You do not own your e-books, or your games. You may not fully the car you bought. The digital economy rewrites some basic rules of capitalism.
Ownership is out, renting is in, a recent European Parliament briefing found. The debate intensified around the same time that 1.3 million gamers signed a petition arguing the same thing after they abruptly lost access to a game they had paid for.
The IMCO committee requested the briefing titled ‘Do Consumers Still Own What They Buy? Ownership 2.0’. The lawmakers heard that legally speaking, traditional ownership rules do not apply to digital e-purchases or technology. Proprietorship remains within the private company even when purchased by the consumer.
Stop the killing
Traditional ownership means receiving exclusive rights with third-party effect, where the owner can then use, rent, transfer, or destroy the product. In the case of e-ownership, that mostly is not the case. You may fully own some parts — the hardware, sometimes a perpetual licence to the software. But a digital product only works if every component keeps running: the updates, the related content, the servers it connects to. Those rest on a contractual promise the company can change or withdraw. As a result, the effective position for the consumer becomes that of a renter.
This was embodied in the server shut down in March 2024 of Ubisoft’s The Crew, where an estimated 12 million players abruptly found their game unplayable, with licences later revoked from buyers’ accounts. That shutdown prompted 1.3 million people to sign the Stop Killing Games petition.
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This is a phenomenon that touches almost every European. About 96 per cent of Europeans over 10 own a smartphone. Digital spending totalled around €20bn on apps in 2025, yet clean data on how many people actually buy digital goods is scarce.
At the EP hearing, MEPs learned that 93.5 per cent of analysed live-service games become entirely unplayable once their servers are switched off. On 16 June, the European Commission declined to propose any legal obligation for publishers to keep games playable after they pull commercial support. It cited copyright and intellectual-property constraints, and the disproportionate burden such a rule would impose on developers.
The recommendations
To provide some context, this is an industry that saw the layoffs of 26 per cent of European game developers within a single 12-month span in 2024–2025. The Commission instead promised softer measures: stakeholder talks by the end of 2026 toward a voluntary, industry-led code of conduct, plus a consumer-awareness effort.
Christiane Wendehorst, professor of civil law at the University of Vienna authored the brief. She proposes stricter enforcement of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Unfair Contract Terms Directive. Specifically, she labelled the language of ‘sale’ and ‘buying’ paired with a one-off upfront payment as misleading (unless some basic conditions are met). She would add a dedicated entry to the UCPD’s blacklist of banned practices, though some of the further fixes she envisages would require the Court of Justice of the EU to act.
She argues that the introduction of these recommendations would enable the consumer to keep receiving content and services for as long as they can reasonably expect, where the manufacturer ensures that repair and resale remain possible, and no party with remote access should be able to unilaterally modify or shut down what the consumer has bought.
What happens next
The Commission is due to publish its review of the Digital Content Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/770) by the end of 2026. It has confirmed it will cover the discontinuation of digital content and services directly.
The Digital Fairness Act, expected in late 2026 is open to amendments by MEPs. Campaigners have pivoted to lobbying for it, arguing that games sold and then switched off fall squarely within its consumer-protection remit.
Legal analysts already note that marketing a revocable licence as something you “buy” or “own” can count as a misleading practice under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and that pulling a service can leave digital content “non-conforming” under the Digital Content Directive, which triggers refund and repair remedies.
