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Valve reminds Steam users they don't actually own a darn thing they buy (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/pcgaming

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I guess it's just a matter of time before you subscribe to games, and you lose access when you stop paying.

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] rtxn 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

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.