News Steam checkout banner clarifies you don’t own the game you buy — GOG takes a jab at Steam, saying it gives users offline installers that cannot be...

[Admin]

Steam clarifies that you only buy a license when purchasing a game on its platform.

Steam checkout banner clarifies you don’t own the game you buy — GOG takes a jab at Steam, saying it gives users offline installers that cannot be... : Read more

 

[ezst036]

Not a surprise. Software licensing has always been just licensing, not ownership.

And actual ownership ended when cartridges and CDROMS/DVD went away due to lack of customer demand. Even in those days it wasn't quite full ownership but it was a little more substantial.

This was a choice gamers themselves made. If they want to lay blame somewhere, I'm sure their houses have mirrors in them somewhere.

 

[coolitic]

Not a surprise. Software licensing has always been just licensing, not ownership.

And actual ownership ended when cartridges and CDROMS/DVD went away due to lack of customer demand. Even in those days it wasn't quite full ownership but it was a little more substantial.

This was a choice gamers themselves made. If they want to lay blame somewhere, I'm sure their houses have mirrors in them somewhere.

I'm pretty sure even "physical-copies" of games were also just licenses. And it's also the same w/ GOG, in the sense that you have a license to *play* the game, and not, for example, own the art-assets inside.

 

[Sluggotg]

GOG is my favorite! The vast majority of my digital game purchases are through them. Make sure to download the local installers. Make back ups and boom, you have your games safe and sound.

If some game developer pulled a game off Steam that I had purchased, I would expect a full refund. I would also NEVER buy another game from that developer.

 

[FunSurfer]

In the PC Gamer site they wrote about this subject: "You can't bequeath your Steam library to anyone upon your unfortunate passing either, which of course you would be able to if you really owned its contents."
But you can bequeath your Steam account password.

 

[AkroZ]

In the PC Gamer site they wrote about this subject: "You can't bequeath your Steam library to anyone upon your unfortunate passing either, which of course you would be able to if you really owned its contents."
But you can bequeath your Steam account password.

The law of most Member States of the European Union expressly or implicitly recognises that digital assets are part of a person's estate and can be inherited by their beneficiaries.

 

[Jito463]

If a developer takes a title you bought via Steam off the platform, the game will also be removed from your library.

That's not really accurate. Back when EA was distancing themselves from Steam, they pulled Dragon Age II from the store, but it remained in my account. There may be specific instances of that happening, but it's definitely not in all cases.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Could be worse, remember the days before Steam when some DRM methods literally took away your ability to play a physically purchased game without recourse if you had to reinstall it a couple of times, such as after a HD failure, without deactivating it first? My Command & Conquer 3 disks became frisbees because of that. Or what about games that were rendered unplayable (without somewhat "illegal" means) because the physical disk was damaged even if all the disk was used for was DRM purposes?

 

[redgarl]

I will from now on buy my games on GOG if they are available there.

You cannot just remove the access right of your customers just like that for any reasons.

Even if it is a license, you should have the right to sell that license to whomever. There should be no difference between a physical copy and the digital one that you are purchasing.

 

[DavidLejdar]

And I never really gave Valve money, just a license to use it, until I want it back, in form of Nvidia stock, at a price of the time I borrowed Valve this or that amount of money. Harhar

If anyone knows of a single instance of a game being retroactively removed from customers' digital libraries that wasn't an online-only game that no longer worked anyway (i.e. The Crew), I would be very interested to learn of it.

A few instances actually. It revolved around publisher having sold Steam-generated keys offsite, a batch-purchase having allegedly happened with stolen CC (to then be sold on a reseller site), and publisher revoking these keys in particular (as in the game not being in user's library anymore).

But yeah, when a game gets removed from the store, it generally doesn't get removed from the library. I have a few of these delisted games still in my library, i.e. Poker Night at the Inventory, 8-Bit Bayonetta, Spec Ops: The Line and DiRT 3 and 4.

 

[luckzeh]

If a developer takes a title you bought via Steam off the platform, the game will also be removed from your library.

Much like you're an authority on tech and video games, I'm an authority on dinosaurs now:
Dinosaurs are green. When a dinosaur dies, it turns into bones. Dinosaurs don't usually speak the same language as me.

I mean, do you just not fact-check anything, or is this hallucinated up by some GPT to begin with? The structure of those two paragraphs (Steam does this, GOG does that) looks very GPT-ish.

