If I buy a paperback book or a drm free ebook, that's a purchase.
If I pay for a drm movie or kindle book, that's a long-term rental.
The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt. Both seem unlikely. This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC.
I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The majority of users may never experience this, but the fact is that when you use a service like this you're at the mercy of the service provider, even for basic things like maintaining access to your account.
What I'd like to see is some sort of movement towards "if it looks like a purchase, then it is a purchase". That is, if I pay a one-time up-front free for access to something (even with DRM), we should pass legislation to make it behave like a purchase and limit the shenanigans that providers can pull. (Granted this is a very ill-formed idea and there are lots of details to work out in order to implement it.)
For any other reasons most banks/credit card companies put limits between 30 days and a year I believe.
The worst part about this is that it often happens when consumers exercise their legitimate rights to e.g. chargebacks. And yes, Steam does it too: if you chargeback a Steam purchase, even a fraudulent one where the CC company sides with you after the investigation, usually this will result in your account getting locked and held hostage until you undo the chargeback and eat the cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc... (binding arbitration overrides state law)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/business/supreme-court-up... (binding arbitration overrides workers' rights)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/supreme-court-backs-... (binding aribtration applies even in cases of fraud and deceptive advertising)
Unfortunately they have been successfully tested often in many legal systems.
Actually no you can't (at least if you're in the US), because the Steam user agreement mandates binding arbitration: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11, where, for all practical purposes, the consumer always loses.
> Nothing gives me the right to just break my part of the contract and take my money back.
The whole point of chargebacks is that they're supposed to give you that right, if the CC company decides that the vendor wronged you. Valve's behavior here is an unethical and unilateral end-run around this process.
The real problem is that a Steam "purchase" are fundamentally an undefined-term rental. When you "buy" a gsame, you are buying nothing, and then Steam might let you access a game if they wants you to.
Admittedly, I don't know that much about the contracts between CC providers and merchants, but in the big picture of things, CC providers are the giants and Valve is the little guy, so I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't have a lot of leverage in those negotiations. Otherwise, presumably the CC provider would be unable to initiate the chargeback in the first place. The fact that the chargeback itself is successful (Valve's retaliation notwithstanding) is evidence that the contract between CC provider and Valve allows chargebacks.
In this particular case, what this probably means is that CC providers need to include a "no retaliation" clause in their contracts for customers who issue legitimate chargebacks. That's assuming CC providers care, and maybe they don't, but point is they have the power to fix this and if it becomes a problem for their customers presumably they will.
But I don't think any of this solves the broader issue though. In general I don't think you can depend on having a powerful authority like a CC provider side with you like this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urS8GmwmeWQ
[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qwvz5/how-cherry...
That kind of what they are doing. You can still play pretty much anything that doesn't run on VAC-secured servers. There are consequences on the steam community as well, though. The most significant are probably your profile being branded and restrictions on item trade/using the market.
It's kind of like saying "imagine being arrested for being naked in public omg I do that all the time ... at home". It's different degrees of freedom.
There is also GOG, which sells DRM-free games. I just keep backups of my games on my NAS.
Not entirely, since there's still some dependency on their client to put the game in 'offline mode', which requires phoning home to Valve.
A better example would be gog.com, which gives you the game binary/installer to download and no requirements for phoning home or any other shenanigans for being able to install/play it.
Nothing clarifies the difference between purchase and rental when you try booting Steam up on a laptop for a 12 hour bus ride across Mexico and you can't play a single game.
You just have this "meh, hasn't affected me" mindset.
I do agree with your point that this is a bad thing in the first place.
Or that somebody phishes your login data or that your account is banned for some reason or that the drm servers for a game you bought are now offline (you still have the installer, but can't use it anymore)... . I also like steam, but it is still very much "all eggs in one basket" and while some of the games on there are drm-free many aren't. gog.com is better in that regard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3fsms1/psa_how_the_s...
Which makes sense: For the involved businesses there are enormous upsides to this kind of deal: Instead of giving your product out of hand, you enter a long-term relationship with the consumer, you get the money and remain in full control over the product, you can define in unprecedented detail how your customers are permitted to use the product, you can use that control as leverage in contracts with other businesses, etc, etc.
Consumers usually don't mind because, indeed, it feels like you own the product. Until stuff like the OP happens and they realize it was a lie.
Sometimes games like this are removed from the Steam store, like World in Conflict, and can be made to work with some tweaking. But for a decent number of people that can be a problem, and there's no guarantee that will always be possible.
To be fair this is dependent on the specific DRM type, if the game receives any kind of fan/official updates to solve the issue, and there's not exactly an easy way out for Valve. Plus games that have to phone in to a central server to work are going to be more of an issue anyway so by comparison Steamworks DRM is doing pretty well.
Really? How? It still needs the steam client to run, yea?
Most of the friends I talk to that buy drm stuff buy it thinking it will be around forever. They just don't conceive of a world without iTunes or Amazon.
The battle for DRM-free video, however, is far from won. I’m not aware of any source for legal DRM-free video purchases (other than niches like stock video clips).
I only buy DRM free books on Kindle.
Many of them trade this for convenience and assume there will be an off-boarding process.
I fully believe artists deserve their share of the wealth created from their work. Unfortunately many artists' work impossible to financially support without also supporting DRM.
In all fairness, I don't know if the Foo Fighters still use DRM. It was irritating enough at the time that it became a lifelong grudge for me (same thing with Civ and any Tell Tale Games title).
The definition of owning a book doesn't include the right to read it out loud, for example. I may own a small piece of land in the city, but I'm told that I must build a single-family home or grassy field on it rather than a parking lot, skyscraper, or open sewer.
The problem is that property rights are defined by people with the most property in a way that expands their control over that property.
A few years ago you could get pretty much any DVD from Netflix mail service, you could also walk in a video rental store and find all the classic, as well as all the blockbusters from the past 10 years.
It's really sad that a technological advance lead to such a regression.
For the best games, I usually rebuy them anyway as digital downloads on gog.com or similar.
Note that this also comports with what "purchase" means as a legal matter. You can "purchase" land and get an interest short of a fee simple absolute. E.g. your interest might be preempted by the occurrence of some event. Such an interest is still an ownership interest, as opposed to a leasehold (rental) interest.
Especially since it's not like Apple is guaranteeing that you get to keep the product for a minimum amount of time. They could just as well delete your purchase a minute after you bought it.
There isn't a single human on planet earth who thinks of such a transaction that gets withdrawn after one minute as a regular legitimate "purchase" of a product. Even "rental" doesn't quite cut it, it's more in the land of "fraud".
There's a pretty wide variance of what people consider acceptable from purchased things, e.g. People generally accept the idea that a mattress will eventually need to get changed even if it comes with a lifetime warranty.
It's only now that the materials and the content can be explictly and easily separated that we see this logic actually apply in more meaningful ways. This is going to apply to more and more things in the future (e.g. cars, phones, etc.) so we better get used to it, unfortunately.
But you can share with others. You can even sell the book.
It is very convenient to have hundreds or even thousands of books in a tiny device, especially for someone who has very little space to keep physical books (and those who move a lot). While nothing can replace physical books, ebook readers are a fairly good compromise. Plus, it is possible to reduce the cost of books (and less dead trees). But we can't share, unless we share the ebook reader device itself :(
As with most things, humans will put commerce first, and I don't see this situation changing anytime soon. Amazon has won the ebook reader race and they are likely going to stay there for a while.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_...