CA law means stores can't say you're buying a game if you're merely licensing it
polygon.com
polygon.com
“Rent until we choose to not allow you to access it for a one time payment of $x”.
EDIT: sorry, just came from the future.
they (the ones that are subscription) still are.
And most of them have micro-transactions on top of that as well. Some will give you a (very) limited number of micro-transaction currency-units per month.
“License” seems too legal, and implies either a lifetime license or fixed term license, which is different than a “we’ll shut down game servers whenever we feel like it”
“Rent” already has a different meaning that is commonly understood.
Is there any suitable existing word? Maybe the awkward phrase “revocable at any time license”?
> lease - a contract renting land, buildings, etc., to another; a contract or instrument conveying property to another for a specified period or for a period determinable at the will of either lessor or lessee in consideration of rent or other compensation.
Typically, as a practical matter, the license ends with your death. You can't pass your kindle ebooks and steam games as inheritance like you can with physical books and game discs.
In any event you are within both your moral and legal rights, in the USA at least, to backup any software you have purchased and you should do so if you care about it.
And nobody is going to be able to stop you from leaving those backups to your kids.
It is interesting though how the software business has managed to, via the courts, meme software licenses into existence. The simple fact is that under written US law no license is required to run software you have acquired a lawful copy of. The law explicitly gives you the right to make additional copies as necessary to execute the program. Case law of course is another matter. And lawfare is another matter on top of that. Who wants to spend the rest of their life being sued by Adobe because they want to sell a copy of photoshop they no longer use?
In many places, ground/land is leased that way, where you pay a sum up-front and are allowed full ownership for 99 years or something like that.
I think they should also remove “buy“ from any software requiring external servers.
There’s no good word because it’s not a reasonable position.
Doesn't really roll off the tongue though.
It's so sad that there have been so very few legal efforts to bolster property rights, to reassert some sovereign claim over the things we have about us & that fill our homes. In fact, the opposite keeps happening: anti-circumvention laws spread like the plague they are, making any attempt to exercise one's property right a felony offense.
This is murdering the human spirit. Man the toolmaker's god-granted rare ability to understand the world about us, to model & learn, and then to adapt & alter is trapped in an infernal legal hell. What's happening is against my spiritual beliefs & is so terrible to suffer, is such high tragedy.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Yes. Now let's do "steal."
Like, if we look back at this, surely there were people saying, "Hey, things have changed. You don't actually 'own' the thing you think you're buying anymore. This could come back to bite you," but on the whole, not nearly enough people cared for it to shape the market.
There is sure to be another thing like this, some other movement where yet another owner of something finds a way to sell you access to it in a way that makes you think it's "yours," but actually all you have is permission to use it as long as they remain happy with you and happy to continue allowing you access. How do we make sure people know and care next time?
And what about the fact that, on the whole, most people are apparently fine with having access to things rather than ownership of them? How do you make the distinction when it matters, but allow both types of transactions? (For example, I'm glad I don't have to buy, and then sell, even a single room in a house to stay in when I'm traveling; paying to use it for a limited period is preferable to me in that situation.)
We know putting the information in the terms of use won't help, but what would?
We could engorge the commons. If people are okay with mere access, then (for easy-to-distribute things, like books and videogames) free culture should naturally outcompete comparable proprietary works.
Promote DRM-free cultural artefacts. If you'd drop $70 on a AAA title, drop $70 on a DRM-free game you like, and then tell your friends about it. (Try-before-you-buy is a feature, not a bug, though don't be stingy about this if you can afford not to.)
This isn't generally-applicable, of course, but deconstructing the "everything is property" schema might make it easier to get another angle on it.
Or better yet, ideas. I can't think things in my own brain, arguably the thing that is most obviously mine, and then talk about what I think about those things, because someone else thought them first and I didn't come up with them on my own? I get why it's not cool to pretend I did come up with them. It's cooler if I can remember where I heard them first and give credit for them. But if I don't remember? If I connect two ideas I heard about ten years apart only once I hear the second one and I can't remember where the first one came from? How did that idea not become "also mine" after being stored and then recalled from my own brain for ten years?
I don't know how to solve the admittedly hard problem of allowing people to profit from the hard work it takes to come up with original ideas. But the "intellectual property" concept doesn't make a lick of sense to me as the way to do it.
This just happens to have been kicked off by one of the first high profile cases of exactly that happening with games (that I know of). It also happened a lot this year and last with movies and TV shows that were allegedly "bought" on platforms like PlayStation and Crunchyroll but were actually licensed by the rights holders.
Steam also can't do anything to protect you from games that require servers to play if those servers are shut down. Case in point, "Concord". They can offer direct refunds (I know they did that with The Day Before), but then doing that is a PR move that you can't rely on.
