Chinese court rules a mother can inherit her dead son's 87 gaming accounts

A Beijing court has ordered a gaming company to transfer 87 online game accounts to the mother of a deceased player, in what appears to be a landmark ruling on digital inheritance in China. The Shijingshan District Court sided with Mrs. Chen after the unnamed company refused to hand over the accounts following the death of her 36-year-old son, surnamed Gu.

Gu had spent roughly a decade building up those 87 verified accounts after becoming addicted to online games in his early twenties. Unemployed throughout that period, he poured enough time, effort, and money into each account to make them collectively valuable. He died from a serious illness at 36, leaving his widowed mother — described as living on a meager income — as the sole potential heir. Gu's father had already passed away, and his daughter issued a written statement voluntarily giving up her inheritance rights, making Mrs. Chen the only remaining claimant. The gaming company pushed back, arguing that under its user agreement, accounts and virtual items belong to the company, with players holding only a limited right to use them — the standard boilerplate most people click past without reading.

The court rejected that argument by leaning on existing Chinese legal precedent around virtual property. Prior rulings in China have already established that online virtual assets can qualify as inheritable property under the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China. The court's reasoning was straightforward: because Gu invested real time, effort, and money to build those accounts, and because the accounts and their virtual items carry both use value and transfer value, they meet the legal definition of property interests. The ruling orders the company to update the real-name authentication on the accounts from Gu's name to Mrs. Chen's within 15 days. The one concession to the company: the same user agreement terms that applied to Gu now transfer to his mother.

The case was first reported by People's Court Daily, a newspaper affiliated with China's Supreme People's Court, which gives the ruling added institutional weight. It sets a meaningful precedent for digital inheritance disputes in China, and it also highlights just how fragile platform user agreements are when they collide with civil property law in court. For players everywhere sitting on accounts with real monetary value — whether through rare items, in-game currency, or years of progression — this ruling is a reminder that the legal status of what you "own" in a game remains genuinely unsettled outside China too.