It was always an odd setup to sell something for a fixed fee that potentially has an endless cost to deliver. Google have always been vague about how to square that circle. They could have sold fixed term or rolling licences but chose not to. I suspect had Stadia game sales reached a certain threshold they'd have done something like that but it's not something you want to talk about with a new system.
... that said, I'd expect the margins were far lower / cost was higher than what Google was used to, and they financially decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
I used the service and as a techie knew it wasn't really sustainable but the average consumer buying in good faith wasn't warned that their purchase might be so short lived. Might have been hidden in the TOS but that won't cut the mustard in many jurisdictions and will be an expensive battle.
I suspect they made a small amount of sales and it'll be cheaper and easier for them to credit than fight.
I'm not saying Google won't pay out, but I just think there's a lot of reasons why they might not.
Might sound crazy but the 100m would be more effective to the brand than spending 100m on marketing.
Further, Google exited this market. Do they really care about marketing to these people anymore? Their main revenue is non-consensual tracking, it's not like being mad at Google is going to matter unless you really go out of your way because of it.
There was a “remember password” option, but the session would still expire.
There would have to be some effort to unlink those games from the auth services.
Also, yes, but I mean you could find a solution I'm sure. As long as you have the copies a solution would be found - just like I can play my PS1 games without owning a PS1. With Stadia there aren't any copies to speak of. Once the servers go down that's it.
Steam is a DRM system with good branding, that gamers treat as special because it comes from Valve. Anecdotally, a lot of gamers believe and trust that Valve would free their games of DRM if Valve ever went out of business or otherwise shut down Steam. Of course this isn't true, they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own (which is the vast majority of the games on Steam) and whatever informal promises Gabe made years aren't worth a damn. Nevertheless, this sort of mistaken expectation affords Valve/Steam a lot of good will they really don't deserve.
In one you paid for the product, in other you didn't.
I'd think that's a pretty substantial difference?
Ip laws are the worst and terrible for the market. Especially the media companies that just recharge you for for the same content just to watch it on a different medium.
That's a really good way of putting it, I'm gonna steal that (irony unintended). It's totally true - when you purchase software or services it's conditional. You have some voucher that can be redeemed at the discretion of the provider, and there are always many ways (EULA violation, company goes away) that the voucher can be negated.
But when you steal something you aren't beholden to anyone. You actually "own" that piece of software in a way more concrete way. Yes, someone could pursue legal charges and force you to remove it, but it's a totally separate system vs the built-in contract between customer/ service.
In the EU at least, you absolutely own the copy and are free to do with it as you please though, including making more copies for your own safekeeping. There are other comments in this thread pointing out that even in US with its crazy laws you also have this right, although I cannot comment on that personally.
My issue with "just download a crack" is that I have to spend time hunting down the crack, and I can't be sure the crack won't include malware, or won't introduce bugs which only appear later in the game. The last of these has happened to me on multiple occasions. A cracked game is no longer the product I bought.
By contrast, when I buy a game on GOG, I get a product that is DRM Free and will work forever—and because it's the product I actually purchased, I receive some minimal level of assurance from the retailer.
I would feel somewhat differently if there was a single "universal" crack that worked on all Steam games, or even which worked on 95% of Steam games and failed in a predictable way on the remaining 5%. This is the case for iTunes TV Shows, and so I have no problem paying for those, because I can run them through some software and I know the DRM will get stripped correctly every time with no quality loss. I'm not aware of any such software for Steam games.
All PS1 games have been archived, yes, because the method of ripping a PS1 game is consistent across every title, and the total number of games released was relatively small. That's not the case with PC games today, and I think it's virtually inevitable that a lot of indie games released exclusively on Steam will eventually be lost to time. As will many of the indie games released without DRM on itch.io—but at least any game you downloaded from itch.io will be playable forever.
You can argue cloud gaming is even worse. Maybe so, but at least it provides a lot of extra utility, since you can play on low-end devices. Steam provides automatic updates, that's kind of nice I guess, but not in the same class as running Assassin's Creed on your phone†. (Even then, I personally wouldn't pay full price for a game I can only run on someone else's servers, but I understand why someone else might.)
I don't like Steam.
† In theory. I've always found cloud gaming has too much latency for me. But in theory, if it worked perfectly—which perhaps it never will—the promise is nuts.
