toroca: BreOl72: Three years is indeed a long time, but stuff happens.

For example, almost a year and a half ago, I bought Divine Divinity and Wing Commander 3, 4, and 5 when they were on sale for very low prices.

I didn't get around to trying Divine Divinity until late last year, and I still haven't installed any of the Wing Commander games.

But I don't have to worry about losing access to any them like I might if they were tied to expiring keys...

amok: It’s not a double standard, it depends on the publishers of the games. Humble doesn’t generate the keys, they receive them from publishers. If a publisher provides them with batches of 50 keys, then once the game is delisted and they run out of those keys, that’s it. If the publisher had instead given them a batch of 1,000 keys, they can continue distributing them until the batch is depleted.

However, digital stores cannot sell new copies of games on their own. Online digital stores act as middlemen, facilitating sales between publishers and buyers. If a publisher decides to stop selling a game, the store must immediately comply. The store’s role is to process the transaction, take a percentage cut of each sale, and send the rest of the revenue to the publisher.

This is different from a physical store, where the retailer buys copies of the game directly from the publisher and then sells them to buyers at a markup. In that case, the interaction between the store and the publisher ends at the point of purchase, after that, it’s entirely up to the store what to do with the remaining stock.

(this is also why a physical store can sell at sales however they want, but a DD store can only have sales in agreement with the publishers)