Steam makes a valuable change to how it sells games, and the whole world will benefit

[Windows Central]

Valve has got ahead of the State of California's new law and is now telling customers exactly what they're buying.

Steam makes a valuable change to how it sells games, and the whole world will benefit : Read more

 

[fjtorres5591]

And...?
25 years after people started paying for digital content and 50 years of consumer software there are still people who don't understand the rules? Do they also think the earth is flat?

Catering to willful ignorance solves nothing.
And Idiotpoliticians™ grandstanding changes nothing.

 

[85d06]

And...?
25 years after people started paying for digital content and 50 years of consumer software there are still people who don't understand the rules? Do they also think the earth is flat?

Catering to willful ignorance solves nothing.
And Idiotpoliticians™ grandstanding changes nothing.

What are you rambling about? Are you a bot? Did you even read the article? I suggest doing so. Requiring offline versions of sunsetted games rather than being left with nothing is a good thing. Stop it

 

[fjtorres5591]

Not a bot.

Just somebody who has been around long enough to buy ebooks since the 90's and digital music since the aughts and who has seen the whingeing over licensing of content by the uninformed for a generation-plus.

Idiotpolitician pandering aside, everybody who signs off on the freaking "LICENSING TERMS AND CONDITIONS" of shrinkwrap sofware Or online storres who understands plain english should know they are not buying the freaking game at all. Not even on physical media, where you only buy the package and the right to access the content, aka a LICENSE.

This has been litigated ad nauseum for decades, most recently in the Internet Archive lawsuit, and the outcome is always the same: consumers buy a license to consume, usually NON-TRANSFERABLE (even if DRM-free) and in many cases REVOCABLE.

If you never heard of any of this, look it up.
The licensing wars go all the way back to the 60's in enterprise markets and the 80's in shrinkwrap software. And every few years some uneducated whiner finally realizes they can't legally make copies of their CDs to give to ten thousand of their closest friends or resell their digital games and make a meaningless fuss. Or end up in court.

And in case you hadn't noticed, most games on Disk use the disk as a form of DRM to prove you have a license to download it from the company server. And if the company chooses to shut them down, well that's what you agreed to when you bought the disk.

Sucks? yeah.
But it also sucks when your neighboring country invades yours, barbarians cross your borders to randomly kill concert goers, or your own neighbors riot and burn half your city, or a hurricane wipes out your town or an earthquake destroys your house and property.

Life isn't all "unicorns and fuzzy bunnies" all summer.
Life isn't risk free and the world doesn't run solely the way you want it.
Life is hard and then you die.
You make choices and live with the consequences.
You choose to buy digital content? If you bother to read the TOS then you know you are only paying for a license. If you didn't read them then that is on you, not Steam, not Amazon, not Sony, Nintendo, Apple, or Amazon.

You live in a consumer society.
Learn the rules. Don't let pandering IdiotPoliticians lead you by the nose.

And in digital gaming, those are the rules of the business.
Because those are the only rules that make digital content a business in the first place. Otherwise, write your own book, compose and record your own song, code your own game. (I've done two of those. Those I OWN. Everything else, I license.)

As for STEAM, their little notice costs them nothing and changes nothing. A big of unnecessary grandstanding because their TOS already said that when you agreed to it to sign up to the store.

If you don't like it, move on.
And reserve your vitriol for those around you in real life, not random dudes on the internet.
It's bad form.