After Sony introduced that it is delisting over 500 movies from customers’ accounts with no refunds, discontinuing bodily discs for PlayStation video games, and shutting down PlayStation 3 and PSVita’s digital shops — persons are more and more skeptical of creating all media digital-only.
Brazilian Xbox gamer, Ordo_Liberal, additionally discovered this out the onerous approach, as again on April 6 (via Reddit), 2026, his Microsoft account was hacked and promptly suspended by Microsoft as its IT group decided it was “unrecoverable” by coverage, as a result of account’s safety particulars being modified by the hacker.
This is not the primary time we have seen experiences of this at Windows Central. Microsoft’s insurance policies for restoring accounts are sometimes extremely flimsy. Getting in contact with the best help companies is usually a Kafka-esque nightmare of AI bots and outsourced customer service layers.
As a results of being blocked, Ordo_Liberal not solely misplaced his Xbox video games however additionally misplaced all his OneDrive information.
Enraged that Microsoft took away his sport library and insisted he purchase them once more, Ordo_Liberal then sued Microsoft in a digital library lawsuit. The courtroom case dragged on till July 12, 2026, when Ordo_Liberal announced on Reddit that he had really received.
According to (translated) feedback, the Brazilian courtroom dominated in favor of Ordo_Liberal below Brazil’s strict shopper legal guidelines, and has ordered Microsoft to utterly restore Ordo_Liberal’s account, giving him his total Xbox digital video games library again, and pay him $400 in damages.
Digital preservation of video games has grow to be fairly a sizzling matter in current days, following Sony’s culling of bodily media to the purpose the place some would argue that “piracy is the only extant form of media preservation” because of no viable, authorized possibility being out there.
However, Ordo_Liberal’s courtroom win in opposition to Microsoft for taking away his digital library for one thing that wasn’t his fault proves that it’s potential to discover a authorized means to guard and protect digital video games and a participant’s possession rights over them, supplied they’ve the braveness, authorized know-how, and cautious planning to take action.
The European Union can also be taking a extra aggressive stance on digital preservation recently. As an increasing number of of our information goes as much as cloud companies, shoppers have gotten more and more conscious of the results when corporations like PlayStation or Xbox pull the plug.
Microsoft must do higher right here, and in the event that they refuse, perhaps the courts will be capable of power them to take action.
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