Time-limited licensing is the norm and has been for a very long time. Perpetual licenses are very difficult to negotiate in a way that's fair to anyone. From t

Time-limited licensing is the norm and has been for a very long time. Perpetual licenses are very difficult to negotiate in a way that's fair to anyone. From the copyright owner's perspective, the value of your work typically increases over time. You don't know by how much, but you do know that the only way to extract that potential value is to ensure you have something to coerce[0] your licensees back to another negotiation. Making licenses expire is an easy and obvious way to do this. Selling 'no-strings-attached' perpetual licenses is an extremely bad deal for you. Think about it like buying DVD boxsets (remember those?) vs. a Netflix subscription. If you buy the boxsets, that's it, you never have to pay for that show again[1]. If you subscribe to Netflix, you own nothing, meaning not only you have to keep paying for access to that show, but also that Netflix can jack up your rates and you'll pay them to retain access to the shows. Even if a perpetual license is made available, it might not be something the licensee actually wants. The above was written from the perspective of a successful artist, but there's a flipside: works that lose value and decay in cultural relevance. The vast majority of cultural works decay like this. As much as I'm bullish on games preservation, games are especially bad at retaining cultural value, because, among other reasons, we burn down the world every 5-7 years with new console generations. A lot of games developers - or at least their bosses - are perfectly happy buying a cheap 5- or 10-year license and then just... throwing their work down the memory hole when it expires. The amount of people still buying Spec Ops: The Line in 2024 is so low that the music license would eat up all the profits and the publisher would be in the red renewing it. Yeah, keep in mind too: all of these licenses are going to have minimum guarantees. When you license a copyrighted work, you're expected to pay a lot of money up front[2], purely for the privilege of having made that deal. Yes, you could pay a certain percentage of Steam sales, but this is almost always in addition to payment up front. First off, copyright owners don't like working with under-capitalized entities[3]; second, promises of future revenue are easily manipulated in ways that money showing up in your bank account isn't. The licensee has to open up their books and you have to trust that they aren't under-reporting copies sold. [0] In the gun-to-head sense. When you use copyright to extract supra-competitive (read: any) profit from licensees, you're using a little bit of the government's sovereign power. [1] Higher quality releases excepted [2] Anime licensing calls this a "minimum guarantee", I don't know if that's a common term in other creative industries. [3] The reasons for this are a complicated mess of elitism and business reality. Remember: the value of a copyrighted work is entirely in your ability to create demand for that work and restrict its supply. Licensing to anyone and everyone is contrary to this. Hell, game preservation as a whole is contrary to this.