/
-1)
Of course, but it's galling that these people can make their customers essentially sneak around like that.
Upvote
43
(45
/
-2)
Exactly. My father died recently and thank god he had a notebook with all of his usernames and passwords so I could log in and cancel all of his subscriptions.
Upvote
85
(85
/
0)
- Add bookmark
- Featured
- #8
Honestly this is a pretty good response ? Not the outcome I'd like but they seem to have thought it through and find the current legal state of digital ownership pretty garbage too. They also pretty much seem to say "we can't know who owns the account for sure... just give the login and password".
Upvote
61
(62
/
-1)
I mean, it seems reasonable? An executor of the estate would be getting court orders for a lot of other elements of the estate, and sure it seems trivial for a game library, but at least here from what I know that's the recognised way to handle distributing estate property.
Upvote
28
(28
/
0)
I think this makes it sound harder than it is. If any part of the estate goes into probate, there will be a court order. Unless I missed it the article doesn’t require the court order to specifically identify the GOG account. Whether, GOG would actually require that might be an open question. And what it means to work through the EULAs of individual titles sounds like a mess, but it’s their mess. (Best guess if they do decide to transfer ownership, they’re not actually going to do a title-by-title review.)
Now… good estate planning means you skip probate by having your assets fall into a trust. Ironically, the better job you do at estate planning, the harder it might be to pass along your GOG library.
Now… good estate planning means you skip probate by having your assets fall into a trust. Ironically, the better job you do at estate planning, the harder it might be to pass along your GOG library.
Last edited:
Upvote
13
(14
/
-1)
I think that's already possible via pen and sticky note, and if the beneficiary wants to change the email addresses associated to an account that's possible too. You can't merge accounts though, which I suppose could be annoying.
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
You must mean that Rubik’s Cube article. Here's an interesting spin on it from a Japanese POV.
Upvote
-8
(4
/
-12)
DID YOU KNOW Samsung phones will PIN lock themselves if the user's thumbprint hasn't been used in a couple days? Someone went into a coma and died and I found that out. Got in anyway. Mid five figures undisclosed debt rang up in the weeks before their death.
Upvote
16
(17
/
-1)
Account credentials is what I'd call a backup plan rather than the preferred way to do this. Anyone who cares about inheriting a video game library is most likely gonna have a library of their own, and switching between libraries to play games is not my idea of a good experience.
Upvote
33
(33
/
0)
"This is the game of my great-grandmother. She passed it down to her son, who passed it to his mother, who passed it down to me. And now I pass it on to you. The libraries have changed, and the controllers have been replaced. The binaries have been patched and the subsystems emulated. But it remains the game of my great-grandmother.
Achieve 100% completion in this game after I pass, and you will make the spirits of those who came before proud. And pass it down to your eldest child, so that they may, in turn, carry on the tradition of obtaining every achievement."
Achieve 100% completion in this game after I pass, and you will make the spirits of those who came before proud. And pass it down to your eldest child, so that they may, in turn, carry on the tradition of obtaining every achievement."
Upvote
90
(90
/
0)
I believe we should not only be able to bequeath our game libraries, but also sell them. If at all times, only one person has access it should be fine. Nothing has changed for the corporation. Of course, we need to catch up to the EU with our digital rights first.
Upvote
19
(23
/
-4)
GOG already does this. When you buy a game from them, you get a DRM-free installer you can download and stash anywhere. With that installer, you can reinstall the game on any machine(s) you want without having to authenticate against your GOG account.
This makes the question of "how do I pass on my purchases?" less pressing in their case, because if you want to do that, you already can. Just download all the installers and store them on a hard drive somewhere, then tell your next of kin where the hard drive is. If they have the hard drive with the installers, they have as much access to your purchases as you ever did.
There could still be scenarios where a next of kin needs to access a decedent's GOG account for other reasons, in which case it makes sense for them to have a policy in place to allow that with the appropriate legal documentation. But you can obviate the need for your next of kin to ever have to contact GOG with just a little advance planning.
Last edited:
Upvote
36
(36
/
0)
Hopefully one day hardware will be invented that can actually run Crysis smoothly at highest setttings.
