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Amazon Just ERASED Your Library. You Have 90 Days. - Video học tiếng Anh
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Amazon Just ERASED Your Library. You Have 90 Days.
Amazon Just ERASED Your Library. You Have 90 Days.
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0:00
You didn’t buy that video game. You just paid for a temporary permission slip,
0:04
and now Amazon is about to shred it.
0:06
The world’s largest retailer is effectively going to erase certain purchased games from
0:11
thousands of user libraries on their Luna cloud gaming service. And while you think
0:16
they can’t legally take away something you paid full price for, Amazon’s lawyers are currently
0:21
arguing in federal court that the “Buy” button you clicked was just marketing… not ownership.
0:28
Chapter 1: The June 10 Eviction Notice
0:31
On June 10th, 2026, Amazon Luna users will wake up to an email no gamer wants to see. The cloud
0:38
gaming service they’ve been using to manage a library they thought they owned is changing.
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And those changes will effectively make much of that library disappear.
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The service itself will still exist. But the part that made it feel like
0:51
ownership? That’s the part that won’t. In early April 2026, Amazon Luna stopped
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selling individual games entirely through its platform. The storefront shut down,
1:01
ending direct purchases overnight. That means anything users bought before that point is now
1:06
on borrowed time. Because when the June deadline arrives, access to those games is revoked.
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Forever. No library. No access. Just gone.
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Gamers hit a button that said “Buy” and handed over real money in each of their
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transactions. Sometimes, 60, 70 dollars per title. And Amazon’s official position,
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stated plainly on its own support page, is that they’re not entitled to a single cent back.
1:34
Compare this to what happened when Google shut down Stadia.
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Google, a company not exactly known for its consumer generosity, issued full refunds for every
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game purchased on its now-defunct cloud gaming service. Amazon looked at that precedent. They
1:48
studied it. Their legal teams reviewed it. And then they made a different call.
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Their Luna service is killing something called Bring Your Own Library, a feature that lets
1:57
users link their existing game libraries from GOG, EA, and Ubisoft to play through Amazon’s
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cloud infrastructure. That goes dark on June 3rd, one week before the final third-party game purge.
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As for all that save data - the hundreds of hours of progress poured into those digital
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farms and worlds - Amazon will allow downloads for 90 days after June 10th. After that, in September,
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those files will be permanently deleted from Amazon’s servers.
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No extensions. No exceptions. Amazon’s support page notes
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that you should “download your save data as soon as possible and test compatibility with
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your intended platform.” Of course they can’t guarantee it’ll work on other gaming services.
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Your money is gone. Your games aren’t staying where you bought
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them. And your progress may or may not transfer.
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Now the company is suggesting you act quickly while simultaneously acknowledging there may
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be nothing worth acting quickly for. Luna will curate its own internal game library
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for the foreseeable future; you can take it or leave it.
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For years people have preached the pitfalls of sinking real money into cloud-based libraries,
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fearing what might happen if the floor beneath finally gives way.
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Now we’re seeing one outcome in real time.
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It’s the equivalent of a digital eviction notice. Your belongings, placed on the curb.
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And if you don’t collect them in 90 days, Amazon will happily throw them in the trash.
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Which begs the question: How is this even legal?
3:21
Chapter 2: The “Buy” Button Lie
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For all its problems, Luna, like Stadia before it,
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started off with its own appeal. For a certain kind of gamer, Luna was a pretty elegant solution.
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You paid for Prime anyway. The service was folded in as a perk. And if you wanted more,
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Luna Premium gave you a rotating catalogue of AAA titles for $9.99 a month.
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When Amazon relaunched the service in October 2025,
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they rebranded it around a feature built with family party games in mind,
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with Snoop Dogg somehow involved in the marketing because…well, Snoop Dogg.
3:54
The pitch was compelling for average families who didn’t want to mess with
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hardware configuration, installs, or 3-hour day-one patches eating up your afternoon.
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All you had to do was show up, click play, and game.
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It was easy. The service did have its fans… though not many.
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Like most cloud gaming platforms, it struggled with input lag and latency. Device support
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was inconsistent. New games arrived slowly. And there was a lingering concern it wouldn’t last,
4:19
especially as it trailed behind Google Stadia in terms of reputation.
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But the ability to integrate third-party libraries gave it flexibility. There was
4:28
also the ability to stream AAA games at 1080p and 60 frames per second worked
4:33
well when conditions were right. And the ability to jump into Ubisoft titles without downloads,
4:38
storage limits, or launcher headaches was a genuinely appealing concept.
