399. The Legacy

A court in China has ruled that when a gamer dies, their video game accounts, in-game items, and digital assets can be inherited by their heirs. The ruling is legally binding. You may now leave your magic sword collection to your children.

The ruling applies to things like character progress, virtual currency, rare items obtained through years of play, and accounts that represent, depending on the game, anywhere from zero to several hundred hours of human effort. These things can now be left to a designated beneficiary in the same manner as a house or a bank account. The beneficiary is entitled to receive them. What the beneficiary is supposed to do with a legendary sword from a game they may not play is a question the court did not fully address.

(A few secondary questions also remain. For example: if the inherited account requires a username and password, and the deceased gamer did not write these down, the heir is inheriting a thing they cannot access. This is not uncommon in non-digital inheritance. What is different is that the thing may be inaccessible in ways that are extremely specific to the game, such as requiring a two-factor authentication code sent to a phone number the deceased's carrier may have already reassigned. The inheritance is still valid. The account is still locked.)

Estate lawyers will now need to become familiar with the concept of "account level" and "rare drop rates." A player who spent eight years obtaining items that other players cannot obtain through normal play has, in the legal sense, built up an estate. Whether a given sword is worth ten dollars or five thousand dollars depends on a secondary market that the court has not regulated. The heir does not necessarily know. The probate court does not necessarily know. The game company may have its own terms of service addressing in-game items upon death of the account holder, which may conflict with the legal ruling. This will be sorted out over time. The swords are still in the account.

There is a generation of people who have spent significant portions of their lives accumulating things inside games. Some of those people have children. The children will inherit the things. This is now a legal fact. The sword is yours when your parent dies. You can leave the sword to your own children. There is no reason this cannot continue for several more generations. The sword may outlast the game.