Upvote
11
(14
/
-3)
This. GOG fully admits that can't identify the actual person linked to the account; and they honestly don't care. As long as they have a CC and any charges get paid they DGAF.
Upvote
28
(28
/
0)
This still isn't ideal but its a shame GOG isn't the champion of PC gaming while Steam is. No shade to Steam and Steam has features that are better than GOG, but GOG's push for DRM free is inherently more consumer friendly and IMO aligns most with the openness of PCs.
Upvote
40
(40
/
0)
If we built a clustered compute node that joined the processing power of every planet in the galaxy together through a tesseract at the centre of it all - the sort of setup that could simulate the movement of every particle in an artificial galaxy and make the simulated life believe it was real - and dedicated it solely to Crysis, it still wouldn't run at top resolution.
Upvote
-10
(1
/
-11)
That will only work until the rent seeking arseholes get hacked due to their poor security, and mandate some sort of future 2FA style crap from their users, as is the usual response of a company to getting itself hacked.
I fully expect that ability to use dead relative accounts will last only as long as it takes for some MBAs to calculate the "lost" profits from it.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
This probably is too expensive for most people to manage. Especially when dealing with an estate that doesn’t require exhaustive intestate adjudication. It’s good that it’s an option, and some people might have a GOG account of sufficient investment to warrant it, but this will likely be vanishingly rare and only really pick up when the majority of GOG owners now start reaching natural attrition, which is probably like 25 years off.
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
Apologies, but I'll just repost my previous post under the previous Ars article about that digital inheritance matter:
___________________
I really wonder what would happen under the EU or national laws here. Could be quite an interesting court case!
Turns out quite a few lawyers have apparently already considered this:
Vučković, Romana & Kanceljak, Ivana. (2019). DOES THE RIGHT TO USE DIGITAL CONTENT AFFECT OUR DIGITAL INHERITANCE?. EU and comparative law issues and challenges series (ECLIC). 3. 10.25234/eclic/9029. [source]
EDIT: Interesting read so far. German Federal Court of Justice already had a case of bereaved parents suing Facebook to access their dead daughter's messages on the platform under German inheritance laws – the court sided with the parents, ordering Facebook to give them full access to the locked "memorial" profile and the sent messages. Though that's a different issue than inheriting a game store account, still the main argument of universal succession was upheld for a digital contract:
"The most important argument was that their daughter’s contract position is transferable according to principle of universal succession. BGH explained that the provisions of terms and conditions do not explicitly exclude inheritability"
Mind you, that was a very specific case where the daughter died in a suspect way and the parents wanted to find out whether it was a suicide or not – quite different case from Steam account inheritance, plus Germany obviously uses a variant of Civil law, so precedents don't really work the US way.
EDIT2: "In other cases, for example in case of accounts created for purchase and music listening, there is no such justification for non‑transferability. Courts should declare such clauses unfair and accordingly null. Additionally, it can be argued that the principle of universal succession should in some cases prevail over the non-transferability clauses" and "When it comes to the inheritability of digital data and digital content, since there are not any special rules in the inheritance law in Croatia applicable in this case, principle of universal succession also applies".
The authors argues that digital inheritance is basically already true under their existing laws in most cases and any licence terms against that automatically invalid*, but that a provision of digital inheritance should be put into later EU directives, as it would simplify it for the heirs, not having to resort to lengthy court procedures. The article was written before the Digital Goods Directive and DSA came into effect, so it might not be entirely up to date. Even if GDG and DSA would likely only strengthen that position of digital inheritability.
Interesting read indeed, even if IANAL!
*: Generally, under the EU law, most licence terms or ToS that contradict legal provisions or take away consumer rights are not only automatically null and voided, but even just publishing such illegal ToS can get the company doing so a pretty hefty fine from the regulator.
___________________
Again, IANAL, but it seems to me plenty of jurisdictions might find Steam's stance against digital inheritance invalid, but also find GOG's more careful (and admittedly quite nicer in comparison!) stance of still requiring a court order also totally invalid – as digital inheritance might become a common thing recognised by the courts. Also, EULA terms be damned, those are worth their paper mass displacement in drowned company lawyers, when it actually comes to legally enforcing them in most of the world. Laws count, EULAs don't.
