OPINION – Digital storefronts display a large “Purchase” button and charge real money to our bank cards, so it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that we receive something we actually own in return. According to the fine print, however, we are often not buying a game at all, but obtaining a personal, revocable and non-transferable license to use it for as long as the platform, publisher, servers and licensing agreements permit. We are treated as full customers at checkout, only to discover on the way out that we are really long-term guests.
Digital games are convenient. There are no discs to swap, no boxes taking up space, releases can be downloaded at midnight, and a few button presses may let us continue on another device exactly where we stopped. I regularly buy games digitally as well, because I have no great desire to find room for another plastic case every time something new launches. Convenience and ownership are not the same thing, however, and the games industry generally prefers to explain that distinction only after something has gone wrong.
Even with a physical game, we do not purchase the copyright, the characters or the underlying intellectual property; we acquire a particular copy and the rights connected to using it. The disc can nevertheless be lent, resold, stored for twenty years and, provided the game does not require a mandatory server connection, played again without asking the publisher for remote permission. A digital copy is usually tied to an account, a platform and conditions we did not write and that may sometimes change without our involvement. The industry calls this a purchase because “acquisition of an indefinite, conditional access license” would probably look less attractive on the green button.
The “Purchase” Button Actually Hides a License
The Steam Subscriber Agreement is perfectly clear: its content and services are licensed, not sold, and the user receives no title or ownership in them. The license is granted for personal, non-commercial use, access requires a Steam account, and certain products may also require an internet connection or the Steam client to be running. PlayStation’s software license agreement says much the same thing: the software is not sold, and the customer receives a limited, personal and non-transferable license. Both platforms are at least honest in their contracts, even though their stores continue to speak the familiar language of buying and owning.
This is not meaningless legal hair-splitting. It determines whether a copy can be resold, lent to someone else, inherited by a family member, backed up independently or accessed after the original provider no longer wants or is no longer able to serve it. A digital library looks like a collection from the outside, but legally it is closer to a carefully arranged row of permissions. It is attractive, searchable and extremely convenient, but the master key does not entirely belong to us.
California addressed that contradiction through consumer protection law AB 2426, adopted in 2024. It restricts the use of terms such as “buy” and “purchase” for digital products when the customer is actually receiving a revocable license. Sellers must clearly disclose that the transaction provides a license, explain its restrictions and indicate when access may later be revoked unilaterally. That is useful, but it does not make the game itself more permanent. The law does not prevent a product from being taken away; it merely requires the seller to say more clearly that it might be taken away someday.
Philippe Tremblay, then Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions, said in a 2024 GamesIndustry.biz interview that players would eventually need to become “comfortable with not owning your game.” His full statement also stressed that Ubisoft was not trying to force everyone into subscriptions and would continue offering traditional purchasing options. The line nevertheless captured the publishing mindset perfectly: the desire to own a product was being treated not as a reasonable consumer expectation, but as an outdated habit that needed to be overcome. Not owning anything can indeed be very comfortable, particularly for the company collecting the recurring payment.
The Crew Did Not Break; It Was Simply Switched Off
The difference between ownership and licensing became painfully tangible with The Crew. Ubisoft removed the game and its virtual currency packs from digital stores on December 14, 2023, then shut down the servers on March 31, 2024, exactly as announced in its official statement. From that moment onward, the game became inaccessible on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Amazon Luna and Ubisoft+. This was not the loss of one multiplayer menu; the entire product stopped functioning.
The boxed version of The Crew can still be held in someone’s hands, but the disc has become a polished souvenir because even the single-player content required a permanent connection to Ubisoft’s servers. The disc was not scratched, the console did not fail and the installation files did not vanish. Someone simply turned off the service at the other end, making a full-price product unusable. From the customer’s perspective, the result is much the same as the publisher entering the house overnight and replacing the disc with a particularly elaborate drink coaster.
By 2026, the controversy had become a legal case. According to Reuters, French consumer organization UFC-Que Choisir sued Ubisoft, arguing that the company misled customers about the game’s expected availability and used unfair contract terms to deprive them of access. Ubisoft responded that players had purchased limited access rather than full ownership. The court must therefore untangle whether the ordinary meaning of “I bought it” matters more than the word “licensed” buried deep inside a contract.
It is important to distinguish between removing a game from sale and destroying it. When an old title is no longer sold but previous customers can still download and play it offline, late arrivals lose an opportunity, but the copies already distributed continue to function. The real problem begins when a publisher designs a technical dependency that allows the entire product to be disabled remotely. At that point, the digital store is not merely closing the cash register; it is retroactively invalidating what it previously sold.
The Server May Close, but the Game Should Not Have to Die With It
The industry’s objections are not entirely imaginary. Video Games Europe has said that “the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly.” A modern online game may rely on servers, databases, anti-cheat technology, moderation, customer support, security updates and an entire network of third-party licenses. When the audience disappears, maintaining that structure may genuinely cost more than the game continues to earn.
The organization has also warned that private servers are not always a simple solution because the systems protecting player data, security and the removal of illegal material may disappear with the official infrastructure. That is a legitimate concern, especially in games built around large communities, centralized economies or constantly moderated user content. Stop Killing Games does not demand that every publisher operate the complete service for free forever or continue fixing leaderboards fifty years after everyone has gone home. The essential demand is that some reasonably functional version remain when official support ends.
