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Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced.

1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.





Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.

In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it.

https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...


It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.

But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.

They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.

Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.

Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).



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