Mexico joins the digital ownership fight - and that matters for us too

When you buy a game on a disc, you can lend it to a friend, sell it second-hand or put it on a shelf for twenty years. When you buy the same game in a digital store for the same price, you get none of that. That gap is exactly what more and more lawmakers around the world are starting to poke at, and now Mexico has joined in.

Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, who chairs the Mexican Senate's Digital Rights Commission, announced on his Instagram that he and federal deputy Iraís Reyes are proposing legislative changes aimed at better protecting consumers who buy digital games. The details of the proposal are still thin, so I won't pretend to know what it will actually require of publishers or stores. But the direction is clear: people who pay for a game should have some guarantees about what they're paying for.

Why should a player in Croatia or the wider region care what happens in Mexico? Because this is a pressure game. Publishers operate globally, and every new market that demands clearer rules makes it harder to argue that the current model is the only possible one. Europe already went through its own round: the Stop Destroying Videogames citizens' initiative, born out of anger over Ubisoft shutting down The Crew, collected around 1.3 million verified signatures, and the European Commission formally replied to it this June. Whether that ends in actual legislation is another question, but the issue is now on the table in Brussels, not just on Reddit.

For us the stakes are pretty concrete. Digital prices here are the same euro prices as in far richer markets, a new release easily lands at 70 or 80 euros, and the one thing that used to soften that blow - reselling the physical copy - is disappearing as more games ship digital-only or as a code in a box. If you can't resell it, can't lend it and could lose access when servers go dark, then at the very least you should be told that clearly at checkout.

I don't expect Mexico's initiative to change anything on my Steam or PlayStation account tomorrow. But every country that adds its voice turns 'you only bought a licence' from an unquestionable fact into a policy choice. And policy choices can be changed.

Image: Evan-Amos / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N64-Game-Cartridge.jpg