I can think of some other exceptions, but they’re usually large, dangerous, or otherwise regulated as such, yet you’re still an owner of it.

So what if they did? Are they going to give me a court summons to destroy my copy and all of my backups of the game? I don’t think so.

I don’t buy it in that case, but it takes me a lot of leg work a lot of times just to figure out what I’m buying, because no one is interested in making it clear besides GOG; even then, there are things I wish they did better on that front.

Seriously. If I bought GTA before those licenses expired, my download should always have them, even if newer ones do not (which, to be clear, still sucks that that’s acceptable).

They’ve already invented ways to keep us from just copying files: in that they don’t provide us with all of the files in a lot of cases anymore.

Broadcast content like a movie or TV show illegally, and see what happens.

Yeah, that’s because you own the property, not the intellectual property. This is copyright law, not an affront to your ownership. When you “buy” a movie digitally on Amazon, you’re only buying access to their copy of the movie. Amazon bought the right to distribute it to you. When that contract expires, they can’t distribute it to you anymore. That’s why it’s not ownership. When you buy a game on GOG, you download the installer, and they cannot take it away from you, no matter how hard they try; that’s their whole shtick.

But literally every single time I say this people get upset about it and nobody can explain why.

Someone has probably explained the above to you before.

9 years old is pretty old for a video game. When it first came out, the goofiest thing about it was the guy who could heal you by throwing a syringe at you. Now everyone has goofy super powers and things that would never make sense in the same world as something like a Jack Ryan novel.

If they can’t take it away from you after you bought it, I think I can still call it ownership.

That’s not even the best metric. You save Destiny 2 to local storage, but you still don’t own that either.

Eh, it’s so easy to hop between streaming services that I don’t have the same hangup there. You subscribe for a month, watch what you want to watch, cancel, and then go to the next one. You can always resubscribe later. When you buy a game on a given storefront, you’re stuck with their feature set forever.

That direction is straight toward the courthouse.

Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin’ back.

They’re all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.

I’m old enough to remember when Siege was a Rainbow Six game.

That new one is a solid metroidvania. It would have been better if they shrunk the map a bit or introduced meaningful upgrades more frequently, but it was still very good.

All of the big publishers from 20 years ago doubled down on a couple of key franchises that make the most money and appeal to the widest demographic, rather than the old strategy of having a diverse portfolio across most genres.

Epic’s exclusivity deals haven’t been working for anyone, so they’re dropping them across the board, other than for games they publish themselves.

No one jams culture war shit into things like people complaining about culture war shit.

It’s been this way for over 20 years.

Maybe it didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but back of the napkin guesstimates sure make it hard to believe DD2 wasn’t profitable.

But that’s not the cycle chronicled in this article. These are old games released onto subscription services in their original versions, more or less, give or take some resolution.