“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”¹

His point was fairly simple. If an unauthorised service is easier to use than the one selling the product, the seller has a problem.

At the time, that could mean waiting months for something to reach your country, dealing with region locks or restrictive DRM, or hunting down a physical copy while an unauthorised version was already online.

Newell argued that the answer was to make the legitimate service better. Steam already embodied that idea, and it worked remarkably well.

I think we have spent the last decade slowly forgetting that lesson.

Digital media was supposed to make things easier. Instead of shelves full of discs, you could log in and have everything ready to play. Streaming was simpler still: pay a monthly fee and have a huge library available instantly.

That was the appeal.

Today I have more digital services available to me than ever, but I am less confident that something I pay for will still be there years from now.

That is a strange direction for technology to have taken.

Streaming is becoming inconvenient again

Netflix used to feel like the answer. You opened one app, found something to watch and pressed play.

Now a programme can be on Netflix one month, somewhere else the next, or unavailable in the UK because the rights have moved.

That is not the same as losing something you purchased. A Netflix subscription gives access to a changing catalogue; it does not give you ownership of it.

But it does bring back the service problem Newell was talking about.

If I want to watch a particular film, I may first have to check Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, NOW and Apple TV, only to discover that the UK catalogue is different. The technology has improved while the experience has become more complicated.

Mainstream music streaming feels less fragmented by comparison. Spotify, Apple Music and their competitors usually offer broadly similar catalogues. Film and television moved towards a patchwork of exclusive services instead.

It may make commercial sense. I am not convinced it makes for a better service.

Anime streaming lost much of its apparent choice

Anime streaming once appeared to offer several competing services. British viewers encountered names such as Crunchyroll, Funimation and Wakanim, while AnimeLab and VRV operated in other markets.

Sony consolidated Funimation, Wakanim and Madman Anime Group under a joint venture in 2019. Its Funimation business then completed the acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T in 2021.²

For British viewers, familiar services including Funimation and Wakanim eventually gave way to Crunchyroll. Funimation’s streaming service closed on 2 April 2024.

The merger itself is not my main concern. What bothers me is that several apparently separate choices became one service, and that Funimation’s closure cost some customers access to redeemed digital copies.

Eligible DVDs and Blu-rays bought through Funimation’s former platform included codes for a digital copy. You bought the physical release, redeemed the code and the digital version appeared in your Funimation library.

When Funimation closed, those copies did not transfer to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll says it does not support Funimation Digital Copies, so access ended with the service.³

The disc still works. The digital copy that came with it does not.

One survived because it was physically in the customer’s possession. The other depended on a company continuing to operate a service and recognise an entitlement in a database.

It is hard to call those two things the same kind of ownership.

Steam depends on trust too

It is worth bringing Valve back into the discussion because Steam is one of the best digital services we have.

I have used it for years. Games I bought long ago are still in my library, and titles removed from sale can often still be downloaded by existing owners. Steam earned that trust.

Its terms still describe a different arrangement from owning a game on a disc. The Steam Subscriber Agreement says:

“The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.”⁴

That does not mean Valve is about to delete everyone’s library. Its record is one of the reasons people trust Steam.

It does mean that when we say we “own” hundreds of Steam games, that word is doing a lot of work.

Compare that with an old Game Boy cartridge. Nintendo does not need to remember that I bought it. There is no account or licence server, and the shop or publisher can disappear. As long as the cartridge and compatible hardware still work, the game works.

Digital purchases often introduce several extra points of failure between you and the thing you paid for.

The Crew showed how bad it can get

Ubisoft delisted The Crew in December 2023 and shut its servers down on 31 March 2024. After that, the game was no longer accessible on any platform, including its single-player content.⁵

Somebody who had bought it years earlier was left with a game they could no longer play because Ubisoft had switched off the infrastructure behind it.

I understand that servers cost money. Nobody can reasonably expect every multiplayer server to run forever.

But that is not really the point.

The question is why the end of the official service must also mean the end of the product.

Could an offline mode be provided? Could authentication be removed? Could server software eventually be released so that communities can keep a game alive?

Those seem like reasonable questions when customers have paid for something.

The shutdown of The Crew directly helped prompt the wider Stop Killing Games campaign. In the UK, a petition to prohibit publishers from irrevocably disabling games they had already sold received 189,887 signatures and was debated in Parliament in November 2025. The Government said it had no plans to change consumer law.⁶

A European Citizens’ Initiative also passed the required threshold. In June 2026, the European Commission declined to propose a legal obligation to keep every game playable after support ends, but said it would pursue work on consumer information and an industry code of conduct.⁷

Neither outcome created a right to permanent access. What matters is that this has moved beyond arguments on forums. Consumers are asking what a digital purchase should actually entitle them to.

The UK already recognises that digital content should last

We do have protections here.

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 specifically covers digital content. Paid digital content must be of satisfactory quality, with durability among the factors that may be considered in appropriate cases.⁸

I find that word interesting.

Durability makes perfect sense when talking about a washing machine or television. You reasonably expect a £1,000 television to last longer than a week.

What does durability mean for something digital?

A film file can be copied repeatedly without degrading. Yet access to it might depend on an account, a shop, DRM, authentication servers and licensing agreements between companies that have nothing to do with the customer.

The actual bits could last forever. The permission to use them might not.

I do not want this to become a legal argument about how the Consumer Rights Act applies to every possible digital service. The Act does not promise that every purchase or server will remain available forever, and individual cases depend on their circumstances.

I am more interested in the basic expectation.

If I pay for something rather than renting it, I expect there to be some meaningful difference.

