A new law in California will force digital stores to clarify whether digital goods will actually be owned buy the consumer, or whether they are merely buying the license.
Over the past few years, we've seen more and more examples of players losing access to their games when various stores go down. This is a result of buying a game digitally; you aren't really buying the product, you're effectively renting a license that permits you to access the game.
Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law that should at least make this distinction clearer for consumers.
Do we own any of our games? Not really
You are probably well-aware of how fickle digital purchases can be, just take a recent example like The Crew, which became inaccessible after Ubisoft deleted the server, and even the game, from players libraries. In this case, it led to the creation of the Stop Killing Games initiative. But in most cases, gamers simply have to accept it.
A lot of these problems will continue long into the future, so long as games are distributed as license rentals rather than actual purchases, but the new Californian bill (AB 2426) should at least ensure that stores will make this clear upfront.
Per the official bill summary itself:
This bill would, subject to specified exceptions, additionally prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good… which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good.
At the moment, this only applies to California, but it might catch on around the US and globally. Hopefully it does, because many consumers are surely unaware of how few games they actually own.
We don't yet know how this will be represented on digital storefronts, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.