Some of you may have read the article written by my colleague, Demetre Vasilounis, back in June of this year about Valve’s incredibly popular game distribution platform, Steam. The platform is selling their games as licences, not as owned games, much to the surprise of the gaming community. This was a spark of many discussions found on Reddit, and Steam’s own discussion forums. If you haven’t read the article, I suggest you do, it’s a good read about understanding how we may not own our online software purchases, and how that may impact our estate planning.

Understanding how our digital purchases become assets, or rather, not assets, is an important part of our planning. You may have these digital purchases whether you have amassed an iTunes music collection, purchased movies on a streaming platform, or in this instance, purchased games via Steam, but do you actually own them? We can spend thousands of dollars and instead of buying music CDs, or movies on Blu-ray, we now buy on these online platforms. What does that do to what we would have otherwise owned by buying this content as physical media?

You may want your children to receive those Lynyrd Skynrd albums you are fondly known for always playing. Do you own those albums, or do you just have a license to play them as long as you have your non-transferrable iTunes account? What about Home Alone 1 and 2, the only good Home Alone movies that you play every Christmas? Do you own them on Blu-ray, or do you have a licence to play them under your Google account? What happens to these license-based accounts on death is a topic I discussed in a previous article.

Steam has listened to the online feedback, taken notes, and made changes, although the changes may not be the changes we wanted, and are probably not a surprise. No, you still do not own the games you purchase on Steam, and you still cannot pass on ownership of your account through your estate or other means. They now have a more obvious disclosure to kindly inform you that the games are, in fact, licenses, and not owned.

Steam was getting ahead here and making it clear. They already were following California’s recently passed legislation(AB 2426) by pointing out in the terms and conditions of purchase that their customers are only buying licenses when they click “buy”.

This isn’t the first time this issue has come around. While Steam has been a stable business for many years now, others have not, and this issue has become a painful reminder of what it means to purchase licences.

Google shut down their gaming platform, Stadia, in January, 2023. Thankfully, Google did at least refund all purchases made on the platform, but all game progress and earned content, was lost. If you spent hours grinding it out in Red Dead Redemption 2, like me, one of the most popular games on the platform at the time, your progress is sadly, gone. Thankfully, I was not playing on Stadia.

This also happened in a much worse way with Sony on the PlayStation Store. Sony had once been selling the ability to play popular shows like Mythbusters, Cake Boss, LA Ink, Naked and Afraid, and many others on their site. On December 31, 2023, Sony placed a notice on their site that the ability to play these shows will be removed. Thousands of episodes of content were lost, because of a licensing agreement that had ended with the Discovery channel. In this instance, Sony did not offer refunds. These were purchases that were made prior to 2021, as Sony had stopped selling shows and movies on its platform on August 31, 2021. On December 21, 2021, Sony did eventually walk back the decision, entering into a new agreement with Warner Brothers. This still shows how close we came to losing access to purchased content.

All of these examples serve as a stark reminder that we do not own most of what we “purchase” online. The majority of platforms are selling you licenses, even if they refer to the transaction as “buying” or “purchasing” the product. Often the price is just as high as if you were to purchase the physical media version. With physical media becoming less common in favour of the convenience of online purchases, we do need to be careful to understand the transaction we are entering into online.

Physical media may not always be the answer either. Microsoft’s Xbox service operates on digital licences, even if you buy a physical copy of the game. This came into effect with the Xbox One. There is no ability to sell or transfer, only a temporary “game share” is available. Alternatively, transferring games has always been an option on PlayStation. Sony even made a video to troll Microsoft’s imposed restriction.

As practitioners, we need to be aware of what constitutes digital assets, and what do not. When our clients detail their digital assets for us in our planning conversations, we can offer some guidance of what assets have the possibility of being transferred. Collections such as online music, movie, or game libraries can carry significant value, both monetary and sentimental. Unfortunately, none of these library platforms have the ability to transfer ownership, at least not now. Perhaps if more people pay attention to the cost of their collections, and ask for the ability to transfer their purchases, companies will eventually listen, and give us the ability to do so.

Until then, I for one will be buying my copy of Grand Theft Auto 6 on physical media when it comes out, hopefully in 2025. Being 10 over years since Grand Theft Auto 5 means I am going to need this game to be playable for at least 10 years. If I buy digital, who knows if the platform I purchase on will still be there?

Written by Dave Madan