It's a multiplayer freemium game. Even if they let you keep your "copy" of it, servers will be down and the game will not be playable anyways. At least they offer a refund.

I guess Nexon wasn't happy with $6 million because the court found Dark & Darker wasn't copyright infringement, but was an infringement of 'trade secrets'.

If I remember 2023 correctly, Nexon decided to cut the game at the end of development and dumpster their work. So the devs left and finished the game on their own. Since Nexon never actually made/finished/released the game they couldn't claim copyright.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dark-and-darker-developer-did-not-commit-copyright-infringement-court-rules-but-has-to-pay-nexon-nearly-usd6-million-anyway/

I'll give them props that they are going to refund owners for the bit they can, I would have expected most stores so to go "oh well! we have been ordered to remove it, sucks to be you."

I mean to be fair, as the court determined, the people making this game stole parts of the game to sell to you in the first place, so this was piracy with more steps. I feel like the correct action would have been for the store to stop selling the game, the people that made money be forced to give that money to the people that were harmed by the steeling of the content. I guess it's a bad look on Epic for them too to keep money made from this and maybe they are just trying to avoid being drawn into this ordeal by doing it this way. Legal systems in other countries can be a bit more precarious than what we expect.

But yeah, it's a dark precedent. Remove them from my library so I can't redownload them from Epic? Never see updates? Maybe even not ever launch through Epic's app? Sure. I get that.

I really wish these stores had better simple language right in the "buy now" buttons. (Like, for example, "Rent now!")

Reminder that you do not own digital games

That is not universally true. On GOG for example you can download all your games, so things like this could not happen there. Sure, you still technically purchase a license and do not actually buy the games, but for all intents and purposes this is still the closest you get to actually owning the games.

My opinion is once I've paid for a game, piracy is on the table for that game if anything happens that prevents me from playing the copy I purchased.

When steam takes games off the store they let you still download them. Epic just sucks.

Steam has proven to be a far, far, far more capable and stable repository for my games that I could be ... since May 2006. I got Steam because that's how you bought Half Life 2.

Ya know what? I can still play Half Life 2. I've never had the slightest problem accessing any Steam game other than Ubisoft crap, and now I don't buy Ubi.

Add it up, man. That's 19 years of gaming. 151 games. And I have access to every bit of it, at my whim.
For some basic comparison, I have a couple digital pictures that old. A handful. And its shocking that I managed to keep track of them that long. An accident, really.
Steam does the job of safeguarding my games much better than I can.

You do not own physical games either. It’s just harder for the publisher to revoke a license for a physical game but legally there is little difference.