Every major storefront sells games as revocable licenses, and the disc that once served as a fallback is disappearing. Anyone who paid $99.99 for the NBA 2K25 All-Star Edition at launch in September 2024 gets a little over two years of My Career, the series' single-player story mode, before 2K pulls the plug. 2K removed the game from digital storefronts on October 30, 2026, and will shut down its online servers on December 31 of this year. Because My Career runs on those servers, it will disappear with them. Buyers, who only licensed the game, can still redownload it and play its offline modes, but My Career will be gone.
The fundamental truth is that you don't own the games in your Steam, PlayStation or Xbox library. You hold a license to play them on terms the company selling them sets, and that license can be revoked. When a publisher delists a game, existing owners can usually download it again, but a server shutdown goes further: anything dependent on online infrastructure stops working, including single-player modes that check in with a server. That's why NBA 2K25 loses My Career and My Team but keeps Play Now, My NBA, The W and My WNBA.
The worst case is a revoked license. Ubisoft shut down servers for The Crew in March 2024 and, according to player reports, began removing the game from libraries. PlayStation owners also raised alarms over a 30-day timer on new digital purchases. Sony called it a one-time license check, but it illustrates how fragile digital ownership can be. In an August 2026 court filing, Sony argued that "reasonable consumers" wouldn't be misled into thinking they own their games.
Discs don't guarantee access forever either. Sony will stop making disc-based PlayStation games starting in January 2028. The Crew was sold on disc, yet its physical copies stopped working along with the digital ones because they required a constant connection to Ubisoft's servers. GOG takes a different approach, letting customers download offline installers they can keep.
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing