A Beijing court has ruled in favor of a mother seeking to inherit her late son’s 87 online gaming accounts, selecting the dispute as an example case to provide judges with legal direction on similar future proceedings involving digital assets.

The case, reported Monday by the People’s Court Daily, a newspaper affiliated with China’s Supreme People’s Court, involved the inheritance rights to the accounts of an avid gamer surnamed Gu, who passed away last year at 36 due to oral cancer.

With China’s internet penetration rate reaching 80.1% by the end of 2025, the case comes as the country faces increasing pressure to handle the growing volume of digital assets left behind by deceased users.

Since China’s Civil Code — which states that digital assets are protected by law — took effect in 2021, courts have increasingly recognized the property value of digital assets. In 2025, the Supreme People’s Court created a separate case category for disputes involving data and online virtual property.

Between 2010 and 2021, Gu registered accounts on games by Chinese game developer Changyou, acquiring valuable in-game assets due to having “built up the accounts” over the years, according to the report.

After Gu’s passing, his mother, surnamed Chen, asked the company to transfer the accounts into her name so she could sell them to help cover her living expenses, as she relied on a low income and no family support. 

The company denied her request, however, citing their user agreement, which states that it retains ownership of all account-related data, including account information, game characters, virtual items, and in-game currency. 

Chen then sued the company. In April, the Beijing Shijingshan District People’s Court ruled that although ownership of the accounts rested with the company, the accounts had independent economic value because Gu had invested time, effort, and money in them. As a result, the court found that the right of use of the accounts, though not their ownership, could be inherited.

The court ordered the company to complete the transfer of the accounts’ real-name registration to Chen within 15 days after the ruling took effect. Chen is the sole legal heir to the accounts, as Gu’s daughter waived her inheritance rights.

Many online platforms prohibit account transfers or inheritance. But platforms’ user agreements cannot override a user’s legal inheritance rights, Zhang Yingzhou, the judge presiding over the case, told local media. 

“Heirs inherit the economic interests attached to the right to use an account, not ownership of the account itself,” the judge said.

Other incidents related to the transfer of digital assets have made headlines in China recently, including a case related to the recycling of popular Chinese-American singer Coco Lee’s phone number by her telecom operator after she committed suicide in 2023.

In 2025, a user who registered for domestic music streaming platform NetEase with a newly purchased mobile phone number was inadvertently logged into Lee’s verified artist account. NetEase explained that the phone number originally linked to Lee’s account had been reassigned to a new user without unbinding the account link to NetEase. The incident sparked widespread discussion on domestic social media about digital privacy, account security, and the management of digital assets after death.

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: VCG)