If it wouldn't be legal, then downloading the crack to the game you paid to play through Steam but can't anymore would presumably be just as illegal as pirating the whole game to begin with. Did you really purchase the game or just an indefinite (but not necessarily eternal) license to play it?
> You "buy" the game from Stadia, it's taken from you, so now you pirate the game.
> You "buy" the game from Steam, it's taken from you, so now you download the pirate's crack to the game.
In either case, the original developer received compensation so I don't think you should feel any moral obligations to anybody. Morally they're equivalent, the only real difference is whether you have the gamefiles already downloaded or not. In both cases you need to dip into the shadier side of the net to get the game you "bought" to run.
You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.
You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.
Both Gabe Newell, the founder/owner of Steam/Vale, and the official support response is now to state that they would provide means for users to continue to have access to their games should Steam shut down. Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.
When game companies go out of business, Steam will remove their product from the store, but continue enabling users who already purchased it access to it, and I expect this independence/guarantee of of access is part of their normal licensing. There is also already 'offline mode' for Steam, and setting the expiration of this mode to e.g. 100 years would be trivial from their side.
In the case of third party games with DRM on Steam: Valve doesn't have a license to distribute those games without DRM, so they're effectively promising to become a pirate software distributor. They have the technical means to do this, but not the legal right. They're almost certainly self-deluding if not lying outright when they promise to do this. I lean towards flagrantly lying; they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising but they're promising it anyway. And if they're willing to lie about this, I think you should reevaluate their promises respecting first party games as well.
Do they not? Did you read the terms for publishing a game on Steam?
I didn’t, but it’s within reason it contains a provision for just this eventuality.
Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.
It would be the equivalent of Walmart saying they would let people buy copies of games and run them forever.
So it makes sense that Steam would be able to make it so the games sold keep running without Steam existing. It seems pretty simple technically too as they would just update their client to no longer phone home to Steam.
Present it as a feature?
“In the event of the dissolution of Steam/Valve, we will endeavour to do everything reasonable to ensure that previously purchased licenses to your content keep working for subscribers in the absence of the Steam platform.”
Just because they try to keep it working doesn’t mean they have to make it DRM free (e.g. copyable between all computers without any checks).
If they shutdown due to bankruptcy (which seems unlikely at the moment, but could change, without much notice since they're private and don't have required public reporting), there may not be anything to collect or anyone to compell to fulfill the promise.
I have a few hundreds games in steam and while maybe one day I may lose access to all of them it’s a risk I am willing to take because:
- I don’t think it will happen anytime soon because it’s a money making machine. The biggest risk for me is Microsoft acquiring it and stopping any work on Linux related stuff (I have been using steam solely on Linux for the past 7+ years)
- Even if I lose access to the library, Steam will have done a better job that I could. I know for sure that I lost the media for the first steam-enabled games I bought but I can still play them.
those are rookie numbers, a couple months of humble bundle and your library can be full of shit you'll never play
They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.
Plus, the most likely thing to happen to Valve is a MS acquisition.
Is it known who will helm Valve if Gabe decides to leave? Plagman has been a big name there with the recent SteamOS platform development but I'm not sure who the actual second-in-command would be.
This is true, but also this is all new. Sooner than later there will be a case of a 20 year old company who licenses media that burns their customer base. It's inevitable.
Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing.
Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve never been one to own an impressive gaming rig and dealing with a tiny bit of lag to avoid spending $3000 on a solid rig would be totally worth it.
Maybe valve should add a Stadia-like service in the future to allow you to play the game on their machines and stream it back when you want to.
GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved it for the last year or so when my computer couldn't run cyberpunk 2077 and I didn't want to sell kidney for a rtx card :)
The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.
The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!
The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:
* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)
* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games
The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.
[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.
AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.
You still bought the game, you're just running elsewhere. They're worried about ports - they want to sell you that sweet android/iOS port of their game. That's why they block the games.
nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.
It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?
The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.
XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.
And this is the #1 problem with stadia - it's a completely different platform, it's as far away from Windows as PS5/Xbox are. You can't just run Stadia version of games on your PC, even if you could download them. GeForce NOW is a much better product, because it runs normal Windows executables(just in the cloud).
You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone.
And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms).
Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you're almost certainly better off just buying it outright at $800, than paying google $10 dollars a month for 5 years for vaporware. Plus at the end of it, you likely still have a perfectly functional computer, more than capable of handling basic mail/web/videos, or serving content (I have machines going back 18 years sitting on the dirt in my basement serving content).
