Valve says Steam users don't own a thing, GOG says its games can't be taken away

California new law forces digital stores to admit you're just licensing content

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41663432 - Sep 2024 (11 comments)

(2) There is also a submission from today related to this article (though TFA and this other article are both rather light and shallow at ~1 paragraph each):

Steam now tells gamers up front that they're buying a license, not a game (engadget.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41809193 (15 comments)

(3) Finally, a marginally more informative article from Ars:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/steam-now-reminds-you...

My account is almost 20 years old (I signed up because you had to in order to play HL2) and I've purchased a lot of games over the years.

Once burned twice shy.

I just stole the games instead!

Then I wanted something else - literally a second game: and it wouldn't recognise either of my cards; all kinds of shenanigans.

I gave up and found Gog. Zero issues. No need to deal with their desktop app if you don't want it. I even bought the original game I had on steam, again, on Gog just so I don't have to deal with their stupid shit.

I realise not everyone has the "luxury" of starting over but I will never understand why if you're forced to start over, you'd choose the same company again.

Games are getting definitively worse. You are a revenue stream, not a customer or a person to app Al to in any way but the most lazy and base ways possible.

Each successive graphic generation places additional production cost to build models and world's, arguably to the artistic detriment of any game: first, since there is so much labor, corners are cut and artistic vision can't be applied everywhere to an army of graphic artists, many outsourced. Second, the overall production costs, much like movie production, makes producers conservative and cookie cutter in pursuit of a reliable return on investment.

The emulation community is preserving not just games, but an entirely different culture of gaming.

Perhaps AI can help with better mass generation of artistic assets, but really an AI is a mass averager of it's inputs: artistic vision is fundamentally a deviation from a norm, and large AI models are anything but

> (b)(1) It shall be unlawful for a seller of a digital good to advertise or offer for sale a digital good to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental...

> (4)This section does not apply to any of the following: ...(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.

https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240ab...

Same thing with open code -- one may say that depending on its license you also may not own it. But I say it's one step better.

And even if source code is provided, it can be next to impossible to build it on your machine, so hopefully it has a docker image or what have you. Would also need to know the GPU requirement to compile it.

Not saying I wouldn't want the source code to be provided, but I'd like it purely for research and modding purposes, not to make sure I can build from source 10 years from now.

GOG Galaxy has been experimental until recently and it is more concerned with being a unified gaming client rather than the primary way to distribute GOG games. In the last couple of years it has actually become quite unstable anyway and it is barely being maintained, clearly not a focus, Linux or not.

“Forcing its users to be at the whim of Microsoft” is quite a stretch.

And you can just download the games from their website, they don't force you to use gog galaxy.

Isn't this not the usual way we talk about ownership? If I buy a book at the bookstore, I own the book. I can put the physical object on my bookshelf. If someone breaks into my house and takes the book, they have stolen the book from me. I have the right to give or resell the book to someone else. I have the right to read it when and how I want to. I have the right to bequeath it when I die. That's "ownership" for all intents and purposes, even if the rights to do certain things with the book are reserved to someone else. I can't, for instance, place the book on a photocopier, press the copy button for each page, and give the copies to someone else. I can't read from it into a microphone at a public event.

I don't see how ownership in the digital realm is so different. I don't have a physical artifact, and copies of a digital work are exactly identical, rather than distinguishable. But that doesn't change very much about what ownership ought to mean. It basically means that I'm not limited in my rights to use the (digital) book however I'd like for private use, although certain things I might want to do with the work are illegal. I can't make a copy and give it to someone else. The fact that copying is "easier" doesn't change the fundamental nature of that restriction.

When Steam got in hot water recently for saying that you couldn't give your account to someone else (e.g. through a will), I think the reason people were mad about that because it meant that having a game in your Steam account is definitively not owning the game. On the other hand, having a game on CD-ROM or purchased on GOG might count as ownership.

- Steam must clearly state it is selling you a license

- GOG is not required to say this (because you can download once and play forever)

I'm just sort of amazed that this law got out to benefit the citizens of california where so many others got veto'd or neutered on the way.

> "In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gog-will-let-you-beq...

Such people are taken by surprise when it turns out companies can take away your “bought” content simply by virtue of changing licensing agreements or corporate structure without public input. Some recent cases:

• Crunchyroll and Funimation merged. People who had “permanent” digital copies purchased from Funimation lost them.

• Sony’s license for Discovery Channel content was not renewed, so all Discovery videos people had purchased (most notably, 20 seasons of Mythbusters) were removed from customers’ libraries.

• Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew and removed it from purchasers’ Steam libraries, despite the presence of a 20‐hour single‐player campaign that was online only for no good reason.

Maybe people will get used to this and consider all purchases ephemeral. I hope not. That’s why I buy and advocate for DRM‐free media.

Yes there was confusion, and the warning will probably help.