Chinese courts recently ruled in favour of gamers in the country, allowing for multiple Chinese families to “inherit the game accounts of deceased relatives”. The cases were part of a drawn-out legal issue in China, which addresses the subject of digital ownership, long after the owner of said game account has passed.
The news was posted in the pcmasterrace subreddit by user Slawrfp, who tells the tale of multiple rulings in different Chinese courts of Chinese gamers suing gaming companies for their right to “bequeath and inherit” gaming accounts, and won. To condense this story, the courts ruled in favour of the families, ruling that game accounts and microtransaction purchases have monetary value, and as such, gamers have rights related to those assets.
Chinese gamers have successfully managed to sue for the right to inherit their deceased relatives’ game accounts
byu/Slawrfp inpcmasterrace
Some of these cases are actually interesting, if you actually follow them: one case involved a widow who wanted to inherit a rare weapon in a game called Zhengtu (征途). The defendant, who was the deceased’s in-game “romantic partner” opposed the claim, saying that the item could only be acquired through collaborative gameplay of two players whose accounts were linked as an in-game couple.
The value of that knife at the time was worth 50,000 Yuan (~RM29,963), a point that allowed the Chinese court to determine that the item, while digital, did indeed have genuine market value. However, because of the supposed romantic partner claim, the widow was only entitled to 50% of the item’s value after it was sold. Not the full amount, but still, better than nothing.
In another case, the widow of another gamer sought to inherit their digital assets. While there was a game account, the deceased also had other assets, including five Bitcoins, a personal social media account with approximately 100,000 followers, plus chat history. Oh, and his aforementioned game account had a value of 200,000 Yuan (~RM119,855). The widow contacted the relevant platforms. Several of which refused her request to transfer said assets.
Again, the court in this case ruled in favour of the widow, ruling that the involved platforms had to cooperate with the widow and transfer the full value of the assets to the widow.
The third and final case in this story involves a mother and her dead son. The deceased child had a whopping 87 game accounts, and asked the game company to change the name linked to the accounts from her son to herself. Unsurprisingly, the company refused the request, arguing that under its user agreement, it owned all the accounts, while the son only held a limited right of use.
In this case, the court ruled that just because the company claims ownership to the account, it wasn’t so. The full ruling was as follows: “…although the game account was associated with the deceased’s personal identity, this connection merely served as an identity management mechanism and did not make the right of use a purely personal right. Instead, the right of use was primarily a property interest, as the gamer had invested time, effort, and financial resources into developing the accounts and their associated virtual assets. Therefore, the right of use was not a right that was inherently personal, non-transferable, or prohibited from inheritance by its nature.”
(Source: Reddit)
