You can pay for services and you may use the term “buy”, but it is clear you’re receiving a service, and a service in its nature is temporary.

Buy a night in a hotel, dinner in a restaurant, haircut, shoe shine. These are all services.

Buying of digital services like games, films, and music is an evolution of buying dvds, cds or records. There is an expectation that you now own something. I can dig out my dad’s old records and play them and pass them onto my children.

If media companies want to sell a license that has an expiry date, that’s fine, but it has to be explicitly communicated. Consumers have to be well informed about what they’re purchasing.

▲

nfw2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Access to an online server is clearly a service, hence the word "server"

▲

fizwidget 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The discussion is not just about online multiplayer games though, it’s about games in general. There is no good reason why buying a singleplayer offline game need be a “service”.

	▲	nfw2 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There IS a reason they don't make it possible to download the game copies directly, which is it becomes trivially easy to perfectly replicate and distribute new copies online, which is not true of any physical good. People who aren't overly-online forum denizens only care about this issue insofar as it affects them, and the only way it affects people in the real world is when they lose access to online games when the server shuts down. Offline games don't get access revoked in practice.