So can I refund all games I ‚bought‘ under false pretenses? I only have few games and opted out of this garbage ecosystem a while ago. Would be nice to recover some investment
The new California law only requires that Steam makes it clear you are buying a digital license.
So per the history of Steam’s terms and agreements users could have been buying digital licenses for a while and Steam just wasn’t upfront about it.
Also depending the lingo in their T&A, digital licensing could apply to all purchases moving forward, all past purchases, or only specified purchases.
Either way if you made a purchase without clear acknowledgement that your ownership and it’s characteristics was terminable or could be altered in the future then I could see legitimate cause for refunds due to false pretenses, bait and switch, or something like that.
Granted Steam also just changed arbitration clauses so they may already be prepping for responses like mass refund requests.
Anyways, time to get rid of steam, save what games I can, find an alternative.
Have fun playing with your license after company shuts down game’s central server.
I personally don’t care about buying licenses. I’m interested in buying games. I’m not finding licenses particularly fun or useful for… anything, really. I could print them out and wipe a… table with them, but paper towels are better suited for that purpose.
That very much depends on the game. Multiplayer games are at the highest risk of becoming unplayable. Most single player game should in theory survive the death of the developer/publisher as long as Steam is around.
Some single player games require a central server for no particularly good reason, or for some functionality that could be disabled without much loss to the game's playability. I think these are the ones that should be called out, and required to either have an end-of-life plan (a flag ready to go that disables online functionality) or a big warning "whelp this game will stop working eventually buy at your own risk".
All for that - but I am rather sceptical if this is even possible anymore. Sure you can have a disk which - best case scenario - contains a game in a executable state. But I can’t remember playing a game without installing an gb sized day one patch. Do even when buying a physical copy - you probably don’t have the full thing anymore after the (whatever) server goes bye bye.
Since Steam is a form of DRM itself does that mean that ALL games on Steam, even the ones that are not “online-only”/“rely on central server” will be marked with “You are buying license only” message?
Steam the launcher itself lets you download the games.
But Steam DRM is entirely optional, it's up to the publishers to use it or not. There are countless games on Steam that you can download and play without DRM (say copy to other PCs without Steam and play there)
I see, hmm… So, pardon me, just want to make things clear.
I can download game through steam, then copy the entire downloaded directory to external drive, copy that game directory to another computer, “double click game.exe” and play the game?
Yes, if the game doesn't have its own DRM or use Valve's (this is admittedly mostly older and indie games these days). You can even use it to manage/sync games/applications that aren't distributed on Steam: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4B8B-9697-2338-40.... I believe this will actually sync those files to Valve's servers and allow you to install them on other machines with Steam installed. This was a feature to drive adoption in the very early days of Steam when basically all it was good for was downloading Counterstrike patches.
