Hmmm... I would say that the GOG account with all its contents is an (indivisible) asset of the estate of the deceased. The estate is then distributed according to the respective inheritance laws.
I see no reason in GOG's Terms of Use why it shouldn't work that way.

I think the whole thing is kinda moot. Don't think so much. :-) In the normal functioning world, when people die, they leave their stuff to other people, and it's theirs, to do as they see fit. Keep it, sell it, open a museum...

Yeah, well, IANAL, and this isn't legal advice, but I will tell you what the answer is.

You bought the games, you own the games. You want to bequeath them to your children, you bequeath them to your children as you see fit. The only limitation is that if you have more than one child, you cannot give both the same game, since you only bought one "copy".

Don't worry about the EULA's and other legal mumbo jumbo, they're bullshit (and good for you for not reading them anymore, they're not at all enforceable in a just world. the fact we may not live in a just world doesn't change right from wrong, they're too long, too complicate, and don't even pass the laugh test when it comes to being written for "the average consumer" to understand, and therefore, existing contract law applies, or should apply). And if others want to jump in and yell at me for saying the truth, yell to your hearts content. I said right away IANAL AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. I'm merely telling what the "right" answer is.

I've already told one of my nephews where I keep all of my gogs, and that when I die they're his. I bought the games, they're mine, and when I die they will be his. Just like I bought the computer, and when I die, the computer will be his. Period.

If you're worried about the current "legal" answer, instead of the "right" one, then I'm sure others will (as they already have) tried to tell you why you really can't do what you want with your own games. But just because something may be technically "legal" doesn't mean it's "right." And we're living in a time right now where that is rampant due to corruption and the fact that the powerful are able to make "legal" what isn't "right" at will.

As you may, or may not know, it is "legal" in the US for the military to arrest and detain you, forever, with no warrant, from the privacy of your own home, and with no right to counsel, no habeas corpus rights, or any other rights whatsoever. And while they're detaining you, they can rendition you to a country that uses torture as a means of extracting information and can even kill you, with no legal recourse for your surviving family. That's legal, right now. Once you're that far down the rabbit hole, who really cares what the "legal" answer is to something regarding passing on PC games that you own??? Do what's "right" and don't worry about it.

I doubt you'll find your legal "on paper" reply, but the solution is simple:

Just give the people you trust the most (like your kids) your account details and teach em how to use it and keep it safe, so they don't have to deal with bullshit after you pass away. Read some cases of steam accounts getting transferred (maybe the same for gog) with death proof certificates and shit like that but it's never certain what will happen, so i don't wanna get my loved ones go trough all this crap and even risking getting nothing out of it. Better play safe.

The account is tied to one person, that is to you, so you should technically be the only one playing those games.

That said, giving your account details to your children legally wouldn't hold, but I can't for the life of me imagine someone actually holding them or you accountable for it, especially here on GOG. Steam would be a different matter, but even there they would not do a thing unless you shouted it out from the rooftops.

This is the real world, where such little trivialities get overlooked all the time, and are only there in the first place to ward off scammers and system abusers, you can rest easy that if you give away your account to someone to hold on to, no one will berate you for it.

And an additional problem - the license you talk about here is the license to play a game, not the allowance to use a service. These rulings is based on an understanding of physical medium (the license follows a physical product i.e. a cd or disk) not on digital download. This means that you may have the rights to transfer the rights to play the game to your child, but said child do not have the right to use gOg's services. So the games must already be downloaded, if the game is deleted or HD is wiped, for some reason, it is then up to that person to go to the rights holder (not gOg) to prove ownership and demand a new copy.

The same applies with patches and updates, the new right holder can not demand patches via gOg, but must do so via the rights holder.

Yeah, I agree with this advice. I think you do own the downloaded games, but if something happens to them, just as if a book you left with them burned, they wouldn't have the right to go back to gog to redownload them. And if new editions of that book became available, they wouldn't have the right to ownership of that book.

This is good stuff here in this post.

I was wondering about these things too, even if I'm young like you lol.

It would be absurd having to buy everything again from scratch, yet, for now, transferring your account to someone else doesn't seem allowed.
Maybe GOG should add some kind of (cheap) account transfer fee for relatives? (not only for sons, they could just hate games!)

P.s: this is interesting, please change that generic thread title for future reference! (ex: gog games inheritance, help!)

Lolz!

Hmmm ok it IS possible worrying about this kind of stuff might kill you before you are 40, so probably best to not worry about it. If you approach much of life with this kind of outlook, it won't be healthy.

Games, these are games, not the air you breathe or the food you eat or water you drink, they are 'just' games. Relax, give them to your kid if you choose, or delete them on your death-bed so they have to buy them again. It really is not that important, and the beauty of DRM-free means it is entirely in your control what you want to do.

That's not actually a problem, it's part of the original question. If you read closely, you might notice that I didn't mention the use of GOG's services anywhere. That wasn't a coincidence.

I'm no lawyer but I think it would be legitimate for one to be able to give the entire account to a person upon passing away (Keep in mind the account won't be used by two people since the original account holder has passed). The account follows one person and the items are paid for already. You can give your disc movie media to your next of kin, why not a digital account?

Licences of DRM free games aren't typically transferable. Sure there's nothing that GOG could do to stop it or even know about it, but legally speaking, they don't include the right to transfer the software in the license.

Which makes sense, with DRM software they can ensure that one copy is used at any given time, but with DRM free software they don't have any way of knowing how many people are using the same copy, hence it would be silly for them to allow transfers.

As I said earlier, I live in the U.S., specifically in Texas, where trivialities are often more important than the big picture. Heck, 2/3 of the pop. in this state actually believe that humans and dinosaurs lived on the planet at the same time. I'm not willing to leave anything that occurs in this state to chance with regards to my family.
Glad you beat cancer, here's to hoping I will.
I'll try to think of a good one for ya!
Games have helped my family, not just me and my children, but my entire family, to come together as a whole. So, it's pretty important to us.

Don't discount the possibility of a spontaneous combustion. Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year, it's just not widely reported.