Stadia made the service part of the platform

Google has a long history of launching products and eventually closing them. Sometimes that does not matter. An experimental messaging app disappearing is not the same as somebody losing something they paid for.

Stadia was more interesting because the service was effectively the hardware platform as well.

When Google shut Stadia down on 18 January 2023, the Stadia versions of those games disappeared with it.

To Google’s credit, it handled the closure responsibly. It refunded eligible Stadia hardware bought through the Google Store, along with games and add-ons purchased through the Stadia Store. It also provided a way to convert the controller for Bluetooth use.⁹

That is about as responsible as shutting down a service like that can be.

But it still demonstrates the underlying problem.

With a PlayStation sitting under the television, the console is the platform. With Stadia, Google was the platform.

Once Google stopped providing it, there was nothing left for the customer to preserve locally.

“We own the glass”

One of the things that pushed me towards writing this was seeing clips of LG Ad Solutions executives speaking to the advertising industry.

They used phrases including:

“We own the glass.”

“We own the TV.”¹⁰

In context, they were describing LG’s control of the connected-television platform, its advertising inventory and first-party viewing data. They were not claiming legal ownership of the set in somebody’s living room.

But I still find the language revealing.

I bought the television. It is plugged into my electricity, connected to my network and sitting in my house.

Yet from the advertising side of the business, the screen is being described as something they “own”.

That says a great deal about how differently the customer and manufacturer can view the same product.

To me, it is a television I purchased. To the advertising business, it is also a screen, an operating system and a source of data that can be monetised.

That is a very different relationship from the televisions we grew up with.

An old television was basically finished when you bought it. The manufacturer did not need to know what you connected to its HDMI ports, identify what you were watching or maintain an advertising account. It was not a continuing relationship between you and the company that made it.

A modern smart television can be all of those things.

This is not just about LG. Smart televisions in general have become advertising and data platforms as well as displays. The LG example simply puts that relationship into unusually blunt words.

“We own the glass.”

No. I bought the glass.

Physical products now depend on things we do not own

We increasingly buy physical products whose useful features depend on infrastructure we do not own.

A smart camera might need the manufacturer’s servers. A thermostat might need an app. A security system might rely on a cloud API. A speaker might need an account. A car can have features controlled by software or subscriptions.

A television might continue to turn on for fifteen years while the apps and online services that made it “smart” disappear much earlier.

That changes what it means to own hardware. The physical object might belong to you, but parts of its usefulness remain under somebody else’s control.

The hardware may survive for years after the services that made it useful have disappeared.

“Buy” and “rent” should mean different things

This is what everything comes back to for me.

If I rent a film, I understand the arrangement. I pay a smaller amount and receive temporary access.

If I subscribe to Netflix, I understand that films and programmes will come and go.

What bothers me is when the word buy is used for something that can disappear in much the same way.

There has to be a meaningful difference between renting something and buying it. Otherwise, we are merely paying different amounts for licences with different expiry conditions.

Most people do not read a twenty-page licence agreement before buying a £9.99 film. They see the word “Buy”.

I do not think it is unreasonable for them to interpret that in the ordinary sense of the word.

Physical media suddenly looks rather good

I have spent years enjoying the convenience of digital media, so this is not an argument that everything should go back to discs.

Digital is brilliant when it works.

But physical media has one advantage that I think we underestimated. Once I have bought it, the company generally stops being involved.

My Blu-ray does not care if the studio changes owners, a streaming agreement expires or the shop I bought it from closes. It does not need the manufacturer to authenticate it every few weeks.

If the disc and player work, I can watch it.

That sounds incredibly simple because it is. We used to take that for granted.

DRM can leave paying customers with the worse copy

DRM is intended to restrict unauthorised copying, but it can leave the paying customer with more restrictions than an unauthorised copy.

The legitimate version may require an account, launcher, regional permission, DRM system or authentication server; the unauthorised version may simply be a file.

That does not excuse piracy or diminish the need to pay creators. It exposes a preservation failure.

If one copy of a game needs several companies and servers to keep cooperating while another needs only ordinary storage, which is more likely to work in thirty years?

That is a ridiculous position for the legitimate customer to end up in.

I do not expect companies to support things forever

There needs to be some realism here.

I am not expecting Ubisoft to run a game server until the end of time. I am not expecting Netflix to keep every programme forever. I am not expecting an old smart television to receive updates twenty years after it was sold.

Companies close. Technology changes. Contracts end.

What I would like is a sensible end-of-life plan.

If a game no longer needs to connect to the publisher, remove the requirement where possible. If a company is shutting down a service, let people export what they reasonably can. If a physical device can work locally, do not make the cloud mandatory. If software is being abandoned, consider allowing the community to keep it working.

Most importantly, if something is sold as a permanent purchase, it should not disappear simply because the company no longer finds it convenient to provide access.

There is a big difference between:

We do not support this any more.

and:

You cannot use this any more.

Those should not automatically mean the same thing.

I still prefer digital. I just trust it less.

That is probably the strange conclusion I have reached.

I do not want to give up digital services. I like Steam. I use streaming. I like having media available immediately rather than waiting for a parcel to arrive.

The technology is not the problem. The problem is how much control we handed back to companies after the sale.

With physical media, the transaction used to end. You paid, they gave you the thing and it was yours.

With digital media and connected hardware, the seller can remain involved for the life of the product. Sometimes that is useful: updates can make products better. But the same connection that allows a company to improve something also allows it to remove something.

Gabe Newell’s point was about providing a good service. Make the legitimate option convenient and dependable enough and people will happily pay for it.

Digital was supposed to be better because it was easier. It still can be, but convenience without durability is temporary. If companies want people to keep paying for digital products, those products must remain worth trusting.

Sources