There are already successful examples. Before shutting down the public servers for Knockout City on June 6, 2023, Velan Studios released a DRM-free Private Hosted Server Edition that allows the community to continue playing on privately hosted servers. The online services for Gran Turismo Sport ended on January 31, 2024, but Polyphony Digital preserved the playable offline content, local progression and purchased add-ons. Not every feature survived, but the game did not become a hundred-gigabyte error message.
Ubisoft itself has since demonstrated that another approach is possible. The The Crew 2 Hybrid Mode, available since October 2025, lets players launch the sequel online or offline and export their progress to a local save. Online leaderboards, multiplayer modes and some community functions are naturally unavailable, but much of the world, vehicle collection, event structure and progression remains intact. It is not perfect preservation, but it proves that an emergency exit can be built when developers do not wait until the building is already on fire.
More Than a Million Players Spoke, and Brussels Chose to Talk for Now
The European citizens’ initiative inspired by the Stop Killing Games movement reached European institutions under the official title Stop Destroying Videogames. It did not ask for permanent server operation, endless free updates or mandatory publication of source code. It asked publishers to leave games sold in the European Union in a reasonably functional state after commercial support ends. The initiative collected 1,294,188 verified signatures and reached the required national threshold in 24 member states. Consumers rarely communicate more clearly that something has gone badly wrong.
The European Commission’s response on June 16, 2026, did not produce a new binding regulation. It concluded that it would not currently propose a law requiring every publisher to keep products playable after their commercial life cycle had ended. The Commission cited copyright, intellectual property, technical complexity, security concerns and proportionality of costs. In other words, the issue was important enough for 1.29 million people to be heard, but not yet simple enough to place a universal guarantee behind the “Purchase” button.
The matter is not entirely closed. The Commission plans to begin discussions with publishers and consumer organizations by the end of 2026 about a voluntary industry code addressing end-of-life planning and better customer information. It also intends to review the application of the EU Digital Content Directive by the end of 2026, including how it applies when digital content and services are discontinued. That is more than nothing, but a voluntary code is only as strong as the willingness of companies to follow it when switching off a product may be cheaper.
Current law therefore focuses mainly on transparency, proper disclosure and certain consumer remedies rather than guaranteed permanent access. California says that a license should be called a license. The European Commission currently says that the industry should discuss how to end services more responsibly. Customers are still entitled to ask why they must carry nearly all the risk in a transaction where the full price was paid in advance with entirely real money.
A Digital Collection Cannot Be Rented Air
The issue concerns not only the customer’s wallet, but also the cultural preservation of video games. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network found that 87 percent of classic games released in the United States before 2010 were no longer commercially available. Frank Cifaldi, co-director of the foundation, said the results were “worse than probably any other medium.” Much of that disappearance happened in an era dominated by physical media; the legacy of server-dependent games may prove even easier to erase.
Phil Spencer, the former head of Xbox, argued in 2021 for industry cooperation and legal emulation. Speaking to Axios, he expressed hope that the industry could develop “legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run” older games. Emulation cannot solve the problem of software built entirely around live servers, but it represents the same principle: a technological generation change should not automatically turn previously purchased culture into waste. When films, books and music are considered worthy of preservation, games should not become the exception simply because preserving them is more complicated.
GOG also demonstrates that digital distribution and durable access are not mutually exclusive. The GOG Preservation Program launched with more than one hundred games, with the company committing its own resources to compatibility fixes, missing content and DRM-free offline installers that customers can store themselves. The player receives more than an icon inside an account; they receive files that can be independently backed up. The system cannot solve every category of game, but at least the word “yours” is not merely decoration in an advertisement.
A reasonable regulation would not need to demand eternal support or preservation of every online feature. It could require publishers to prepare an end-of-life plan during development, clearly disclose a minimum support period at the time of purchase, and provide an offline patch, limited standalone build or private-server tools before discontinuation wherever technically feasible. If a full-price game is permanently disabled before the disclosed minimum period ends, the customer should receive a proportional refund or another meaningful remedy. That is not a revolutionary demand; it is the digital equivalent of preventing a store from taking the television back out of our living room because broadcasting to it is no longer profitable.
I do not expect the servers of every fifteen-year-old online game to operate forever, nor do I expect publishers to maintain communities that everyone has already left. I do expect a product sold at full price not to contain a secret self-destruct switch controlled exclusively by its manufacturer. Companies are free to sell subscriptions, time-limited services and rented access, but those products should be labeled accordingly. “Purchase” cannot mean that the customer pays once and permanently while the other party remains free to change its mind at any time.
Our digital games can genuinely be taken away without anyone breaking into the house or stealing the console. A server shutdown, an expired license, a closed account or thirty pages of terms almost nobody read at checkout may be enough. This system does not exist because technology makes every alternative impossible, but because the business model rewards it, contracts protect it and the law is still trying to catch up. You bought the game, it appears in your library, and yet it is not entirely yours; that is the part of the agreement that urgently needs to change.
-Gergely Herpai „BadSector”-
