MetaCity's Terms of Service Auto-Renewed Overnight — Legal Researchers Have Found a New Clause Granting the Platform Full Ownership of Any Avatar Inactive for 90 or More Days

MetaCity's Terms of Service renewed automatically at midnight EST. By 5 AM, three independent legal researchers had flagged a clause that was not present in last year's agreement: Section 9, Paragraph 4, which states that any avatar account with zero logged activity for 90 consecutive days becomes the 'designated property' of MetaCity Corporation for purposes of archival, display, commercial licensing, and platform continuity. The clause covers avatars, all associated cosmetic items, in-platform structures, and any username. MetaCity has not responded. Estimates suggest over 40 million accounts currently meet the threshold.

MetaCity's Terms of Service have always contained an inactivity clause. The previous version, Section 9, Paragraph 3, stated that accounts inactive for 180 consecutive days could be subject to 'username reclamation procedures' — a process by which MetaCity could release an unused username back into the available pool after giving the account holder 30 days' notice via their registered contact method. That clause has existed in some form since 2021 and has been the subject of periodic community complaints and several hundred formal disputes. It was not controversial in the sense of being surprising. The new clause is different in kind, not just in degree. It does not address usernames. It addresses the avatar itself — the full digital identity, the appearance, the history, the items — and it does not require notice.

The legal researchers who flagged the clause at 5:00 AM did so independently, comparing the new agreement against the prior year's version using a diff tool that highlights changes between documents. The diff shows that Section 9, Paragraph 4 is entirely new text. Nothing was modified to produce it. It was added. The paragraph defines 'zero logged activity' as the absence of any of the following: login events, content publication, content interaction, RealCoin transactions, property access, or avatar movement. It defines 'designated property' as meaning the account and its associated assets 'may be used, displayed, licensed, archived, or transferred by MetaCity Corporation for any purpose consistent with platform operations, continuity, or commercial activity, without further notice or compensation to the original account holder.' The word 'may' is doing considerable work in that sentence.

Forty Million Accounts. Ninety Days. One Paragraph.

The 90-day threshold matters more than it might initially appear. MetaCity's published platform statistics indicate that the platform has approximately 800 million registered accounts. Of those, the platform claims 180 million 'monthly active' users — a figure it defines as any account that logs in at least once in a 30-day window. The gap between 800 million registered accounts and 180 million monthly active ones has always implied a large number of dormant accounts. Community analysts who have attempted to quantify that population using publicly visible login data have consistently estimated between 30 and 50 million accounts that have been inactive for 90 or more consecutive days. Many of those accounts belong to users who played MetaCity intensively for a period, built significant inventories of cosmetic items and properties, and then stopped logging in. The clause, as written, applies to all of them.

The question the legal community is debating this morning is not whether the clause is enforceable — that question is genuinely unsettled and depends heavily on jurisdiction — but whether MetaCity will act on it, and if so, when. Nothing in the clause specifies a timeline for enforcement. Nothing requires MetaCity to announce when it begins asserting ownership under the provision. Nothing prevents it from asserting ownership retroactively for accounts that have already crossed the 90-day line. The clause took effect at midnight. As of this filing, 40 million accounts have been inactive long enough to qualify. MetaCity has not explained why the clause was added, who approved it, what business purpose it serves, or whether any enforcement actions are planned. The Terms of Service page has not been updated to highlight the change.