PlayStation can delete all your digital games after 3 years of inactivity (EU)

The useful part of the conversation was not outrage at Sony alone. It was that plenty of people have already been burned by the same pattern elsewhere. Microsoft came up in two opposite ways. Xbox got credit for keeping decade-old purchases playable across console generations through backwards compatibility and emulation. But Microsoft also got hammered for forced account migrations, especially Minecraft, where missing a migration deadline could kill a paid account for good. That made Sony’s policy feel less like a hypothetical legal clause and more like a familiar failure mode across the industry. The GDPR angle got a hard reality check. Several people pushed back on the claim that privacy law requires Sony to erase dormant purchases. Their read was straightforward: GDPR requires keeping personal data no longer than necessary, not deleting customer entitlements that still serve the obvious purpose of proving ownership and restoring access. The sharper version of that argument was that companies choose not to separate the minimum data needed to preserve a purchase from the much larger pile of personal and behavioral data they would rather keep for convenience or analytics. Then they present deletion as regulatory necessity. That reframed the issue from “Sony bad” to “digital stores are still structurally weak.” Licensing deals can block redownloads even when a title remains on your account. Store operators can force account changes on deadlines that are easy to miss if you stop playing for a few years. Warning emails are not much protection if the address on file is old, dead, or tied to a school or hobby account from another phase of life. The mood was sour because this is exactly the scenario people mean when they say you do not really own digital media, and many expect the problem to get worse as physical distribution keeps disappearing.