Legacy Games shuts down its PC store and 'yours forever' turns out to be just a slogan

Some marketing lines age badly, and others collapse in real time. As reported by Vandal, citing information from VGC, publisher Legacy Games, which specialises in casual and indie titles, has announced the closure of its online PC store. The problem isn't just that the store is going away: anyone who bought games there will lose the ability to download them from 28 February. Anything you haven't saved to your computer by then effectively stops being yours.

The irony is hard to ignore. The store's own homepage boasts of having “over a million happy gamers” and promises games that are “yours forever”. That “forever” turns out to have an expiry date. It might look like minor news, far from the competitive scene, but it touches on an issue that affects all of us who live out of digital libraries: what are we really buying when we pay for a game with no physical copy?

What you need to know

• Legacy Games, also known as Legacy Interactive, is closing its PC store at the end of the year, according to the information reported by Vandal.
• From 28 February, games purchased on the platform will no longer be available to download.
• The store opened in 2020 and grew to offer more than 1,000 games, many of them grouped into themed bundles.
• The site promoted itself with the message that the games would be “yours forever”.
• If you bought anything there, the sensible move is to download and back up everything you want to keep before that date.

Who Legacy Games is and what's being lost

This isn't a studio that came out of nowhere. The company was founded in 1998 and has published titles on PC, consoles and mobile. In the United States it also sold games on disc and as download codes, and it's especially well known for simulation games like the Emergency Room series, a real touchstone for a generation that grew up on the family PC.

Its own store launched in 2020 with a catalogue aimed squarely at casual players: hidden object games, puzzles, management sims and the like, often sold in themed bundles. These are players who don't usually follow industry news or back up their installers, and who may only find out about the closure when it's already too late. That's the worst part: the harm falls on the least informed users.

A recurring pattern

This case fits into a debate that has been going on for years: the difference between buying a game and buying a licence to use it. Digital stores have got us used to the convenience of having everything one click away, but that convenience depends on the company continuing to exist and being willing to keep its servers running. When a small platform shuts down, there's no guarantee that purchases will move somewhere else, and in this case, according to the source, no alternative for users has been mentioned.

Our take

Here at the Underworld Lordz newsroom, we're clear on this: promising “forever” and then cutting off downloads is unacceptable. Closing a business is legitimate; selling something with an explicit promise and then breaking it is not. If a store is going to use that phrase as a selling point, it should commit to offering DRM-free installers, keys on another platform or, at the very least, a generous download window clearly communicated to every buyer.

For those of us who compete or create content, the lesson is a practical one. Our library is our work tool: games for challenges, retro videos, nostalgia streams. Spreading out where you buy, favouring stores that let you download offline installers and keeping backups isn't paranoia, it's digital hygiene. And if you're a creator, stories like this are worth sharing with your audience: plenty of people still believe that what they pay for digitally belongs to them just like a disc on the shelf.

We also need to look ahead and demand more. The more small stores pop up trying to compete with the giants, the more cases like this we'll see unless there are clear rules. As players, we should ask for transparency: what happens to our purchases if the store closes, with that answer written down before we pay, not after.

What do you think?

Has a store, service or online game ever disappeared and taken your purchases with it? Do you still trust digital, or have you gone back to valuing physical copies and DRM-free stores? Tell us about your experience in the team chat or on our Discord: do you think there should be a law guaranteeing access to what you buy even if the store shuts down?