Chinese Court Allows Inheritance of Gaming Accounts and Skins
Western companies practice a different approach.
Western gamers sometimes discuss the possibility of inheriting their online gaming or service accounts, such as Steam. According to Valve's rules, this cannot be done officially. Formally, "Steam accounts and games are not transferable" — the company cannot grant another person access to an account or merge its content with another account. Therefore, players can only transfer them unofficially.
China has a different view. It recently became known that courts have recognized gaming accounts, virtual items, and characters as full-fledged property that can be inherited.
A user under the nickname Slawrfp drew players' attention to a series of court decisions in China:
Chinese courts consider game accounts and in-game microtransaction purchases as objects with monetary value, which means players have rights associated with these assets [...] Chinese courts reject the idea that standard non-transferability clauses can prevent you from inheriting a game or even individual microtransactions (similar in nature to CS:GO knives or skins in other games), and have already made such rulings in several cases.
As one example, he cited a lawsuit concerning an artifact from the now-closed MMORPG Zhengtu. The deceased gamer's wife wanted to sell it (it was worth over 500 thousand rubles): the court recognized the artifact as a legitimate inheritance but divided the proceeds from the sale between the gamer's real and virtual wives, as she had previously helped him acquire the item.
Some players hope that at some point, Chinese judicial practice will be studied in the West, and previous rules regarding digital items and accounts will be revised to allow their legal inheritance.
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