4:43
After the latest announcement, Luna’s few faithful fans were already changing tune. “Well,
4:48
everything I play on Luna are paid titles,” one said dejectedly. “I guess I am done with Luna.”
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Amazon’s response was a corporate classic. They offered a complimentary Luna Premium
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subscription in return, which, of course, locked users into the Luna ecosystem. It did
5:04
absolutely nothing for the third-party games they’d paid for and were already playing.
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Which brings us back to the legal architecture
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that makes that type of response not only possible, but protected by law.
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Because if there is one word Amazon doesn’t want you to use right now, it is “own.”
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In August 2025, a class action lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for
5:26
the Western District of Washington. The plaintiff was a Californian named Lisa
5:31
Reingold. Her charge was that Amazon ran what she called a “bait and switch.” They
5:36
were displaying a “Buy movie” button while burying the reality of what consumers were
5:40
actually purchasing in deep legalese at the bottom of the confirmation screen.
5:45
That fine print, according to the complaint,
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granted consumers a “non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable,
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limited license” to access content. Maintained entirely at Amazon’s sole discretion.
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It was revocable, at any time…
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Without warning.
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Reingold was furious that Bella and the Bulldogs Volume 4,
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purchased for $20.79 on Amazon Prime Video, had vanished from her library.
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Now, Bella and the Bulldogs may not be your particular vice, and no judgment if it is.
6:17
But for the Downton Abbey crowd - the people who paid good money between 2010 and 2014 to
6:22
own a piece of British aristocratic misery - your library had also lost that series by 2024.
6:28
This same principle is played out over and over again, without people even realizing it.
6:33
The filing describes the gap between what Amazon advertises and what it actually sells with a
6:38
precision that is damning: “At no point prior to the purchase is the consumer ever put on notice,
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in plain language, that… he or she is buying is just a license that can be revoked at any time.”
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This is not Amazon’s first rodeo defending this argument in court.
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In 2021, a similar class action alleged that Amazon had deceived consumers by
6:58
misrepresenting that it was selling digital content when it was, in fact, licensing it.
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The company’s defense was remarkable.
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Amazon argued that the word “buy” doesn’t imply perpetual ownership.
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Quoting directly from Webster’s dictionary,
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their lawyers maintained that it simply means “rights to use our services” upon payment.
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Plaintiffs pushed back that a reasonable consumer understands that when they click “buy,” they own
7:23
it unless or until they return it or otherwise dispose of the good. Then they added that what
7:29
they received was a limited license Amazon could revoke at any time, for any reason.
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The court declined to dismiss the case outright, ruling that it was plausible
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the word ‘buy’ could be “materially misleading” to a reasonable consumer.
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Amazon walked away from that ruling and kept the button exactly where it was.
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Then California changed the rules of the game.
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Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426) took effect on January 1st, 2025. It is, in legal terms,
7:56
the equivalent of forcing snake-oil salesmen to print "This Is Not Medicine" on the bottle,
8:01
in forty-point font, prominent enough that no reasonable person could possibly miss it.
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The law prohibits companies from marketing digital transactions as a ‘purchase’, or using
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words like ‘buy’, unless one of two things is true: Either the customer receives unrestricted
8:16
ownership. Or they clearly acknowledge that what they’re getting is a revocable license.
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Amazon does neither.
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The lawsuit also points to a specific scenario that reads
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like a thought experiment… but is completely real.
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Let’s say you paid $40 for both Barbie and Oppenheimer
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on Amazon, the Barbenheimer double feature, the cultural event of 2023.
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One morning you wake up, Amazon loses a licensing agreement,
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and your Barbenheimer weekend is simply gone. The court, in its own words,
8:46
acknowledged that a consumer in that situation "might feel a little miffed, or go nuclear."
8:51
The court used the word nuclear. In a legal
8:54
filing about a streaming license. That’s how absurd this has become.
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Amazon is betting on the fact you didn’t read page
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11 of their Terms of Service. Betting on the fact you don’t have a lawyer.
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And for years, they were right.
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Chapter 3: The Trillion Dollar Retreat
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To understand why Amazon is doing this,
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we should explain who Amazon even is when it comes to gaming.
9:15
The gaming industry is worth $187 billion, and in 2012, Amazon decided they wanted a slice.
9:22
They bought Twitch in 2014 for nearly a billion dollars. Pretty smart move.
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They announced three big AAA games in 2016. Pretty ambitious. Then,
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one of them, Breakaway, got canceled in 2018. Then another, called Crucible,
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launched in 2020 after a 6 year development and an estimated $80 million in investment. It was so
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catastrophically poorly received that Amazon didn’t just shut it down…they unreleased it.
