The Word "Buy" Does Not Mean Buy

Both storefronts tell you, in their own agreements, that the button marked buy does not do what the word means. Sony’s terms state that using the words purchase, sale, sold, sell or buy “does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership”. Valve puts it in six words: “The Content and Services are licensed, not sold.”

Neither company is hiding this. It is the agreement everybody accepts and nobody reads.

What the licence actually is

Sony’s wording is the more complete of the two, and it names three properties in a single sentence. The licence is:

• Non-exclusive — you are one of many holders, not the owner of a copy
• Revocable — it can be withdrawn
• Non-transferable — it cannot be given, sold or inherited

Valve says the same about transfer in a harder form: subscriptions are not transferable, and even if your access is terminated, the original activation key cannot be registered to any other account. The licence does not return to the pool when it stops being yours. It stops existing.

The clause about switching the servers off

This is the part with practical consequences beyond the philosophical ones. Sony reserves the right to “indefinitely suspend or discontinue online access to content or data associated with your Account at any time … without notice or liability”, and states it makes no commitment to keep online servers available for content that needs them.

Read plainly, that is the mechanism by which a game you paid for can stop working without anybody breaking a promise, because no promise of permanence was made.

Why this lands hardest in December

A licence is the one kind of purchase you cannot wrap.

You cannot buy a digital game, decide it is not right, and pass it to somebody else. You cannot hand your library on. You cannot lend the one you finished. The gifting flows the stores provide are a separate product, bought as a gift from the start, and they are the only route — which is also why the refund clock runs from your purchase rather than from the unwrapping.

What this is not

It is not a scandal, and it is not new. Software has been licensed rather than sold for as long as software has been sold, and the same is true of the film you “buy” from any streaming store.

What has changed is that the physical alternative has mostly gone, so the licence is no longer the cheap convenient option next to a disc. It is the option. Understanding what it is worth is therefore ordinary consumer literacy rather than activism.

What to actually do

• Buy a gift card rather than a game as a gift. It is the only version of this transaction the recipient actually controls.
• Keep the disc where a disc still exists, if resale, lending or handing it on matters to you. That is the entire practical difference. Keeping the machine that reads it is becoming the harder half: two hi-fi makers have dropped a disc product because the drive supply ended.
• Do not plan on a digital library as an asset. It is non-transferable by its own terms and it does not survive the account.
• Treat an online-dependent game as a subscription with no renewal date. The terms make no commitment to keep the servers up, and that is worth knowing before rather than after.
• Read the two sentences. They are quoted in full above, and they are the whole of what you agreed to.
• If you bought on the PlayStation Store between 2019 and 2023, a class-action settlement may owe you a little store credit, and Sony’s settlement has no claim form.
• Keep the disc if you claim Xbox’s digital copy of it. Microsoft’s own rules tie that licence to the disc: Xbox’s disc-to-digital copy lasts while you keep it.