"At the time of the alleged offences an offline purchase would cost the purchaser about £2.70 for the same number of gold pieces as would be generated by a £6 bond purchased from Jagex," the court adds. It also amusingly notes that "the number of gold pieces generated by a bond might take some 15 hours to earn by completing in-game tasks." Get grinding, gamers.

That "15 hours" number seems misleading, I highly doubt a fresh account can make enough money on it's own in 15 hours to buy a bond (that gives it ~14 days of membership status). I'm no expert at Old School Runescape, but I've tried my hand at some moneymaking and most decent methods require a prior investment of many hours just to make them accessible. I wouldn't be surprised if the average bond grinder has been playing for so many hours that the amortized cost of a bond indeed works out to be around 15 hours of game-play time - though this still only works out as long as at least some people are purchasing bonds from Jagex and then selling them, in-game, to other players for gold.

Oh, this is gonna have implications

Since they determined that in-game assets are real property of the player, basically every MMO is gonna need to change their ToS if they operate in the UK, because all of them that I've seen (and I've seen a lot) have something in there that "All assets are the property of $gameCompany" to stop these kinds of shenanigans. But if all it takes is being able to tie the game dollar to real dollars in a capacity officially supported by the devs... Yeah that's gonna be some lawsuits

According to this precedent, Destiny stole an incalculable amount of money from its players when it sunset exotics the first time.

Further, being "banned" from a game or having an account deactivated now constitutes destruction of property.

How does this work if an account is banned thereby stripping players of access to their property.

Vat coming soon to mmo in game transactions.

Only because he sold it as Bitcoin. As long as there is a direct trail to money lost for a company, otherwise I doubt the court would have made such a consideration. This was the second court case regarding it, so the lawyers and the court are definitely making plenty of their salary off of it.