As far as I'm aware, developers cannot ever electively remove games from a user's library after they have been bought. See the Steamworks documentation. Once you buy it, you own the license perpetually. <....> If anyone knows of a single instance of a game being retroactively removed from customers' digital libraries that wasn't an online-only game that no longer worked anyway (i.e. The Crew), I would be very interested to learn of it.

Technically there are several possible ways that developers can render a game any of: unplayable, inaccessible, undownloadable, unowned. But they're all so far-out that it happens with <1% of game removals.
Since you asked for details:
- Obviously, a developer can shut down online servers (and update the game to state this, or leave it abandoned & failing to connect). This of course happens frequently as products are abandoned.
- A developer can update their game to replace the game files with nothing (but someone who "owns" the game can still use advanced tools to download an older build). I would hazard a guess that this is the most common way of defacing your own title, along with deleting the contents of the store page before taking it down. Sometimes developers are ashamed of a product from years back and want their name erased from it, that kind of thinking.
- A developer can remove the game files from the license entirely, and then the user can't download anything at all anymore. This is the most bothersome type of expropriation, but also incredibly rare.
- A developer can revoke all Steam keys they handed out, even years after the fact. From time to time, they do this entirely by mistake, but fortunately lately Valve has been willing to restore these to affected users: most recently, "City of Beats" accidentally killed legitimately sold keys, and the game was restored to users in a matter of hours.
- A developer can ask Steam to forcefully refund all store purchases (potentially for a specific time range or a region) – which is again very rare, but does happen in practice when big publishers accidentally make a long-delisted game available for purchase again, or when a moderately sized company accidentally sells their product for next to nothing and wakes up with regret the next morning. Of course, if you do get your money back you're not technically getting robbed of anything.
- Sometimes, an AAA publisher gets to turn your game into something else – for example, the original Grand Theft Auto IV and its stand-alone expansion GTA Episodes From Liberty City used to be two different Steam games that used Games For Windows Live, and when Rockstar relaunched the game as Grand Theft Auto IV: The Complete Edition they removed those two games from users' libraries entirely and instead gave them the new version. As common with GTA re-releases, this also lead to the loss of a big chunk of the game's soundtrack, though of course that can be modded back in – dunno how legal it is to do so.

 

[Dr3ams]

I have dozens of original game CDs and DVDs and I wish companies still sold them. I still buy physical copies of music and movies though.

 

[waltc3]

The problem with the way the Valve comments are being interpreted is pretty basic. Yes, we are licensed to run the games we buy from Steam, however, the license itself authorizes you to a local copy of the software to run in your system. Additionally, copyright law allows for an archival copy of your games. (Which Gog provides in its standalone installable copies.)

These game copies are ours until such time as the license grantee (not Valve, as Valve does not own the games it sells, obviously) decides he wants to cancel our license to the games we've bought. This would require court action, and most likely the license grantee would have to refund our money as the action would damage us financially, and would be easy to show. So, it's easy to see this will never happen... Remember that when you buy a game copy it is not and never will be a rental, unless you are informed of it being a rental at the time of the sale.

None of us owns the content, of course, as the license grants us only the copy needed to play the game, and usually to mod our copy (except in special circumstances like Game Pass, I discovered back when I tried it briefly.) It's basically been much ado about nothing, as I can't see that anything has changed.

 

[unis_torvalds]

but the game developer retains the right to control and do as they please with the game.

The game publisher retains the right. Most developers lose control of their IP when they enter a publishing agreement.

 

[woot]

In the PC Gamer site they wrote about this subject: "You can't bequeath your Steam library to anyone upon your unfortunate passing either, which of course you would be able to if you really owned its contents."
But you can bequeath your Steam account password.

If you want bequeath your steam account to someone, then you would have to also give them the email account that's associated with the steam account, since steam will request a verification code if logged into from a different ip address.

 

[Blessedman]

Truthfully there is where the government should actually be involved in. While I agree that you don't actually own the game, the game isn't tangible like the Mona Lisa. However, I believe it should be forced (and I don't honestly care about the piracy concerns, they can figure that out) upon EPIC, Steam, EA, other distribution apps/sites that they must allow an install version be available for download.