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It had been live for 41 days.
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You can get a free trial of a random meditation app that
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lasts longer than Amazon’s $80 million flagship game.
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The Crucible team was redirected to another title in development called New World,
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which launched in 2021 to nearly a million concurrent
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players. And then immediately began hemorrhaging them as bugs piled up.
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The in-game economy was broken by player exploits,
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so Amazon had to disable gold transfers entirely to stop the bleeding. A patch
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accidentally made one weapon so overpowered they disabled it globally. A different patch
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duplicated gold. It also struggled to handle the number of concurrent players on launch day,
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and took 2 days to get their servers up to spec and bring down wait times.
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This is the company that runs the cloud infrastructure for
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a significant portion of the entire internet.
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By October 2025, the butchers bill came due.
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Amazon cut 14,000 jobs company wide. Gaming absorbed a disproportionate share.
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Studios were shuttered. Their Lord of the Rings MMO was announced in 2019,
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cancelled in 2021, revived in 2023, then quietly stopped being discussed.
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And Amazon Luna - the platform meant to tie all of this together - retreated to
11:00
the lowest-risk option… a curated subscription library. There were no
11:04
more individual purchases. No third-party storefronts. Just a controlled catalog.
11:09
Yes, Luna is evolving. Amazon will happily take your $9.99 a month for Luna Premium. You just
11:15
won’t be able to buy anything, link anything, or own anything anymore. You’ll get whatever
11:21
games Amazon decides to put in the catalog, for however long they decide to keep them there.
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Amazon thinks this is better serving the players.
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But players are smarter than that.
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After a decade and billions spent failing in gaming, Amazon rebuilt Amazon Luna into
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something with zero liability, zero ownership, and zero risk… for them.
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The risk, as usual, has been neatly transferred to you.
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Chapter 4: The Walled Garden Trap
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For a lot of Luna users, the solution to access
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your games through the third-party storefront is completely useless.
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Luna's entire pitch, the reason people chose it over a PlayStation or a gaming PC,
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was that you didn't need the hardware. An internet connection and a screen you
12:03
already owned was good enough. That was the point.
12:06
So when Amazon says don’t worry you can still play your games through the EA App,
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what they're really saying is go buy a gaming PC.
12:13
Would you be happy if your bus company cancelled your commute
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route and then politely suggested you just drive yourself to work?
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The save data situation makes it more personal. Every hour
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you sank into a game on Luna - every completed quest, every unlocked skin,
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every painstakingly leveled character - lives on Amazon's servers. After June 10th,
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you have 90 days to download it. Amazon’s support page even warns about compatibility issues. The
12:39
downloads might not work anywhere else. Your progress might just have been a souvenir.
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This is the walled garden in its purest form.
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A closed platform ecosystem designed to be convenient enough to pull you
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in and just inconvenient enough to keep you from leaving. Cloud saves
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that don't port and purchases tied to a platform.
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The library was never really yours to begin with.
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Luna isn't even the first time Amazon has played this game.
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In February 2025, Amazon quietly removed the "Download & Transfer
13:09
via USB" option from the Kindle platform.
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For years, that feature let Kindle readers download a local copy of their purchased
13:17
e-books directly to their computer. It could be used as a backup, a safety net,
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proof that the thing you bought existed somewhere other than Amazon's servers.
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That, too, was removed without ceremony and buried in a support page update most people
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never read until a few zealous individuals aggregated the news and helped it go viral.
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Amazon's official explanation was that it was a feature not many people used, and those who did
13:41
were using it to commit e-book piracy. Which is a remarkable framing, the assumption being
13:46
that if you wanted a local copy of something you paid for, you were probably a criminal.
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The backlash was significant enough that Amazon partially reversed course by early
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2026. It announced it would allow e-book downloads as EPUB files… but
14:01
only for titles where individual publishers explicitly opt out of DRM protection. Most
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major publishers won't. So the reversal is, in practice, for a small fraction of the library.
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Then, just weeks before the Luna announcement, Amazon declared that 12 Kindle device models
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would lose the ability to purchase, download, or borrow new books entirely as of May 20th,
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2026. The devices still work. They just can't access the store anymore.
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Two products, two ecosystems, and the same pattern.
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position of actual authority is going to do something about it.
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Chapter 5: The Digital Bill of Rights
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The good news is that something is shifting.
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Amazon’s deceptive terms of service, licensing agreements,
14:49
and a “buy” button that means nothing has enabled all of this. And that system is
14:53
facing the most coordinated legal and legislative challenge it has ever seen.
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It all started with a game called The Crew.