My take: general computing will be gone.
There will be no way to run arbitrary code on any device.
You can see the screws already tightening at several places. Phones have various methods like safety net that is meant to "protect you", apps can now detect if they were sideloaded, bootloaders are locked.
DRMs are running with kernel level privileges, Microsoft requiring TPM on new releases of windows. There is pretty much one browser left (Chrome), so google can do whatever they want with the web. I'm sure they are already drafting out the next "web attestation" API, except this time they will do it in the dark instead of in the open.
DNS over https means that you can no longer block devices from phoning home on your own network.
There is a handful of companies controlling about 90% of the internet if not more.
It's already annoying to use your iPhone as a primary camera without paying for iCloud storage. Imagine if you could only view your own photos after you've paid $10/mo for the cloud service, and there would be no reasonable way to get your data out.
I think it's pretty sensible. For any digital good (including books and movies etc., not just games), if you're supposedly buying the thing, it can't be given to you in a form in which your ownership can be unilaterally revoked later.
> (C) Any digital good that is advertised or offered to a person that the seller cannot revoke access to after the transaction, which includes making the digital good available at the time of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet.
I can imagine e.g. Amazon arguing that kindle books can be downloaded to kindle devices and phones, and so they apply to this exemption. However, the downloads are only usable through their software, so they technically maintain their ability to revoke access because of that.
Wonder if they'll keep their "Buy now" button on kindle books product pages.
ie. Your money is not collateral. You are paying for a license to use the software (game) for a period of time.
Digital licenses take away all of this and add the possibility that your licence can disappear at any time.
[1] https://www.trueachievements.com/n53706/phil-spencer-intervi.... [2] https://academyofanimatedart.com/gaming-statistics/#:~:text=....
Depends whether the game is 'online-only' or not.
Now, yes, you can say "but first sale still holds, you aren't prohibited from selling the object you bought", but most rational people are going to call that nonsense.
There's people who have spent literal days entertained by a game, but then complain they had to spend $70 for the privilege. Where else can you be entertained for a couple bucks an hour or less?
In my opinion, if you license a game and play it for a dozen hours... you've gotten your money's worth already. That said, I too would be disappointed if a game I enjoyed was removed from my library.
Paying to play a game for some time is fine, but they shouldn't lie about what terms you're getting.
This is a case where even if you wanted to pay money to continue or start playing a game, you can't because someone else simply doesn't want you to.
This is a consumer-hostile shift from earlier days where if you owned the disk, disc or cartridge and a computer that could play it, you could play the game, no questions asked. I think it's always worth fighting against consumer hostile shifts.
Some people are collectors as much as they are gamers. A license (or whatever) is less valuable to a collector than a game.
To be frank - nobody cares about collectors. That argument will not change how software is licensed one bit...
Some examples include:
*Mountain hiking
*Swimming in a lake
*Reading a book
*Arguing on HackerNews
On Steam (from Valve) you would be entitled to a full refund in that scenario.
Valve offers full refunds for any game you have played for less than two hours and owned for less than two weeks. In some other situations, they have also applied refunds outside that policy where the game turned out to be a fraud or something.
There are also many titles in people's Steam libraries that are no longer offered on Steam, but you can still download and play if you purchased it prior to it being pulled from Steam.
Not having re-downloads is a separate issue.
What company is this?
The streaming service is Qobuz. Here's a forum thread of others who found the specific date and wording interesting: https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/70250-qobuz-may-be-...
Valve is certainly a consumer-friendly company, but that's not the whole story and it doesn't change the fact that they're hiding vital information from consumers.
No sane court is going to uphold an adhesion contract where someone pays $100 for a substantially multiplayer game (e.g. not Portal 1) yet the publisher is allowed to disable servers required for the game's multiplayer operation a week later because they cost money to maintain and the userbase hasn't hit targets.
That said, I doubt it has any real impact on sales. It’s like “Beef chili” vs “Chili with beef”. The average consumer wouldn’t know the difference.
Idk, but where I lived before, at some point virtually everyone knew the difference between e.g. "cheese" and "cheese[-like] product", because it quite mattered - one is real cheese made with real milk, another is typically a plant-based substitute with quite different properties (and typically of much worse quality).
Average consumers aren't exactly dumb (at least, not at the individual level) when things actually matter to them. They're just uninformed and don't actively express the desire to learn (so they remain uninformed), so they can act not in their best interest because they aren't aware about something. But when we know, when the information gap closes - we act differently, and that's not going back. Education is important.
