GTA VI and the 'impermanent lightness' of streaming: Forbes on the end of owning games
An essay that ends on GTA VI
On August 31, Forbes contributor Emil Steiner published a long essay whose title borrows from Milan Kundera — "The Impermanent Lightness Of Streaming, From Amazon To GTA 6" — using GTA VI as the closing example of a wider cultural shift: media have never been easier to carry and never been harder to keep (Forbes). It is an opinion and media-analysis piece rather than game news, but its punchline lands directly on Rockstar's title: "A digital copy of GTA VI cannot sell out when it arrives November 19."
From Columbia House to the ephemeral library
Steiner opens with the apparent closure of Columbia House, the mail-order music club that sold generations of Americans "12 CDs for a penny." After 71 years, the company reportedly stopped taking new orders on September 15 — a disappearance that fuels nostalgia for a time when a record, once received, "was mine": playable, lendable, sellable, even giftable. Streaming broke that bargain. The discs Columbia House shipped could be scratched, copied onto a mixtape or handed down; a Spotify playlist can vanish with a licensing deal (Forbes).
When "buy" means "license"
The essay then catalogues the legal fallout of the access economy. Netflix removes licensed titles without notice: on September 1, US subscribers lose dozens of films, from the original Rocky movies and the Creed trilogy to The Big Lebowski, The Breakfast Club, Schindler's List and Little Miss Sunshine (Forbes). In 2009, Amazon deleted purchased copies of George Orwell's 1984 from customers' Kindles after a rights dispute — a "mass, remote erasure of literature," as Steiner puts it. California now has a law, in force since 2025, that generally bars sellers of revocable digital goods from using the word "buy" without disclosing that customers are receiving a license. Amazon is fighting class-action litigation over exactly that distinction (Forbes).
Video games make the problem impossible to ignore
The sharpest section concerns games, because a purchased object can become entirely unusable. Steiner cites the shutdown of Ubisoft's The Crew in 2024: players sued, and Ubisoft agreed to a proposed $2 million settlement, with a final approval hearing scheduled for November 13 (Forbes). He also relays the European citizens' initiative "Stop Destroying Videogames," which gathered 1,294,188 verified signatures — enough to force a response from the European Commission, which declined in June to require abandoned games to remain playable but plans an industry "code of conduct" for end-of-life management. Even the physical format has become symbolic: on Switch 2, "Game-Key Cards" are thumbnail-sized chips that only unlock a download, not the game itself (Forbes).
Why it matters for GTA VI
The connection is not incidental. GTA VI launches November 19 in a landscape where "buying" a game increasingly means renting a license: no resale value, preservation dependent on servers and licensing contracts. Rockstar's boxed edition ships with a download code rather than a disc — so even the "physical" copy lives or dies with the platform. As Steiner writes, the impermanence of streaming is not digital in nature: it is architectural and economic, the result of designing culture around continuing access rather than possession (Forbes).
The takeaway
For players, the essay is a reminder that the most anticipated game of the decade arrives at the exact moment the industry is redefining what "owning" a game means. GTA VI cannot sell out — but in the streaming age, it may not need to. It only needs to stay available.