Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user licence agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed.
We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe
This is the business model that now dominates the digital age. Neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, chokepoint capitalism: it gets called all sorts of things, but the basic idea it has in common is that the rules of property ownership, as we have tended to understand them for most of the history of capitalism, are shifting under our feet. We think we’re buying products. In practice, we’re locking ourselves into subscriptions where the power rests with the vendor and the things we think we own are merely licensed to us.
That’s why a petition about videogames currently before the European Commission deserves our attention. A campaigning group called Stop Killing Games was formed in protest after Ubisoft shut down the servers for an online car-racing game called The Crew in 2024. That meant, in effect, that without warning or right of appeal, everyone who “owned” that game ceased to. It became unplayable. As one player complained: “You buy a physical copy of a game, you bring it home and install the game, you play it for some amount of time. Then all of a sudden the publisher completely destroys all copies of the game worldwide, including yours.”
Nerdy silly nerds, you may think. Who cares if they can’t waste more of their time playing some daft car game that came out more than ten years ago? I sympathise with the instinct. But I urge you to look not at the specifics of the instance, but at the general principle. This is a bellwether issue. We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe. Manufacturers reserve the right to remove or disable useful features from things we have already paid for – or add useless or profit-maximising, rent-seeking features – remotely.
Versions of these issues are to be found all over the place. They are present in your pocket, where Apple doesn’t just sell you an iPhone, but retains the right to determine which software you may or may not install on it and what repairs you may perform on it. They are present in your desktop. Not so long ago, users of the Microsoft Office suite of programmes – MS Word, Excel, Outlook etc – had the unwanted, enraging, impossible-to-delete AI assistant “Copilot” foisted on them, and were quietly and without consultation upgraded to a more expensive subscription for the privilege.
They are present in agriculture. If a farmer buys a tractor and it breaks down, he can’t repair it himself: unless he uses (expensive) approved parts, the tractor might tell the parent company it has been tampered with and a kill-switch can turn it into a giant agriculturally-themed paperweight. They are present in motoring, where certain hardware features present in modern cars – higher bhp or better acceleration – can only be unlocked with a premium subscription. They are present in your Kindle library, where a couple of years back Amazon reached in and remotely deleted from users’ libraries copies of (of all things) Nineteen Eighty-Four after they discovered a rights issue with the edition. Poof. Gone.
These issues are not, it bears saying, completely clear-cut. It’s the nature of software that patches and upgrades will be necessary from time to time. Sometimes – as with Microsoft Office – a subscription model makes more sense than a one-off purchase for just this reason. Buying a bit of software, even if you buy a hard copy of it, is a tiny bit different in kind from buying a physical object.
To return to the Stop Killing Games case, in Ubisoft’s defence, it isn’t reasonable to expect that their selling users an online game should bind them to keep dedicated servers for that game running in perpetuity at their own cost. It has long been standard for companies to discontinue tech support, or making spare parts, for old products since before the digital age.
But on the petitioners’ side, it is reasonable to expect to have *some* rights in a product you have paid for. That is Stop Killing Games are asking for. An “end-of-life” software patch that would let the game be played offline or on private servers, for instance, is the sort of proposal that is being made as a reasonable compromise.
At the moment, though, the blurred lines between hardware and software – between ownership and subscription, or holding something under licence – are being exploited strongly to the advantage of big tech and strongly to the disadvantage of you and me. And that is, well, a bit fishy.
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