 

[petePESTILENCE]

Funny how the articles fails to mention that alot of the time for GOG to provide its offline installers they are required to strip the online component meaning that you are buying half a product and effectively being ripped off.
Remember people, you don't dislike journalists as much as you should.

 

[luckzeh]

Good points. Regarding points 2 and 3, I'd think that developers deliberately vandalizing their game would be considered abuse of the system and would likely be walked back by Valve and/or result in refunds issued, but you're right that it could technically happen.

Perhaps take this as hyperbole:
Steam is ran by a skeleton crew that couldn't care less about someone replacing their game with an empty folder. They got their $100 to list the game and their 30% of each purchase, and as long as it's not a violation of their latest pet peeve (atm: outside links on store pages and gifs urging players to wishlist a game) it's unlikely for anything to happen.

Valve essentially only react to individual developers going crazy if there's at least some media coverage of it, say a PCGamer and a Kotaku article.

 

[Friedec]

If buying is not owning, then pirating is not stealing.
How to steal something that you can't own?
In an international world, no one gave a d4mn about laws and license.

 

[stuff and nonesense]

One game I had was on (for sake of argument) Epic, the responsibility for maintaining the updates, user access the ability to sell the game was transferred to Steam. I didn’t have a Steam account at that time. I lost the ability to play the game as the login was through Epic.

The publisher will argue that they made provision by arranging for existing licenses to be accessible through Steam.
My contract was with Epic not Steam.

Not blaming Epic or Steam here, the loss of access to that game was a publisher’s choice.

 

[AchakBrooks]

Not a surprise. Software licensing has always been just licensing, not ownership.

And actual ownership ended when cartridges and CDROMS/DVD went away due to lack of customer demand. Even in those days it wasn't quite full ownership but it was a little more substantial.

This was a choice gamers themselves made. If they want to lay blame somewhere, I'm sure their houses have mirrors in them somewhere.

Yeah, but I would definitely not blame the consumer.

Corporation's intentionally did their best to implement practices that hit the core function of what the non-tangible (licenced aspect of the tangible they sold) was sold for. ie leisure/leasure/stress removal.

They initially used bait-and-switch tactics by removing annoyances they intentionally built into licensed products that required tangible distribution in favor of a system that bypasses the laws and restrictions tied to selling their licenses through physical items they had a responsibility to maintain.

Lack of demand happened because the obfuscation of education on the rights we have between tangible and non-tangible goods, and the act I mentioned above.

Having a physical item made the practicality of another entity(the corporation, in the future) overstepping and disrupting the core consumer intent less possible.

One of their major objectives in eliminating tangible distribution was to avoid the significant "risk and return" associated with investing in tangible delivery methods and the time needed to effectively implement planned obsolescence.

Introducing a law that simply states "consumers only own the conditions of a license" achieves little to nothing. The correct narrative and education still haven’t reached the majority's awareness.

It’s important to establish laws that hold corporations selling non-tangible goods to the same standards (or higher) as those selling tangible goods, with an understanding of why the previous approach made the licensing system more socially acceptable.

When blockchain first emerged, it was envisioned as a public ledger—a tool for organizing, tracking, and addressing licensing issues in secondary and tertiary markets. Similar to tangible distribution, it allowed secondary holders to resell items when they no longer needed what they licensed. Close to the social contract we bought into allowing for licensing system to be valid.

Corporations did everything they could to corrupt the disruptive potential of the new distribution system, turning it into a "pump and dump" scheme. They successfully shifted public perception away from addressing the very issues that could challenge their current and very profitable methods of engagement.

It frustrates me to see how well-meaning people swallowed the bait, letting this negative narrative dominate their rejection of what corporations fed them—without redirecting the conversation back to the problems that a system or the structure I am describing could help solve(benefit us).

I don’t think blockchain is the solution, but the narrative it was supposed to create regarding the distribution of licensing rights—past and future—had the potential to help consumers. It could have addressed the legal concerns of rights holders through a more robust regulatory system with public records, enabling scrutiny and active public involvement. This could help elect officials and guide policies toward socially equitable changes in these types of exchanges.

Sorry, this just bothers me. Working in this field, where I make the majority of my living from non-tangible goods, I see narratives and policies that seem to contradict the passion I have for this industry (art). I believe it doesn’t have to be this way if there is proper regulation and a more informed social narrative about these mediums and businesses is/are .