If platform licensing arrangements don’t protect customers from losing access to purchases, they should be forced to advertise them as rentals or leases and not something the consumer is buying.
They do this by killing the old version.
Very much this!
And furthermore the prices need to be significantly lower as well. No one pays to rent or lease an automobile what they would pay to purchase it. No one pays to rent or lease an apartment what the sum total cost of the building is.
If these companies want to pretend this is all just a rental then they need to accept no one will be willing to pay purchasing prices for those rentals.
Then steam said you don't own the games they are selling to you
So you buy games that you don't really own with a 30% tax on the developer's paycheck on top of his local taxes, thanks Valve!
If you don't like this then stop using proprietary software.
False. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25371427
> You don't own any commercial, proprietary software sold to you.
I do own the commodity good (here: copy of the game) that I bought.
You were previously talking about licences and ownership of "any games". What you mentioned now is an orthogonal concept, and affects a subset of all games sold.
Depriving me of the use of my purchased good that way is fraud, of course. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348526>
You're purchased "good" was a license to use some software. That license defines the rules for using that software. If the license says they can remotely disable your game then they can remotely disable your game without violating the license or committing fraud.
There is of course some question about the enforcement of licenses, particularly click through licenses, but the legal doubt doesn't help due to the arbitration clauses in those same licenses and/or challenging them in court being ridiculously expensive.
Or, you know, change the law. It doesn't have to be this way.
>"This French ruling flies in the face of established EU law which recognises the need to protect digital downloads from the ease of reproduction allowed by the Internet," said CEO Simon Little in a statement.
I'd love if they lowered their cut but as things are, no one even seems to be trying to seriously compete with them. All consoles and all other PC distribution platforms seem hell bent on hand curation through human intermediaries, which often comes down to rubbing elbows with the right people / impressing arbiters rather than just letting customers judge. Even itch.io does this for the promotion / discoverability part.
Mobile has a slew of its own problems but gets this basic thing right, too.
the value they provide you is by being a intermediary between you and your customers; it's pure intermediation, there's no disintermediation.
Before if you wanted to buy games you had to show up in person, so competition between corporations and mom and pops was limited to what a corporation was willing to spend on capex and staff for a new store. The internet destroyed that need and so now the costs of corporations to compete with more efficient services due to economies of scale is very low.
And then they can plan for that by unlocking the games when they would sunset them.