Today, digital games sales have taken the upper hand and physical games are no longer a given – and this is likely to change even more in the future as consoles increasingly lack disk drives.
This is, of course, both environmentally friendly and convenient, as well as avoiding the risk of your disk breaking or getting lost. Discs involve shipping and packaging as well as many middlemen, but despite this, it is usually much cheaper than buying digitally. And you can sell your game if you want to get some money back.
The latter is of course impossible with digital games, but there is actually an even bigger flaw. Most agreements (with the exception of GOG.com among the larger options) are written so that you don’t own your games. The publisher has the right to take your fully paid game away from you at any time, something we have unfortunately already seen when Ubisoft revoked The Crew licenses from those who bought the game while Sony wanted to revoke video content people bought (though this was temporarily changed when the agreement with Discovery was extended for a year or so). In addition, there are countless examples of games that have lost some of their content such as online features, music and the like.
Now, Californian courts have ruled that companies can no longer say they are selling games which to some extent requires an online connection, but must make it clear that you are only paying for a license, which the company can withdraw at will.
Journalist Stephen Totilo writes on Game File that sellers “need to provide purchasers with the conditions of the license and a warning, if applicable, that a loss of rights to aspects of the content-such as the expiration of music licenses-could cause the game or other digital work to be pulled.”
Whether this will change people’s buying patterns is debatable, but it will at least raise awareness of the problem. What do you think about this and is it something that should be adopted here in Europe as well?