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Steam now warns customers they're only buying a license when paying for a game
(www.eurogamer.net)
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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The point is every company hides simple facts like this in the TOS that no one reads. You know you are one of the handful of people that have bothered reading more than 5 words of it.
We regularly see the average person surprised when companies shutdown or change structures and their digital "purchases" become no longer accessible because they only own a license to something that will no longer exist and there are little to no protections for digital purchases being revoked because most laws are archaic and based on a physical product, even referencing digital items but not taking the nature of that into account.
Remember just a couple years ago when Sony was shutting down a PlayStation Store movie service and those movies were removed from customer libraries? This wasn't a subscription service with changing library like Netflix, but specific movie purchases advertised as if it would be the same purchase as getting a physical product but digital, and from a large corporation that no one would reasonably expect to suddenly shutdown.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23199861/playstation-store-film-tv-show-removed-austria-germany-studiocanal
Where i live there are laws about what can be written in the tos, what cant and what is irrelevant to the tos (invalid statements).
However everyone with more than a wallnut brain knows that you don't own the game physically and that you basically get a license to download it with your account, steam isn't responsible for the game itself (servers being shut down) you can in 99,99% of cases still download the game from steam even without key servers or the servers necessary for the games online mode, steam distributes from their own servers.
And yet we regularly see that is exactly what the average person is. That's what the laws have to be based around, not those that are educated about a subject.
The average person doesn't understand licensing as a concept. They buy a movie on DVD, they buy a movie on Amazon streaming. It's the same term and the same thing to them, but with vastly different restrictions. One you don't even own the product at all. If Amazon decides to shut the service down, you're Shit out of Luck. Even though you paid to buy the movie just like if you got it on a disc.
Our laws differentiate that difference in ownership because the corporations want that to be specifically mentioned to protect their interests, but they usually don't require storefronts to tell consumers that the purchase button doesn't mean you own the product you're paying for. You just are able to use it as long as the company wants to let you, with little to no recourse if they change their mind for any reason.
You're defending this fucked up system whether you intend to or not. You are basically blaming the consumer for not knowing that paying for something one way means they own it, and paying for it a different way means they don't and it can be taken away at any time.
Nah im not defending anything, im saying that thats how it works and everyone that doesn't meme a IRL NPC knows and understands that. I also don't get why its about steam, every store is like that, but not because the store wants that, its the publishers, and they are the ones locking stuff. You could definitely sue them as they cant just shut down a service you paid for, but good luck with that.
RATTLE OFF-
Even with the physical disk or movie on DVD you only own a license.
Except the store can't take it back from you if they decide to close up shop. So it inherently is a different product purchase, and should be required to be disclosed as such.
Except that only applies to the physical bytes on your disk. If the publisher can legally revoke your license to use that installer they can do so whether you are able to violate that law or not.