I don’t have to tell you that buying and selling of MMORPG characters has become big business over the years. Back in the day you could easily go to Ebay and see hundreds if not thousands of listed auctions of people that were selling their MMORPG characters. Today however Ebay does not allow the sale of online characters, instead new sites have stepped in to fill their shoes, MMObay.net for example where you can buy wow account.
The question that has comes up over and over is, who really owns your online character? Well it’s different from game to game, I’ll use World of Warcraft for my example here since its the most popular. If you take a look at the EULA for World of Warcraft, you can see that Blizzard owns your character.
3. Ownership.
A. All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Game and all copies thereof (including without limitation any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, character inventories, structural or landscape designs, animations, sounds, musical compositions and recordings, audio-visual effects, storylines, character likenesses, methods of operation, moral rights, and any related documentation) are owned or licensed by Blizzard.
Buy, if you read further it does state you can transfer your account to another person as long as you also give them the CD and packaging. However the EULA for European users does not allow the same transfer.
You may permanently transfer all of your rights and obligations under the License Agreement to another by physically transferring the original media…
As you can see, character ownership is a complicated topic. You’ll need to check your games EULA agreement to see if trading/buying/selling your account is allowed.
Now aside from what the EULA states, I’m wondering just how legal it is for a gaming company can claim rights/ownership over a users account. People argue that they can claim ownership because its their game hosted on their servers. However I can claim the same about this website, even though I legally own the domain name, I don’t posses anything other than a piece of paper that says I own it. It’s also hosted by another company where I don’t own the servers. So why doesn’t my domain registry or web host claim ownership of the site? Because even though they provide the technology and hardware I am the actual owner by law.
Why don’t MMORPG players get the same treatment? MMORPG gamers spend a extremely large amount of time building their characters and making them unique, from the name to the characters look and the nearly infinite combos of armor and weapons.
For a studio to claim ownership of the account in my opinion is pushing the legal boundaries, however until there is an actual legal battle over account ownership we will have to abide by the EULA set by these gaming companies.
The problem here is the sense of entitlement that people falsely cling to.
Your argument between a domain name and an MMORPG is mute. Not only because you enter into two totally different legal situations, but because there is a governing body overseeing Internet name registration. If there was an MMORPG Avatar Rights Group, it may be a different story.
Click-through EULAs may not hold a lot of weight after the Second Life case, but they are still upheld as a legal agreement between the two parties.
The age old, “don’t like it, don’t play”, holds up well here. It annoys me when people agree to something and then demand something afterwards that was never agreed to.
I actually never read the EULA about transferring media allowing people to transfer characters. That would create a big loop hole for people selling gold too perhaps.
IE:
I’m selling 1000 gold / my character / my disk
Buyer pays for gold/char/disk and sells back the char/disk
I can understand why gaming companies want to set it up legally such that you only have use rights or some form of limited license. If you actually owned your character, that creates a whole bunch of legal issues relating to the behavior of the developer. Sure, you would have rights to sell your character, but a developer would have to build in a lot more legal protection around the way continued developments impact characters. If you owned characters outright, they would then be considered property of yours with an associated monetary value. Since, as you say, people invest significant time into their characters, would such a person have a right of action against, say, Blizzard, for a massive (intentional) nerfing to an overpowered character class? It devalues the character, wiping out the value of all the hours you devoted to making that character uber in PvP and with all the best gear. What about gear nerfs? What about liability for downtime or shutting the entire game down altogether? One could classify such incidents or actions as preventing you access to your property.
I’m not saying that games can’t set up a EULA that makes your characters your property, only that it’s pretty goddamn complex to do so and full of additional risk for developers that they don’t need to take on. Besides, everything you do is a generation of their system with just a couple notable exceptions–if you spend significant time on your backstory or some other truly user-created content, then maybe you have a more fairness-based argument as to your continued ownership. For example, what if someone created a backstory for their WoW character that later served as the basis for a best-selling (but not specifically WoW-based) fantasy novel? I don’t see the particular parts of the EULA you posted as causing any problems in that area, but I am sure there are other EULAs that might attempt to capture such user-created content as their own property. That would make an interesting court case.
ok, i sold my account… and i am trying to see if its legal to get it back… can the buyer press charges?
Yea i sold my account as well and i want it back, the website i sold it to says that returns arnt aloud so i was wondering what the legal ramifications would be if i just called blizzard and changed my account password and email.
If you do not own the account then you can not sell it.
If a company knows the EULA then they understand that you can not legaly buy or sell an account from anyone but the company that owns the rights.
Therefore any transaction is not legal wether buying or selling.
If you sold an account to a company then say “toonstorm” they would have to prove that they were not aware of the TOS/ULA to claim fraud.
Since it is thier business to know said information then they would not have grounds to stand on.
It would be very easy to state you were only selling them your account information for as long as said information was valid.
Now as far as selling to an individual this may be different and I am certainly not a lawyer but those are my views.
Where can you sell your video game characters?
I agree with you 100%. Those characters take a tone of time and effort to build up. When i Played EQ1 I was in a guild that was one of the first to enter the Planes of Time and I got neaerly 5k a peice for my 2 characters when i quit! Now that made the game not a waste of time and that is a good thing. Had fun and earned money, cant beat that!
As an keen gamer fan, I just wanted to pop you a brief word
or three to say thank you for putting this up.