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Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

If I buy something, not only should I be allowed to keep it until I die, but I should also be allowed to pass it on to someone else after I die. I should also be allowed to give it or to sell it even before I die. That's currently impossible with many of these so-called digital purchases.

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It's a huge bummer that Steam has trained a whole generation to give up their right to own a game disc they can loan, trade or resell. And see it as a good thing because now all their games are in one "place".

A lot of games I bought on Steam are so heavily discounted I’m willing to take the risk.

If it goes missing, I will still have spent less than it would have cost me to rent it for a week back in the day.

No single loss of any digital good will ever break anyone. The point is that digital "ownership" was normalized and the rights have been lost period.

What happens if your steam account gets hacked/banned/deleted out of your control? Then you can lose hundreds to thousands of game purchases.

What happens if my house burns down? Or somebody steals my car full of CDs?

Those problems also exist with physical belongings.

Which is why you should be able to back them up too! DMCA laws are also unreasonable

Steam came at a time where publishers were already fighting to stop resells. For instance copy protection was abused to expand to single use codes.

In a way, the lower price of Steam helped swallow the disappearance of the second hand market. I see the point, but wouldn't set it as a positive thing (neutral at most?)

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