"You Never Actually Own the Game" — Why That Is True, and Why It Still Misses the Point

Geoffray Brunaux, a digital law specialist, told AFP at Gamescom the thing that gets deployed to end every argument about physical media:

"Whether it is physical or digital, you never actually own the game."

He is correct. It is also the least useful true statement in this entire debate, and it is worth explaining exactly why — because it is about to be used a great deal.

Why it is true

Buying a game has never made you the owner of the game. You buy a licence to play it. That was as true of a PS2 disc as it is of a PS Store download, and Sony restated it to users in plain terms this month:

"The Software is licensed to you, not sold. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license..."

We covered that email, and its remarkable timing, in Sony's licensing email. The language is standard across Steam, Xbox and Nintendo. Nobody has ever sold you a game outright.

So: the disc did not make you an owner. Correct.

Why it misses the point entirely

Ownership of the work was never what anyone was arguing about. What a disc gave you was ownership of a copy — and that is a completely different thing with completely different consequences.

Not one of those depends on owning the intellectual property. They all depend on possessing a physical article that the law treats as your property — the doctrine of first sale, essentially: you did not buy the film, you bought the tape, and the tape is yours.

Remove the tape and every right in that left-hand column disappears at once. Brunaux's statement is true about the top of the stack while the entire argument is about the bottom of it.

The bit that should worry you more than delisting

The common fear is that a publisher deletes your library. That is rare, and it is not the real exposure.

The real exposure is that your games are attached to an account, and accounts can be lost — compromised, banned in error, locked during a payment dispute, or orphaned when someone dies. A disc on a shelf survives all of that. A licence does not survive losing the account it is bound to, and there is no legal mechanism to inherit one.

Which produces the single most useful thing in this article: two-factor authentication on your PSN account is now a preservation measure, not just a security one. Your account is your library. Keep the recovery codes somewhere that is not the console.

What genuinely changes in 2028

Nothing about the licence. That was always the deal.

What changes is that the last option that did not depend on it goes away for new releases. Not "you stop owning things" — you never did — but "you stop being able to buy the version that worked anyway".

And as we set out in GTA 6 is already a code in a box, that has already happened on the biggest game of the year, without waiting for Sony's deadline.

The practical upshot

• Buy physical for the ones you care about, while it exists. Pre-2028 discs are unaffected and keep working.
• Secure your account properly. It is the only thing standing between you and your library.
• Do not accept "you never owned it anyway" as an answer. It is true, it is irrelevant to what is being lost, and it is going to be repeated by everyone who benefits from you shrugging.

More on where the money in this actually goes is in who actually profits from killing discs.

Reported 28 August 2026. Brunaux quote via AFP from Gamescom 2026.