The fact that we no longer actually own our games has often been a topic of debate. If you buy a physical copy, the titles are yours and you can resell them, but if you buy digitally, you have essentially paid for a license that gives you access to a specific title and can never resell them. Even so, the agreements are written in such a way that you can also lose your rights at any time, even though you have paid for them.
This means that you cannot demand your money back when games are discontinued or servers are shut down, making it impossible to play online or even download the games again. Unfortunately, there are only a few complaints online about this and no organised initiative to give the rights back to the players, and it looks like we will continue to have to pay for arbitrary licenses.
One person who doesn't like this arrangement at all is Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft. In a discussion concerning, among other things, the Stop Killing Games campaign (which we reported on the other day), he shares his view on purchased games that you don't own via X, writing:
"If buying a game is not a purchase, then pirating them is not theft."
When an X user asks him what he thinks game developers should do when they kill their games by shutting down the servers, he replies:
"Host your own servers. This is what ALL games used to do."
Previously, it was common for fans to continue running their own servers, and thanks to that, long after the shutdown, it was possible to play Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005 edition), World of Warcraft - Vanilla (which later prompted Blizzard to release the Classic editions), and Phantasy Star Online (which is still playable despite the fact that it has been two decades since the servers were shut down).
What do you think about Notch's somewhat controversial view on game ownership, as well as his suggestion on how server shutdowns should be handled?