Sony says you always knew you never owned that game. Brussels answered a different question in June
In a California court, Sony argues no reasonable consumer thinks they own the games they buy on the PS Store. In Europe the fight was never about ownership, and the Commission's answer to 1.29 million signatures was still no.
The button says buy. The contract says licence. For twenty years almost nobody cared about the gap, and now it is being argued in two places at once: a federal courtroom in California and a Commission document in Brussels.
The courtroom first. Four players sued Sony Interactive Entertainment in June, claiming the PS Store checkout breaches a Californian law in force since the start of 2025 that bars sellers from advertising digital content as a purchase when what changes hands is a revocable licence. Sony filed its answer on 21 August, and the answer is more interesting than the claim: no reasonable consumer would be misled, because the software licence agreement says in plain terms that the software is licensed and not sold.
The whole defence rests on what lawyers call consumer expectation. If everybody already knows, nobody was tricked.
The European question was never that one
Here the argument came from a citizens’ initiative, Stop Destroying Videogames, which gathered more than 1.29 million validated signatures and cleared the threshold in 24 member states. It was not asking for ownership of a file. It was asking that a publisher not be allowed to switch off a game people had already bought and leave it unplayable.
The Commission replied on 16 June, and the reply was no. It will not, at this stage, propose a legal obligation to keep games playable once they stop being sold. It pointed to intellectual property rights, confidential business information, the cost to publishers and the security risk of running servers that no longer get patched. Instead of a law it promised to open talks with the industry and consumer groups before the end of 2026, aiming at a code of conduct for handling a game’s end of life.
Code of conduct is the language of voluntary sign-up. The people who signed the initiative read it exactly that way.
What does Portuguese law give you when you buy a digital game?
What is left is ordinary consumer law, which says nothing about ownership and a good deal about conformity. In Portugal, consumer rights over digital content and services sit in Decreto-Lei 84/2021, which brought the EU digital content directive into national law.
The practical shape of it: the content has to match what you were promised and what you could reasonably expect, and where it does not, you can demand it be brought into conformity, ask for a price reduction, or walk away from the contract. On a one-off supply the trader is on the hook for two years. On a continuous supply, for as long as the contract runs.
Now notice what is absent. None of that guarantees the game still runs in ten years, or that the account holding it still exists. Which is why Sony can say what it is saying in court, and why the box that arrives in shops with no disc inside it from 2028 changes more than it looks like it does. The disc was the last part of the purchase that did not depend on somebody’s server staying switched on. Europe has moved fast on protecting minors and policing platforms, as the fight over France’s under-15 social media ban showed. On who owns the library you paid for, it has not moved at all.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Coolcaesar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
