Steam now tells gamers up front that they're buying a license, not a game
Steam now tells gamers up front that they're buying a license, not a game
Steam appears to have started posting a notice in its shopping cart that purchases on its storefront are only for a license and not a game.
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Is it a blanket statement for every purchase regardless of what game it is?
If so, that's completely useless.It informs customers, that licensing a game on Steam is not like buying a pair of pants on
pantsshop24.org. That's what it's meant to do.I thought it would only apply to certain games. I feel like it's just normalizing it rather than really being educational. Now companies can go fullboar with games only being a license and just point to the disclaimer as an excuse.
You only buy a license to watch/listen media private in most cases. Even if yo buy a DRM free copy of a film/track/game, you only have a license to consume it private. If you want to show (or share) with public, you need another (way more expensive) license to do that legally.
The only difference is, when you only stream the media or there is DRM on the files, it is not possible to archive it easily and the danger of lost media is far greater.
Dude, you just cannonballed into the Achualy pool. You know that's not what we're all talking about.
Well, in this case, it is actually Valve that does the licensing. I don't think the original companies have much to do with it, other than maybe being more willing to sell through Steam than e.g. GOG or itch.io.
But all in all, yes, it would be a much more useful law, if it declared such a licensing model void.
I'm guessing, they didn't tackle that problem, because there are more legitimate uses of a licensing model, like World of Warcraft only giving you access while you're paying the monthly fee.Nothing unsolvable, but you need some solid laws and it'd be a lot less likely that you'd get support from enough political parties to carry this into actual law.
Just like popups about cookies!
Those are like a real life Navi from Zelda.
"Hey! Link!" one every site is annoying.
That crap really needs to be a browser setting.
Not really. If you buy the game on gog, you own it.
GOG themselves literally said that you do not, even very recently. You own a license like every other customer, and it can be revoked at their discretion.
GOG choose to exclusively sell games for which they can sell DRM-free versions, which is a great option for consumers. It is not a straightforward decision however as this is, whether it is a priority or not, a tradeoff for the things that Steam integration provides - cloud backup, mod workshops, multiplayer functionality etc.
Steam also sells plenty of DRM-free games, and offer customers the informed choice when selling Steam DRM and Third-Party DRM controlled game licenses.
This is not an argument that Steam or GOG are objectively better. But it is a straightforward lie to state that the license you buy from GOG is legally different from the one you buy from Steam. What is different is the possibility or otherwise of DRM software being used to control your adherence to the license.
You're like one of three people on Lemmy that understands this. I always get piled on whenever I bring it up.
It is usually also followed by "but I can download my installers and then I can have them whenever I like" as if it's a sane idea to store terabytes of offline installers for the day that GOG goes out of business.
I mean, I also have terabytes of offline installers for the day that Steam or GOG go down. On other people's computers. In a, uh, distributed distribution system.