2024 was the year gamers really started pushing back on the erosion of game ownership

Gaming Industry2024 was the year gamers really started pushing back on the erosion of game ownershipWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: CD Projekt)

Geralt thumbs up

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.

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).

(Image credit: WB Games)

Harley Quinn looks pensive

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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.

(Image credit: GOG)

GOG Black Friday sale 2021

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.

(Image credit: Nightdive Studios)

System Shock

“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 playersand 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.

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