China Rules That Gaming Account Use Rights Can Be Inherited
A Beijing court has ruled that the right to use a gaming account, not the account itself, can be inherited after death.
The Case Behind the Ruling
A gamer surnamed Gu spent over a decade building up accounts across games from the Chinese developer Changyou, registering the bulk of them between 2010 and 2021. Eighty-seven accounts is a lot of usernames to remember, even for someone who plays for a living, and by the time Gu died last year at 36 from oral cancer, those accounts held real value: years of progress, items, and currency that took time and money to build.
His mother, Chen, asked Changyou to transfer the accounts into her name so she could sell them. She had a low income and no other family support, and the accounts were, in a very literal sense, an asset her son had left behind. Changyou said no, pointing to its user agreement, which claims ownership over all account data down to the characters and the currency inside it. Chen sued.
What the Court Actually Decided
In April, the Beijing Shijingshan District People's Court split the question in two. Ownership of the accounts, the court agreed, does belong to Changyou. But the accounts still carry independent economic value because of what Gu put into them, and that value can pass to an heir even if the account itself can't. The court ordered Changyou to transfer the accounts' real-name registration to Chen within 15 days of the ruling taking effect. She's the sole heir, since Gu's daughter waived her claim.
The presiding judge, Zhang Yingzhou, drew the distinction plainly: a platform's user agreement can restrict who owns an account, but it can't cancel out someone's legal right to inherit what that account is worth to use. The case was picked as a model example specifically so other courts handling the same kind of dispute have somewhere to point.
Where the Line Still Holds
I'd read this as narrower than it's being sold. Changyou didn't lose the accounts. What Chen won is recognition as the account holder and the right to everything inside them. She didn't get a green light to do whatever she wants with that access. Whether she can then sell those accounts to a stranger is a separate question the ruling doesn't answer. Most platforms ban that kind of transfer to stop trading between strangers, and this case is about inheritance between family, not resale to anyone else.
Part of a Bigger Pattern
This isn't happening in isolation. China's Civil Code has protected digital assets by law since 2021, and courts have leaned into that more each year since. In 2025, the Supreme People's Court created an entirely separate case category just for disputes over data and virtual property. With internet penetration in China just past 80%, the volume of accounts, currency, and digital estates left behind by the deceased was always going to need an answer eventually.
A similar problem surfaced last year in an unrelated case, when a phone number that had once belonged to Chinese-American singer Coco Lee, who died in 2023, was reassigned to a new user and briefly logged them into her old NetEase artist account. Different platform, same unresolved question about what happens to a digital identity once the person behind it is gone.
What It Signals for Everyone Else
Every platform that runs on accounts instead of discs or cartridges will eventually have to answer some version of this question, and most of them are still doing it with a user agreement that assumes nobody's supposed to die holding a library. This ruling shows a working middle path: the platform keeps ownership, the value passes to whoever earned it through the person who built it. It's not law outside China, and it doesn't bind anyone else's courts. But it's proof the split can hold up in an actual courtroom, which is more than most digital ownership arguments can currently claim.
