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Your digital game library is yours, until it's not

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Your digital game library is yours, until it's not

Every major storefront sells games as revocable licenses, and the disc that used to be the fallback is going away.

Anyone who paid $99.99 for the NBA 2K25 All-Star Edition at launch in September 2024 gets a little over two years of MyCareer, the series' single-player story mode, before 2K pulls the plug. 2K removed the game from digital storefronts on October 30, 2026, and will shut down its online servers on December 31 of this year. Because MyCareer runs on those servers, it will disappear with them.

While those who bought (or, I suppose, "licensed" is the correct term) the game can still redownload and play its offline modes, that's all they'll get after the game artificially "expires." While many players will be furious with 2K's decision, the fundamental truth is that you don't own the games in your Steam, PlayStation or Xbox library. You hold a license to play them on terms the company selling them sets. And that license can be revoked.

When a publisher delists a game, as 2K did with NBA 2K25 , existing owners keep it in their library and can download it again; anyone who doesn't already have it only has the option to track down a disc copy, if available. But a server shutdown goes a step further: anything that depends on the publisher's online infrastructure stops working, including single-player modes built to check in with a server. That's why NBA 2K25 loses MyCareer and MyTeam but keeps Play Now, MyNBA, The W and MyWNBA.


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