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In March 2024, Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew, a racing game released in 2014.
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The move rendered every purchased copy permanently unplayable. They could have
15:11
patched it. Released an offline mode or a refund for those who purchased the game intent on playing
15:16
the multiplayer. Instead, they reminded consumers that they’d agreed to terms allowing exactly this.
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A YouTuber named Ross Scott who runs a channel called Accursed Farms decided he’d had enough.
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He launched a movement called Stop Killing Games, a consumer rights campaign demanding that
15:32
publishers be legally required to plan for what happens to a game when they choose to abandon it.
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What they’re not asking for is eternal server support or a retro reactivation.
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A basic commitment to the players would be nice enough. If you sell someone a game,
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you must leave them a way to keep playing it after you walk away.
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What followed was the kind of grassroots momentum that corporate lawyers lose sleep over.
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The Stop Killing Games European Citizens’ initiative, which they later renamed the
16:00
Stop Destroying Videogames to avoid confusion, surpassed 1.29 million validated signatures. That
16:07
number cleared the 1 million threshold required to force the European Commission to formally respond.
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On April 16th, 2026, Ross Scott appeared before the European Parliament where his
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team presented data on approximately 1,100 games that had become permanently
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inaccessible when official support ended. They cited Concord and The Crew.
16:27
The hearing was, by every account,
16:29
extraordinary. The European Parliament expressed support for the initiative.
16:33
The European Commission’s own representative was, in the words of one organizer, “pretty positive.”
16:38
One consultant argued that games developed 20 years ago still technically function,
16:43
the implication being that there was no technical reason consumers
16:46
should be losing access to products they paid for. Only a legal one.
16:50
The momentum is now spilling beyond Brussels.
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Stop Killing Games has now launched NGOs in both the European Union and the United
16:57
States. It’s advising California lawmakers. It’s in dialogue with the UK’s Department for Culture,
17:02
Media & Sport. Ross Scott, speaking on the state of the movement in early 2026,
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felt like winning wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
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By any meaningful measure, it is the largest organized consumer
17:14
rebellion against digital licensing practices in internet history.
17:18
Back in the United States, California’s AB 2426 - now in effect - is already the legal
17:23
foundation for Lisa Reingold’s lawsuit against Amazon. If that case survives, if it goes to
17:29
trial and succeeds, it won’t just affect Prime Video movie purchases. It will set a precedent
17:34
that reshapes how every digital storefront in America labels and markets its products.
17:39
Amazon, for its part, is proceeding as planned.
17:42
There is a special kind of corporate confidence on display here. It’s the
17:46
confidence of an entity that has read its own terms of service, confirmed it says what
17:50
it needs them to say, and has determined that the law, for now at least, agrees.
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The June 10th deadline is firm; they won’t change that. The refund policy
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is firm. The save data window is also firm. But Amazon’s legal team
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may not have fully priced in the upcurrent in public sentiment.
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Once it crystallizes into legislation, that tends to move faster than corporate strategy. AB 2426
18:13
didn’t exist 2 years ago, just like the Stop Killing Games EU petition didn’t have a million
18:18
signatures 2 years ago. Ross Scott wasn’t standing in front of the European Parliament 2 years ago.
18:24
The speed of this shift is the story.
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The precise moment when enough people understood
18:29
what digital ownership actually means and decided they wouldn’t take it anymore.
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And Amazon? As of April 2026, 14,000 jobs had been eliminated, Luna’s purchase library had
18:40
been wiped, hundreds of millions of Prime subscribers had lost Riot Games perks,
18:45
and class action lawsuits were building in federal court. Yet the official messaging
18:49
stayed unchanged. These decisions are being made to “better serve” their players.
18:54
If Amazon gets away with this, then every digital storefront on the planet has its answer.
18:59
The ‘buy’ button is safe to keep. The liability will never materialize. And the consumers? Well,
19:04
they’ll keep absorbing the loss every time.
19:06
Every save, every dollar you spent on a product you believed you owned, all of it now rests
19:12
on the same legal foundation that Amazon is currently using to justify taking yours away.
19:17
We were told to grieve the loss of our physical media shelves - our libraries of discs and
19:22
cartridges - the things that truly belonged to us because we bought them, irrevocably.
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Today, there is only a license. And a trillion-dollar company in federal court,
19:32
arguing that you knew that all along.
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But loss of ownership isn’t the only way the industry has been alienating its players.
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It’s also happening in how games are being built,
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with decisions increasingly driven by efficiency over craft. Find out
19:45
the real story in ‘Ubisoft Bet On AI Slop. Now They Are RUINED’. Or watch this video.
