Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase

We knew it 10 years ago, we know it now, how is this news to anyone consuming online digital content?

We know about we been buying a license not a game.

gestures to the other 99% of gamers

Maybe the average lemmit, not the average gamer.

If there’s an offline game you love and play all the time, consider buying it again on GOG.com.

Soon, GOG and all other storefronts will state that you’re purchasing a temporary digital license for any game who’s publisher uses an EULA that states you don’t own the game. This is due to the recently signed California law that forces storefronts to be transparent about the publishers EULA.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426

That’s not GOG works. Get your offline installers.

On a legal level, it is how GOG works. They still only sell licenses. You just have the loophole that their installers and the games installed by them will work regardless.

But also with GOG you can download the installers and play offline. It’s literally one of their big selling points. It’s less convenient than things like steam, but you can do whatever the hell you want when you buy it. So in that regard, it literally is a purchase. Or as close as you can get with digital goods.

you can do whatever the hell you want when you buy it

Mmm, not quite.

And I point that out because Lemmy is a very FOSS-friendly place where that sentiment is actually true.

Depends on the game, they still sell DRM games which are limited in being able to be downloaded freely

But GoG provides it DRM free, so you can always play what you’ve downloaded til the end of time. It’s as good as piracy in that way.

At that point, why not buy the game on any platform of your choosing and just pirate it when it stops being accessible on the platform you bought it on? I understand wanting to support GOG, I “own” a lot of games on GOG as well. But it’s not really “owning” even on GOG if at some point, I could lose the ability to download the game.

Any game that isn’t available as a pirated game isn’t going to be on GOG anyway… The problem here is that GOG needs to be better than piracy in any tangible way and right now, that’s not the case. It would be the case for me if GOG Galaxy was available on Linux but it’s not, as one example.

Nah, I’m good 😂

If I back up a DRM-free installer what’s the difference?

Legally, it’s still a license, it’s just effectively impossible to revoke.

Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).

American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.

A digital “purchase” is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can’t be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.

If you back up the folder of a steam installed game that doesn’t need steam to run, what’s the difference?

Owning the copy in a legal sense doesn’t affect most of the userbase tbh.

unless you keep the offline installers.

I mean at that point you can just make backups of your steam games too. A lot work straight from the exe and for the rest there are steam simulators.

I would say, if you’ve purchased, just get a free version.

Nah fuck all that, you own the game already. You pirate it.

Also don’t forget to download the offline installers from GOG. I spent all of last week doing that

Is there a nice FOSS utility to do that? I need to do a backup of my GOG library.

I did find a few on GitHub, but the one I tried had an error after a few downloads, so I just manually got them all.

Problem there is the games I have in Steam which are Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana, and GTA 5 I was looking at and thinking about whether or not to get, are not coming up on GOG.

what’s old is new again! they tried to pull this shit back in the day but physical media was the only delivery method. now that everything is downloaded there’s a bunch of legal grey area they’re hiding in.

so the next question, is this retroactive? if so, then when will I get my money back? Licensed software is cheaper than the full MSRP I paid for titles that had physical options I could have bought at a store. this is because licensed software usually has an expiration date while physical media with software can be installed anytime after purchase.

so, Valve, one last question.

I think there’s one key thing you missed: you have never bought a copy of the game on Steam! It’s always been a license. Valve simply made the fact clear now because of legal changes.

so the next question, is this retroactive

So the answer for this is a solid no.

yeah no, this is just fixing the wording to better represent the truth that has always been.

this is because a California law recently passed requiring these kinds of purchases to inform consumers that they don’t actually own these games. valve decided it would be easier just to do this for everyone.

this has always been true for all digital games you purchased. the fact that you didn’t realize this is why the law was needed.

thanks California for being the only force fighting for consumers rights in the United States. i can see why conservatives give you so much shit. you do things that matter.