So it may impact licensing of digital media where user intent was specifically focused on indefinite access. E.g. movie or music sales when people had incorrectly assumed that "buying" means they can rewatch/relisten it whenever they like, no matter what (and then their "purchased" content disappears because licensing deal wasn't renewed or something).
Your point is true, though. It's not all that common to use those words. I thought at least the checkout page would, but I'm seeing "Place your order", which is pretty apt for both purchasing and licensing.
Game shops like EB are likely going to stop soon too I imagine which also conincides with all their gaming merch and toys thats taking up the majority of their store space these days.
Methinks we need something like a Criterion Collection but for games… which I suppose would be GOG.com - but if they carried triple-A games from day 1, instead of having to wait a decade first.
The issue is that all modern games need to be installed on the internal SSD. So you're not playing of the disk, you're just copying the files from it. And many games require a day-1 patch to work properly. Some even require a constant online connection.
doesitplay.org is a useful database for that information.
Sony, Ubisoft scandals lead to California ban on deceptive digital goods sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593 - Sept 2024 (100 comments)
Also, some companies (like Tesla) designed the cars so they can control the resale process by remotely dropping it into various limp modes.
You might be licensed to operate the vehicle but restricted in specific interactions with it.
It seems the industry is moving in this direction, which is concerning due to the cost structure. It shifts control away from consumers and toward the IP owners of these products.
Tesla may be a notable example, where you're unable to make modifications or repairs to the car without a proper license.
I mean, I guess you could theoretically buy a physical medium that contains the data for a game, explicitly without a license to use the data in any way. But at the end of the day, you will always be licensing it, until the government abolishes the artificial enforced monopoly called copyright.
For instance, I bought Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. That game is locked in. No fixes, no additions, no nothing. What is on the cart is what you get. Nintendo has no more obligation to me and I have no more obligation to them.
But people expect updates and changes. Let's not talk about "incomplete games being finished through updates", games get updated all the time now. Even for physical copies. Games now often install on the hardware and check for updates on first run.
So if we go to "buy", if you get a broken game, that's on you. Don't buy from them anymore. You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game. You paid for the thing, they gave you the thing. If you want a refund, return the thing.
I think we still haven't quite figured out how to work with ephemeral goods like software. It's kind of like a performance, kind of like a physical item, etc. It requires far more effort to generate than it does to copy. And buyers want to buy on the value of the copying, but sellers want to sell on the value of generation.
You get to self-refund a game on Steam within a certain timeframe, after that it's on you.
Game breaking bug? Eh, they got their money.
If you buy a shitty album, you can't get your money back. And you can't get the band to "make it better" for you.
Is software a thing? A performance? A recording? It has elements of each. And despite people saying "we've solved this issue", we haven't. We keep slapping on different metaphors and complaining when that metaphor inevitably fails.
That and no one really wants to pay the actual price for complete, error-free software. What they want is to get complete, error-free software for the price they've paid. Which is different.
The difference is whether "shitty" is subjective or actually defective.
Like, if you don't like the music, that's on you, someone else might like it.
And, I've certainly been to concerts / movies / events where there have been "experience-breaking" technical difficulties and they've (partially or fully) refunded the tickets.
This entitled attitude is part of the problem. A game can’t simply be shipped and done anymore. It means the quality can slip, because “we’ll patch it after we ship.” It also means the author has to continue development indefinitely, which means they’re also never done.
The cost of a few years of support is built into the price of the software.
No, it's the developers' responsibility to release a finished product that works properly. The ability to simply do updates later has introduced a cancerous mindset to almost all areas of software development, where it is now suddenly OK to release an unfinished, buggy, or broken product and "fix" it later.
> You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game.
Generally people purchase products with the expectation of them not being defective.
The games I care about are the ones that I can play with my friends, online. Nearly all of these have transitioned to driving revenue from other means than an upfront purchase.
I’m arguably paying less now, than I did when I was younger. I used to have dozens of games that I played just a few times. $60 to sit on the shelf.
Now, I “subscribe” to one or two flavors of the month. I pay perpetually, but my overall cost is lower since I’m only paying for what I actually use.
If in 20 years I need to run an air gapped VM to play it, fine.
What's not cool is if a single player game needs to phone home, and when it can't, my purchase is disabled.
How so, I do not expect that a developer will add more content to a finished game for free. And AFAIK in the games I own the content updates are paid DLCs, I can only think at No Man sky as an exception that added more free content, in fact the thrend is to have like 50+ paid DLCs and milk the players for at least a decade.
And can't be taken away from you by the sunsetting of game servers. And this isn't just a problem for multiplayer games.
What country doesn't have laws against selling broken goods?
Even the US has an implied warranty of merchantability that requires a product work as promised.