An amusing typo :)
To say this project failed and everyone is just out of luck would really shows what kind of company Alphabet/Google really is.
Don't expect human decency from a corporation, because corporations aren't humans. They're alien intelligence constructed out of humans, but that humanity is not inherited.
""" Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Support!
My name is Dianne, and I'm sorry to hear that you have been unable to redownload the album "Rachmaninov: Complete Piano Concertos", on your new computer. I can certainly understand how this could be disappointing for you, please be assured that I'm happy to help.
Unfortunately, this item is no longer in the iTunes Store, and only items that are currently available can be redownloaded.
If the content provider no longer offers these purchases on the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBookstore, your content will not be available for you to download again.
However, if you still have this album on the original computer, you can certainly transfer it to you new computer. You can do this in several ways. See the following article for how to transfer iTunes Store purchases using Home Sharing, an external drive, an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, or iPod), the Windows Migration Assistant, and CDs/DVDs: """
Good luck doing that for a game that consumers were only ever sent frames of. If/when there's a streaming-exclusive game, it'll be conclusively lost to time when the company stops letting people play it.
This is the tragedy of game development. I heard the other day that copies of Anthem are selling for a penny at GameStop. When EA abandons that game (any day now), all of the work of those programmers, artists, and everyone else will basically be lost. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, gone.
Meanwhile, here is what Steam's subscriber agreement says https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/english/
> Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally [...]
Not true. Maybe if you mainly play ubisoft tiles.
And here's a list of games which are sold through Steam but which nonetheless do not use Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
Why would such a list be necessary if games sold through Steam that used Steam DRM were the minority?
I think what you may be saying is the behavior if you open a Steamworks game while Steam is opened, it just executes as normal. Any authentication or nonsense happens in the background. Try opening a Steamworks game with steam closed, it will force steam to open and login before the game can be played.
You'll get a message about steam.dll missing or being unable to authenticate.
You can also sign out of steam, unplug from the internet and try to launch - and again, you won't be able to except this time steam will launch and tell you to login.
There's this family sharing thing though, where you can share your Steam library between 5 accounts and up to 10 computers:
I don't see too much of a difference other than Steam has more proven longevity - even if the developers that sold games on Steam don't. I can still download Dungeons of Dreadmor from Steam even though the company appears to have disappeared in 2016.
That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear.
Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential hacking and mods). If I want permanence I get a DRM free downloadable game from GoG.
Simply not true. There is really no arguments here. You can run most games directly from the game files without steam. In the cases were you can't you would have issues with DRM in all other venues of purchase.
No, Steam sells permanent licenses.
I don't know where you're getting this from.
To quote from https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/:
> [long list of things you can obtain/do via Steam] are referred to in this Agreement as "Content and Services;" the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license.
> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.
There is zero legal entitlement to any given subscription in this agreement. The fact that they call it a "subscription", and that this is the "Subscriber Agreement" is not by accident. Rather, they explicitly reserve the right to cancel your "rights to access and/or use" their offers (aka subscriptions).
I mean, no? Just no. Kindle doesn't sell you permanent irrevocable licenses and neither does steam, nor origin etc. They've each been revoked in the past and it's demonstrably true. Their TOS is clear and trivial to read. They all grant personal, limited, non-transferable, revocable and non-exclusive licenses.
You may be able to crack the downloaded steam game files to get them to run. But that's lateral to steam and irrelevant to discussion. if you're going to run cracked files skip steam and go to piratebay.
In fact I remember reading from a community representative that there are plans for this in place (not the best source but whatever https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...)
This isn't even a sketchy crack thing, it's an open source tool. Look up Goldberg emulator.
I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.
It’s important to save the offline installers too. I keep a rather large external for my GOG library.
The anti-circumvention statutes mean DRM complicates matters, but you definitely have a legal right to the game files themselves. For what it's worth, I believe that a competent lawyer could successfully argue that disabling DRM is an "adaptation" that's an "essential step in the utilization of the computer program." Get the case in front of Judge Alsup or some other computer literate judge and the argument would probably even prevail.
However is it the right thing to do? Will it damage their reputation to do that?
If they wanted to dodge that beating they'd offer steam/epic/xbox/ps5/switch keys to their customers to claim. Any game their customer bought is probably over a year old at this point and they can cut a deal with the publishers to get deeply discounted keys and eat the costs.