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Steam now tells gamers up front that they're buying a license, not a game (www.engadget.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Dude, you just cannonballed into the Achualy pool. You know that's not what we're all talking about.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.