Ever since the advent of digital distribution (which despite what some may think, does pre-date Steam), gamers have worried about ownership of their games. Time was that this sense of unease was mixed-up with an understandable nostalgia for physical media, that comforting sense of having the disc and always owning the game, but as the physical and retail side has become a smaller part of the picture, which is especially true on PC, our questions about the various digital storefronts and Steam’s default status have become more pointed. And it feels like 2024 is the year when gamers en masse started to get serious about the erosion of their ownership of software they’ve paid good money for.
The arguments have been around forever, but they’ve been made concrete by the simple fact that, over the last decade in particular, we’ve seen more and more games simply disappear. And we’re not talking about obscure hobbyist projects, but seriously big budget titles that companies have spent millions developing, and hundreds of devs have spent years of their careers on. 2024 even gave us the perfect poster boy: Concord, Sony’s live service shooter that lasted all of 11 days before being taken out behind the sheds and unceremoniously shot in the head.
That seems incredible, doesn’t it? Concord was a AAA shooter backed by PlayStation, one of the biggest and most-moneyed brands in gaming, and it didn’t last two weeks. For the average punter, Concord may as well have never existed.
But Concord is just one high-profile example from dozens, and it feels like the combination of prominent games disappearing from storefronts and so many having online elements that will never work again has brought the issue to the fore of many more peoples’ minds. Arguments about preservation for future generations may attract the wonks among us but, for the mainstream audience, it is now not uncommon to fork out $60 or whatever for a game that may well not be playable two years down the line, or at the very least compromised beyond the experience promised at launch. I don’t envy folk trying to play Suicide Squad in a year’s time (albeit in this case Rocksteady has committed to adding an offline mode).
The main way this growing concern found expression, or the most prominent at least, was the Stop Killing Games campaign. This was sparked by Ubisoft pulling the plug on The Crew in April this year, with the 10-year-old racing game now unplayable and no offline mode coming due to “server infrastructure and licensing constraints”—which upset fan and YouTuber Ross Scott enough to begin rallying support around the Stop Killing Games website.
The idea is to create a focal point for opposition to what Scott calls the industry’s “assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media,” and the site’s purpose is to direct consumers towards other gathering points such as major online petitions and advise them on how to submit complaints to regulatory bodies like the DGCCRF, France’s consumer protection agency. The legal argument is that videogames should be classed as “goods” rather than “services”—regardless of the terminology publishers use—and goods shouldn’t be able to be rendered inoperable by the seller after consumers buy them.
Goods shouldn’t be able to be rendered inoperable by the seller after consumers buy them.
OK: Some of the arguments seem a bit out-there. A proposed class-action lawsuit saying players of The Crew were “duped” by Ubisoft compared the situation to the publisher entering peoples’ homes and stealing parts of a pinball machine. But other elements of it have the chance to enact real change by getting the regulators interested. Stop Killing Games is currently running a petition which, if it reaches a million signatures by July 2025, will oblige the EU to consider a ban on making multiplayer games unplayable (it currently has over 400,000 signatures).
This was also happening in a wider context of both publishers and regulators realising that, at the very least, there are some big questions to answer about digital ownership. Even if players might not like the answers. Steam added a new disclaimer about ownership which wasn’t exactly new, but seemed forced by the rise in big publishers rendering games inoperable, and in some cases revoking their licenses. The message also followed shortly after a new Californian law that requires retailers to warn consumers that the digital games they buy can be taken away at any time—exactly what this message does.
Point with this example being that Valve appears to be looking at the California law and assuming that other states will follow suit, and dealing with it in the most simple way possible: Applying the new language to everyone, rather than responding on a state-by-state and region-by-region basis.
Never missing an opportunity to weigh in on such matters, GOG (formerly Good Old Games) took a moment to remind players that, hey, anything you buy from us is yours forever and cannot be taken away. But GOG does walk the walk, and this year committed to a new preservation program whereby it’ll keep games like New Vegas running on contemporary systems in perpetuity, regardless of what publishers do.
Oh, and the final GOG hit. It’ll now let you bequeath your library to someone: As long as you can prove you’re actually dead.
GOG shows this is not just a matter of players versus the games industry. In fact, many industry grandees and studios think that actually the industry is doing a terrible job with this stuff, and giving players a raw deal in the process. Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse got all het up about Ubisoft’s moves over the year, and flipped the tables on the publisher, saying that if players had to get used to not owning games, “developers must get used to not having jobs.”
Not everything is quite so confrontational. Certain publishers are much more alive than others to the value of their back catalogues, and some like Capcom make their heritage a key part of their current strategy with rereleases and remakes. Across the industry there’s more of a sense of the value of older games and, quite apart from the preservation angle, that will be what eventually inspires better practices from more publishers.
More and more, publishers are seeing the sense in partnering with companies who devote themselves to the practice of sprucing up and servicing old games. 2024 was another great year for Nightdive, for example, a studio that specialises in polishing up and remastering old classics, from System Shock to Dark Forces to The Thing.
“I was doing remasters even before I joined Nightdive,” says Larry Kuperman. “One of the earliest ones was Total Annihilation, that I was involved in when I was at Stardock. We had a lot of resistance from people. I mean, it was taken as an art project, not a commercial project, because the thought was, well, who would ever buy these old games?
“They were great then and they’re great now, and companies have begun to realize that and certainly we’ve had a leadership role in that. But we’re not the only company doing that these days. Everybody is.”
There are a lot of different issues smooshed together under the idea of ownership and preservation, and 2024 feels like the year that many came to much greater prominence for players and rule-makers alike. The question of whether you own your Steam games, for example, can fairly simply be answered right now: No, you don’t. Valve can take them from you at a moment’s notice and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Many of us have known that for a long time, and traded it for convenience. But it feels like we’re reaching a point where these platforms are so core to our lives in videogames, and the personal investment in them is getting so high, that the wider audience is no longer happy with that. More and more of us are realizing that, even if it feels otherwise, we don’t own our games. And that there’s no good reason to just accept that when there are alternatives.