Upvote
15
(17
/
-2)
Not too excuse it, but at least GOG sells their games DRM free. I can download my game library and leave that NAS in my will.
Upvote
19
(19
/
0)
That was kind of the approach I was thinking of. If silly buggers are going to be played, by gum I'm going to play silly buggers.
Upvote
5
(5
/
0)
Waiting for the Judge Judy episode where two step-siblings are arguing over who gets to have their deceased father’s copy of Witcher 3.
Upvote
16
(16
/
0)
Already showed that one to my daughter who is into Rubik's Cubes in a big, big way. She felt machine solving is cheating and only watches human solvers.
Upvote
-1
(1
/
-2)
I did the best I could with that when mine died a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, there were some where he had duplicate accounts and others where there just wasn't the information. And my mother didn't want to just cancel the payment card because she had things going to the same number. But it took months of dealing with charges from services with no such convenient information (or the written ones were outdated) to get them all.
A forced Windows update on his computer required access to the Microsoft account when the only written password was local. Thankfully, he didn't know to encrypt his data so I had to mount the drive from another machine and copy it that way.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
Given the current legal situation, I'm not sure GoG could be expected to do anything else. They can't get sued by a publisher if they're obeying a court order.
Updating the legal codes so that software is treated the same as older media seems to be the answer to me. I can inherit other stuff, why not software?
Updating the legal codes so that software is treated the same as older media seems to be the answer to me. I can inherit other stuff, why not software?
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
Password sharing is against terms of service and can lead to account deletion.
Upvote
7
(7
/
0)
Or . . . hear me out . . . you could just write down your login and password and give it to someone when you die.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Steam allows you to share your account with family members, so you could just enable the sharing and bypass the problem of inheritence. https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing
Upvote
-6
(0
/
-6)
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
When all you own is an ephemeral vector of voltages or magnetic moments then you own nothing.
Upvote
4
(5
/
-1)
1. The company adds a field for an heir(s) email address(es) to the account settings.
2. A person with an account fills in that field.
3. A message is received from an heir's email address containing the company's standard "owner with email address is dead or permanently incapacitated" notice.
4. The company attempts to contact the owner, for instance emails once a week for three weeks or at login.
5. If the owner (who is really "gone" in this scenario) does not respond, the company sends a transfer of ownership message to the heir's email, with a temporary access credential.
The only downside is if one of the heirs is scum they could steal Dad's games if he goes on a long vacation. Or if they were truly evil they could just off the parent, but seriously, who would kill a parent just for access to old games?
2. A person with an account fills in that field.
3. A message is received from an heir's email address containing the company's standard "owner with email address is dead or permanently incapacitated" notice.
4. The company attempts to contact the owner, for instance emails once a week for three weeks or at login.
5. If the owner (who is really "gone" in this scenario) does not respond, the company sends a transfer of ownership message to the heir's email, with a temporary access credential.
The only downside is if one of the heirs is scum they could steal Dad's games if he goes on a long vacation. Or if they were truly evil they could just off the parent, but seriously, who would kill a parent just for access to old games?
Upvote
-4
(2
/
-6)
1. This is a company which does not collect invasive PII on their customers. Do you really want to put a stop to this?
2. A person's account is broken into, their contact email address changed, and then...
3. The "new account holder" announces that the original owner is dead.
4. The real owner doesn't receive "Are you still alive emails" because they are sent to the wrong address, and...
5. Their account is sold off with the full cooperation of GOG.
So what happens after it's done? The original owner just says "Hi, you gave away my account by mistake. Please give it back, even though the only authentication you have is the email address I'm sending this from"? Wonderful. Now there are two fully supported ways to take over an account.
Rather than open Pandora's Can O' Worms, I really think that GOG is better off just differing to the courts to identify who really owns an account and whether or not they're dead. Handing over accounts to anyone who can tell a convincing story seems like a terrible way to keep the business running.
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
Yeah, this would've made a better headline, not only they don't care what you do with your games, they make sure when you buy a game, you actually can have it forever unlike all other digital companies but on top of that, they don't care to know who you are!
Their answer is pretty much, give your login to your friends and family you want to donate your account to, as we won't know that even happened or do it the legal way and get a court order saying you're the new owner!
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)