We've all joked at some point about who will
keep our sacred Steam library or who will delete our history when we pass away.
What seemed like a simple internet joke has just become a pretty serious legal
matter. Courts in China have officially ruled that video game accounts,
virtual items, and other digital assets can be claimed as
a legal inheritance by the immediate family members of a
deceased player, recognizing that all that time and money invested has real
economic value and cannot simply disappear into thin air.
To set this monumental precedent, the
authorities relied on recent cases that seem to be taken from a movie. In
Beijing, a court ruled in favor of a mother who demanded control of her late
son's 87 verified accounts. Although the platform tried to block it by hiding
behind its aggressive terms of service that classify the
accounts as "non-transferable" properties, the judges determined that
the right of use has a clear monetary value and forced the company to make the
transfer. Another brutal example was the case of the "Golden Blade",
an incredibly rare weapon within a popular MMORPG, whose enormous
valuation had to be legally divided between the heir of the fallen player and
the guildmate who helped him get it.
But Chinese law drew a very clear line to
protect the dignity of the fallen: although family members can inherit Bitcoin
wallets, high-level accounts, and lucrative social media profiles, all purely
personal content such as chat histories and private messages is kept strictly
blocked. This position clashes violently with the model used by platforms in
the West, where companies insist that we do not own anything and that each
digital purchase is only a temporary license that dies along with the user. The
Asian courts have just shown that no end-user contract can be above succession
rights.
Knowing that thousands of players invest real
fortunes and decades of their lives building their virtual inventories
