Forever yours?

Conversations around digital goods, and whether consumers “own” the digital products they purchase or not, have been raging for years. But in 2019 they’re especially pertinent, with the growing encroachment of cloud-everything occurring alongside the steady decline of physical distribution.

There are few areas where this shift is felt more than in video games. When Telltale Games shut down in 2018 a, and (among others). The fate of each has varied. For example, was wrapped up by Skybound Games, rather than Telltale, and is still available to purchase digitally. By contrast, has had a curious and alarming fate. studio Mojang announced in June that the game was soon to be delisted from all digital storefronts, which isn’t that rare. What is rare, is that users who “owned” the game on any storefront were warned to download the game before the June 25 deadline, because it would no longer be available to download afterwards.