The issue of gaming account inheritance after a person’s death is deeply ambiguous. Steam doesn’t (officially) allow it, GOG does. Essentially decided by another person simply having the necessary email address and password to access the account, even then the matter is very legally dubious, often causing consternation and upset. Not least when such accounts have huge monetary value. One mother in Beijing, China, was faced with this situation after her 36-year-old son died. She wanted to inherit his 87 accounts with an unspecified gaming company in order to supplement her income, but after the company refused, saying it owned the user data, not her, she sued in the Shijingsham District Court and won.
It’s worth noting that the name of the specific gaming company involved in this case is not known, because the story was first reported by the People’s Court Daily (and reproduced here), a newspaper which Sixth Tone says is affiliated with China’s Supreme People’s Court. But we do know that a young man with the surname Gu (or Hu by some translations) “became addicted to online games in his early twenties.” Unemployed, Gu spent the next decade playing across 87 verified accounts, “making each account quite valuable.” Gu died following a serious illness at the age of just 36, leaving his mother, Mrs. Chen, alone. She lived on a “meager income,” and was previously widowed, now alone and struggling. She only learned of the gaming accounts’ potential value after organizing her son’s funeral, and then unsuccessfully attempted to have them transferred into her name.
Gu’s father was already dead, and his daughter had, according to the Beijing Daily Client, “issued a written statement voluntarily relinquishing her inheritance rights to the game accounts in question.” That left his mother, Mrs. Shen, as the remaining potential inheritor, but the gaming company disagreed.
The company argued in court that the user agreement for the game said that accounts and virtual items belonged to the company. Users had, by those legal terms, “limited right to use the data information.” Which is the sort of god-awful thing we all unwittingly agree to when we click “Agree” without reading the deliberately impossible text. However, the court had other ideas.
This comes down to previous Chinese law about “inheritable property,” which previous court rulings have determined include online virtual properties, and thus are protected by the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China. The court’s logic, as laid out by the Beijing Daily Client (via machine translation), is that because a person needs to invest their time, effort, and money to “cultivate the account,” and that the account itself and the virtual items within have “use value and transfer value,” they meet the requirements of “property interests.” Thus, those gaming accounts become inheritable property.
The court ruled that the gaming company must change the real-name authentication from Mr. Gu’s to Mrs. Chen’s within 15 days, giving her ownership of the accounts. The compromise, if any, is that the same user agreement rules are transferred to the heir.
This appears to set a precedent in China, and as such is a pretty significant ruling. It’s also yet another example of the ineffectiveness of User Agreements the moment they encounter a court, with national laws often overruling a company’s attempts to claim that, by agreeing to such unread screeds, a user has waived their rights.
Valve’s will
While a Chinese ruling has no bearing on the U.S., it is hard not to wonder if something similar could occur elsewhere if someone were willing to take Valve to court over its claims that Steam accounts cannot be inherited. The company refuses to transfer an account from one individual to another, and Steam users report that when people notify Valve that a person has died, the account gets locked, not transferred.
You are, after all, not actually buying anything from Steam, but instead purchasing an ambiguous sort of subscription right to access the game, and doing so in your own name. Of course, Steam accounts can also be worth vast amounts of money, as well as containing the personal experience of a person’s save games. As such, it does seem extremely odd that these aren’t inheritable property. Perhaps we need to wait for someone to put this in front of a judge. There were rumblings from the EU in 2024 about a potential law that could change this, but things have been quiet since.