I guess it’s just a matter of time before you subscribe to games, and you lose access when you stop paying.
I love how everyone is whaling on steam, the one honest good product that does digital sales, instead of the stupid streaming and online movie sites which this was targeted at.
I guess they were the only ones to make a significant visual change?
No good deed goes unpunished.
No, they’re just the only ones doing it pre-emptively:
This disclaimer appears as though it’s likely related to a California law set to come into effect next year
Probably because they know no one really cares.
I don’t think anyone is “whaling on Steam”. You can like Steam and also point out that they’re complicit in the “you will own nothing and like it” society.
How many times is this shocking revelation going to be made? I’ve seen the same damn article regurgitated four times today and over a dozen times over the week. It’s getting as annoying as the “I use arch btw” and “how do I quit vim” memes in the unixsphere.
Nothing of importance has even changed! The only difference is that a California law is forcing storefronts to use different nomenclature. The “you’re actually paying for a license” thing has been public knowledge for pissing years.
We get it.
Welcome to Lemmy :-) Not much different from Reddit, eh?
It’s full of… ugh… redditors.
The “you’re actually paying for a license” thing has been public knowledge for pissing years.
It’s only public knowledge to educated consumers.
Outrage bait is obnoxious. Your kids aren’t going to be playing that one game you played 50 years ago. If they want to play it I’m sure there’s internet archive or they could pick it up for like $1
internet archive is literally right now under attack by hostile actors, which by all logic must be capitalists or governments who want to destroy the public library in favor of a paid and/or censored one.
we shouldnt trust that it will still exist in a few years the way the world is moving.
which by all logic must be capitalists or governments who want to destroy the public library in favor of a paid and/or censored one.
Confidently incorrect.
I like how you say that without citing any sources. You can be right, but there’s no reason you’re speculation is any better than someone else’s.
https://gizmodo.com/hacktivists-claim-responsibility-for-taking-down-the-internet-archive-2000510339
I like how you didn’t even spend 10 seconds to look up if there was information about the perpetrator of the Internet Archive hack.
There you go, good job. In the future, do that the first time.
In the future look it up yourself you lazy bum
You are wrong about “nothing of importance has changed”.
I can take a pc game I bought on a disc and still play it. It’s mine. Even if the company stops developing the game, I can play it. It’s on my disc, not in the cloud where I have no control over it.
You don’t realize this if you grew up with everything being digital in the cloud. Then it’s normal for you to not have any control over what happens to the content. But I’m telling you, it was different before and something of value has been lost now.
Now, game makers are adding patches that change anything about the game too. You can’t play if you don’t accept the patch.
A lot of freedom is lost today and I think you should realize that the convenience of the cloud has a cost, and that cost is less/no control over what you once paid for.
We should all avoid subscriptions and rentals like a plague, despite its convenience. It’s costing us more and makes us dependent on the companies.
Good job completely missing my point.
I was talking about the actual event that happened in the recent past and what all of these lazy copy-remix-paste articles are parroting. Let me break it down for you.
- Steam was selling licenses a month ago.
- California passed the law in question at some point.
- Steam is selling licenses now but with a different label.
Do you see how fuck all has changed in that period? You are getting the same deal, but journalists need the sensationalism, so they’re retelling the same known facts (known since the controversy decades ago where some famous person wrote into his will that his daughter should inherit his iTunes library and Apple said no) about the revocable licenses as if they had just discovered them.
I’m fully aware of the consequences of digital-only distribution. I have stacks of PC game discs, and have dedicated a large part of my NAS to storing game installers. Do not talk down to me like I’m an idiot.
Yet you are trying to talk down to me. Sometimes the mirror is a great tool for learning about your own flaws, and it seems you read a lot more into what I wrote than was actually there.
Anyway, I don’t really care. :) Plenty or angry people on Lemmy and I guess you have your reasons.
You can take most of the game binaries out of steam as a backup, only few require steam to run in order to make DRM protection happy.
Additionally, you do not own the game on the disk, you have the license to use it privately, like you have with games bought at steam.
So the only difference is, that you are dependent on steam to keep them server running in order for you to download and reinstall a game, if you failed to back it up, prior loss.
Different are the games that require a server running in order to work, but this is not valve’s fault, but the owner of the game. I think the owner of such games should be forced to either keep the server running, or release the binary or the source in order for people to host their own server.
GoG lets you own the game.
If you subscribe to the Pirate Bay, there is no expiration date.
the pirate bay. lol. really incredible it still exists
I have heard that some of the newer sites have much better search engines and UIs, or maybe you can even get search built into your software. So perhaps it’s more of a fallback site these years.
It’s very much a last resort for me.
We’ve never owned the games themselves, only a license to use them (at best). Even the physical media of an older game was legally speaking a physical licence. Ownership rights in gaming started off minimal and got worse over the decades.
What happens to a steam account when someone dies? Its not like Steam does a lookup against a deaths register.
If the password is handed on, is the account auto deleted after 120 years?
If someone dies at 20 does the account live on for another 100 years?
I get the legality aspect, but how is this handled in practice?
Wait until people hear about Microsoft’s license…
So my Steam library, 500 plus games are worth shit. I actually knew this buying digital…still this practise should be very illegal.
How the heck are you just now realizing this? It’s literally always been like that. Anything digital you “buy” has always been just a license. From music on iPods, Windows, and Office to Games. It’s always been that way. Is it kind of annoying and dirty? Absolutely. But I don’t understand how people are acting surprised about this.
I guess you skipped over the…
I actually knew this buying digital.
…part.
Selling digital licenses should be illegal? That’d kill any hope of indie games turning a profit.
Indie developers should sell licenses instead of games because otherwise they would not make a profit. Maybe you could explain the logic…
And here I am literally not caring. This is software, it will become outdated eventually and unable to be run at all.
Nothin is forever. So i guess you do not need to own anything.
Good for GoG seeling a peoduct you iwn.
I am fine using steam until they eventuakly change leadership and go down the tubes as the last 20 years have been the best computer gaming experience with convenient updates and support for games of any age, community connections for playing with friends, and easy access to a massive number of AAA titles on steep discoubts, independent games, and lots of little fun free games like Pineapple on Pizza.
Yes, I know I don’t own the games in the literal sense. But the convenience and lowered prices have been worth the money in the long run.
Gog also sells you a revokable license. From the legal side they’re identical, from a practical side they save you one step.
GoG may make some market share up with the new CA law. We’ll see. Some competition would be nice.
Won’t fix any of the always online games being bricked when the servers go offline, but still would be nice
I remember a couple years back when gamers thought Nintendo and Steam were the best and most ethical
