You Don't Own It: Sony Is Deleting 551 Movies People Paid For

CaptainDumbass · July 1, 2026, 9:10pm

Sony is about to delete 551 movies that people paid for. The receipts said “purchase.” The fine print said something else. This keeps happening, and it is time to call it what it is.

Starting September 1, 2026, PlayStation users in the UK and Europe will lose access to 551 StudioCanal movies and shows they previously bought through the PlayStation Store. The list includes Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo, Pan’s Labyrinth and Paddington. Sony’s reason is “content licensing agreements.” There is no mention of refunds.

These were not rentals. They were not labeled as temporary. People clicked a button that said “Buy,” paid full price, and were told the movie was theirs. Now it is being taken back, and the money is not coming with it.

This Is a Pattern, Not a One-Off

Sony has done this before:

In 2022, Sony pulled 314 StudioCanal titles from customers in Germany and Austria, citing the same licensing reason.
In 2023, Sony told users it would remove 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows. After heavy backlash, it reversed course by signing a new deal. That reversal is the exception, not the rule.
When Sony merged Funimation into Crunchyroll, it deleted people’s Funimation digital libraries.

So the September deletion is not a mistake or a rare accident. It is how digital “ownership” has worked the whole time. You are not buying the thing. You are buying access that lasts exactly as long as two companies keep agreeing with each other.

It Is Not Just Sony

Every big player in games and media has done a version of this:

Ubisoft and The Crew. Ubisoft delisted the 2014 racing game in December 2023, shut its servers on March 31, 2024, and because the game was always-online, even the single-player mode died. In April 2024 Ubisoft began revoking the license from people who bought it, with no refund. When customers sued, Ubisoft’s legal position was that buyers “only bought a limited access to the game, not full ownership.” A company said in court that your purchase was never a purchase.
Nintendo and Super Mario Maker. On March 31, 2021, Nintendo switched off course uploading in Super Mario Maker for Wii U and closed its companion site, then pulled the game from the store. If you bought the disc, it still spins, but the online course sharing that was the entire point of the game is gone. Nintendo also closed the 3DS and Wii U eShops to new purchases on March 27, 2023.
EA and Battlefield 2. When the GameSpy service shut down, EA took online support offline for about 50 older games on June 30, 2014, including Battlefield 2 for PC, which was also removed from sale. EA later shut down fan-run servers that tried to revive some of those games.

Different companies, same move. Sell it as a purchase, then treat it as a revocable license when it becomes inconvenient to keep the servers or the rights.

What I Think Should Change

This section is my opinion, not reporting.

The problem is not that licenses expire. Licensing is real, and some server shutdowns are genuinely unavoidable. The problem is the word on the button.

If I can lose it because two corporations stopped agreeing, I did not buy it. I rented it for an unknown length of time. So the button should not say “Buy.” It should say “Lease,” or “Rent,” or “License until further notice.” The price should reflect that too, because a copy I can keep forever and a copy that can vanish in a licensing dispute are not the same product at the same value.

And if a company does pull something you paid for, the default should be a refund or store credit. “Thanks for your money, the film is gone, here is nothing” should not be a legal way to treat a customer.

There is real movement here. The Ubisoft shutdown launched the Stop Killing Games campaign, which gathered over a million verified signatures in the EU and drew a lawsuit from the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir over exactly this issue: selling a license that can be revoked at any time and calling it ownership.

What You Can Actually Do

Until the label matches the reality, the only real ownership is a copy nobody else controls:

Buy physical media when it exists, especially for things you want to keep.
Prefer DRM-free stores like GOG for games, where the download is yours to back up.
Keep local backups of anything that matters to you.
Assume any “purchase” tied to a login can be revoked, and plan around it.

This ties directly into the next post, because the physical option I just recommended is the exact thing Sony announced it is ending for games.

Sources

Your Turn

Have you ever lost something you paid for when a service pulled it or shut down? And would you pay the same price for a “purchase” if the button honestly said “license until further notice”?