PlayStation is deleting 551 movies people paid for — including Terminator 2 — with no refunds
On September 1, Sony removes 551 StudioCanal titles from the libraries of customers who clicked “buy.” No refund, no download. The thread's cleanest question: how does Steam keep delisted games playable forever, and Sony can't?
Sony's notice blames “content licensing agreements” for pulling Terminator 2, Total Recall and 549 other films from purchased libraries. It's not the first time — the company tried the same move years ago.
The recurring demand in the thread is legal, not technical: stop letting a checkout button say “purchase” when what you get is a revocable license with no end date disclosed.
“Purchased” content, scheduled for deletion
Per Kotaku, Sony is removing 551 films and series (StudioCanal titles including Terminator 2, Total Recall and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) from PlayStation Store libraries on September 1, 2026. Sony's own wording to customers: you “will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” The reason given is “our content licensing agreements.” No refunds. And as one reader noted, this is a rerun — Sony attempted the same removal a few years back.
The objection most repeated was about the word on the button. “It should not be legal,” one commenter wrote, “for the product page to say 'purchase' or 'buy' when in reality you're only renting it with a to-be-determined end date.”
The Steam comparison that makes Sony look worse
The thread kept circling one inconvenient counterexample. A longtime commenter asked it directly:
“How is it that Steam manages to avoid yanking games from people's libraries even after the games are delisted for licensing issues … Or is it as simple as 'We're not dicks.'?”
It also isn't a Sony-only disease. One reader described iTunes music “going back to the day the store opened” vanishing from Apple's cloud, recoverable only because he'd kept a local backup, met with a boilerplate “sometimes we lose licensing” reply.
The line the thread drew: digital isn't the problem, streaming is
Kotaku's framing, that nothing digital is ever truly ours, got a precise correction. A software developer drew the distinction the headline blurred:
“Lots of digital things are ours. Digital files on our personally owned HDDs and SSDs. … What you meant to say is, streaming content is not ours — and that is true by definition, because the data is streamed from somewhere else.”
That's the takeaway the whole thread converged on, often via the same practical pivot: people announcing they'd spend the weekend standing up a Jellyfin or Plex server. The lesson isn't that ownership is dead — it's that ownership now requires a hard drive and a deliberate refusal to trust the buy button.
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