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

Before Steam you bought a physical disc and it didn’t matter that you technically only purchased a license, the disc was yours and nobody was coming to your house to take it away if the publisher started fighting with the developer or whatever.

True, with some modifications:

Some games had online activation built in. Some games would simply not install on a second or third machine without getting permission from the publisher.

Regular CDs have a lifespan of 5-10 years, shorter if not stored ideally. Almost all games had sophisticated mechanisms to prevent backups being taken.

Even if you could take a backup, record associations and publishers lobbied to make it illegal and punishable by severe fines in many countries.

Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software. EA shipped CDs with autoexexuting software that would actually delete CloneCD and other CD copying software and prevent new installes from working. My copy of Sims 2 came with that bullshit and OH MAN I was not happy about it.

Some games would simply not install on a second or third machine without getting permission from the publisher.

I remember binning DDR2 RAM on a test bench back in the day and Windows deactivated itself after about a dozen times lol

I’ve got CDs I’ve had for 25+ years and they’re still fine

Yeah good ones allegedly last 200 years if stored correctly. Cheap ones are 5-10. 20 can be expected for quality CDs stored correctly.

But no matter the claimed quality, it’s a gamble. Our local library had a lot of 10-20 year old CDs that had developed microbubbles.

5 years is low range for CDs, but common enough that you should be taking backups for anything you keep longer.

Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.

Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.

The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.

The modern equivalent would be to make cold backups of your steam stuff.

Before Steam (esp. right before Steam) it was common for a disc to have nothing but a 100mb installer that attempted to download the game, or an actual game build so buggy that you were forced to download patches that required you to be online.

Prior to this, games came with serial numbers and needed to be activated online. This made reselling PC games no longer a thing as you needed to trust who you were buying the game from.

In both cases, the physical disc was yours, but it was pretty useless. It wasn’t the game, but also was required to play the game.

Before that, we had truly resellable DRM: “Enter the 3rd word on the 20th page of the manual 🤣”.

No, dialup was still common in the early days of Steam, game content was not largely being delivered as downloads yet and discs were still useful because it could not yet be taken for grated that a customer would be always online.

But I’d still rather download a game straight from the developer or publisher without an additional middleman. Privacy aside, the cost of that rent seeking from Steam gets passed along to you.

I vaguely remember having on the order of 5mbps “broadband” when Steam worn me down enough for me to give it a shot over the alternatives 🙄. It was pretty bad at first, but it worked. But maybe broadband adoption was more of a thing in Canada back then.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nah, I’m good 😂

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

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.

I’m pretty sure this is in response to a recent California bill that forces digital storefronts to disclose if it is a license you are getting. Otherwise the storefront is not allowed to use words like “buy” or “purchase”.

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

10/10 law can we please get this in Canada too?

At least for steam it looks like it might be rolled out worldwide

Better yet, can we just get a law that makes it so when we buy something we own it?

I mean that’s what the California law is.

If you buy it you own it, but we aren’t buying the games.

A law that says they have to let us buy it instead of license it would be nice though.

“EA, play the license”.

We all know here that you don’t own anything on Steam or any other client with DRM. Duh…

B this shit should be illegal, I buy a product, game, license whatever you call it, it is mine. This farce of consumer protection… "do you understand the words coming out of my mouth!?..License!!'. Yeah we do, let us own our purchased games.