I’m pretty sure this is in response to a recent California bill that forces digital storefronts to disclose if it is a license you are getting. Otherwise the storefront is not allowed to use words like “buy” or “purchase”.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426
10/10 law can we please get this in Canada too?
Better yet, can we just get a law that makes it so when we buy something we own it?
I mean that’s what the California law is.
If you buy it you own it, but we aren’t buying the games.
A law that says they have to let us buy it instead of license it would be nice though.
At least for steam it looks like it might be rolled out worldwide
If there’s an offline game you love and play all the time, consider buying it again on GOG.com.
Soon, GOG and all other storefronts will state that you’re purchasing a temporary digital license for any game who’s publisher uses an EULA that states you don’t own the game. This is due to the recently signed California law that forces storefronts to be transparent about the publishers EULA.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426
But also with GOG you can download the installers and play offline. It’s literally one of their big selling points. It’s less convenient than things like steam, but you can do whatever the hell you want when you buy it. So in that regard, it literally is a purchase. Or as close as you can get with digital goods.
Depends on the game, they still sell DRM games which are limited in being able to be downloaded freely
DRM is added by the developers/publishers not by GOG, tho.
Same thing applies to Steam. You don’t need to use the Steam DRM if you don’t want to, it gets added by the developers/publishers. There are plenty of DRM-free games on Steam
No thats not true. You need to have steam installed and be logged into an account to play a steam game, always.
you can do whatever the hell you want when you buy it
Mmm, not quite.
And I point that out because Lemmy is a very FOSS-friendly place where that sentiment is actually true.
But GoG provides it DRM free, so you can always play what you’ve downloaded til the end of time. It’s as good as piracy in that way.
At that point, why not buy the game on any platform of your choosing and just pirate it when it stops being accessible on the platform you bought it on? I understand wanting to support GOG, I “own” a lot of games on GOG as well. But it’s not really “owning” even on GOG if at some point, I could lose the ability to download the game.
Any game that isn’t available as a pirated game isn’t going to be on GOG anyway… The problem here is that GOG needs to be better than piracy in any tangible way and right now, that’s not the case. It would be the case for me if GOG Galaxy was available on Linux but it’s not, as one example.
It’s data.
It’s never “owning” in the traditional sense, because data is not physical.
When people say they own something, there’s an implication that it’s theirs until they decide to part with it. That is true for games bought without DRM. DRM free the closest you’ll ever get to ‘owning’ data, you possess that on your own local device and it can’t be taken away.
You can lose the ability to download the game, sure. But that is an additional service, not the game itself. You have that data until you delete it. Same with GoG Galaxy. that’s an extra service.
You’re arguing 2 or 3 different things. Ownership as a legal right, ownership as in possession, and a weird third thing where you seem to be confusing meta services with the ownership of the thing itself.
It just needs to be "owning* in the way physical media without DRM works. That is data too after all. The ability to sell your copy of the data or have your friend borrow.
Yes, DRM-free is the closest thing, never argued otherwise. I’m also not arguing the services offered by GOG are part of “ownership”. The lack of an ability to download a game at any point is just a part of the fact that GOG too is simply licensing in the end. But yes, GOG is still the closest thing to “owning” games. Which is why it sucks that so many titles on GOG have DRM despite the claims btw…
I’m really only arguing one thing: piracy is better than GOG right now in every single way. You don’t have to worry about hidden DRM. You don’t have to worry about account creation bullshit. You don’t have to worry about anything else. You just download, hit play and it works every single time. If I send the copy to a friend, it will still work.
Piracy has always been closer to “owning” than GOG, so GOG should at least have some other tangible benefits over piracy. But right now, they don’t.
That’s not GOG works. Get your offline installers.
On a legal level, it is how GOG works. They still only sell licenses. You just have the loophole that their installers and the games installed by them will work regardless.
While that may be partly true, (also likely) depending on the county you’re located, they’re not able to revoke the license though.
So in this specific case you having the files makes a world of difference.
But then the same is also true for Steam
Err… You often don’t have the files drm free on Steam. Nor in an installable format (without steam).
Anyhow. Seeing the down votes I’d love for some to elaborate.
Otherwise it just looks like some rampant steam fanboys.
Also I forgot to reply to this on the other answer, but:
Err… You often don’t have the files drm free on Steam. Nor in an installable format (without steam).
Often you do, and an installer is nothing more than a fancy zipped folder. Also people usually like to compare Steam with GoG and claim that on GoG you get DRM free games and not on Steam, that is not true, both have either, although GoG has percentually more it’s still not 100% DRM free (nor is Steam 100% DRMd), it’s always up to the game developers.
This is what you said:
While that may be partly true, (also likely) depending on the county you’re located, they’re not able to revoke the license though.
The same is true for Steam, laws are laws
So in this specific case you having the files makes a world of difference.
You also have the files if you downloaded them on Steam. What’s important is whether those files can be used on their own or if they’re protected by some form of DRM. If the files can be used on their own it doesn’t matter if you got them from Steam, GoG or a physical disc. If on the other hand the files are DRM protected you having them is useless, whoever controls the DRM controls your files, again regardless of where you got the files from.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
Check 2.1, GOG is the same.
If I back up a DRM-free installer what’s the difference?
Legally, it’s still a license, it’s just effectively impossible to revoke.
Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).
American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.
A digital “purchase” is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can’t be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.
Just like any game ever sold on a CD.
Technically, probably yes, but you can buy old, opened games on eBay. I doubt you can do the same with GOG games. Digital media is much harder if not impossible to resell.
If you back up the folder of a steam installed game that doesn’t need steam to run, what’s the difference?
Owning the copy in a legal sense doesn’t affect most of the userbase tbh.
unless you keep the offline installers.
I mean at that point you can just make backups of your steam games too. A lot work straight from the exe and for the rest there are steam simulators.
Well, gentlemen. I guess we got this all sorted out. Not a big deal, after all.
A small minority of GOG games have DRM, a majority of Steam games have a form of DRM. “Use a simulator” isn’t a solution, I shouldn’t need a third party program to play the games I paid for.
Also there’s a pretty big difference between downloading the installer and backing up the installed files, one is an intended backup solution, the other is a workaround.
Which gog games have DRM? The costumers over there even protested Hitman’s inclusion in the store precisely because without internet you can’t unlock anything in the game, GOG even removed it from sale.
I would say, if you’ve purchased, just get a free version.
Nah fuck all that, you own the game already. You pirate it.
Also don’t forget to download the offline installers from GOG. I spent all of last week doing that
Is there a nice FOSS utility to do that? I need to do a backup of my GOG library.
I did find a few on GitHub, but the one I tried had an error after a few downloads, so I just manually got them all.
Problem there is the games I have in Steam which are Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana, and GTA 5 I was looking at and thinking about whether or not to get, are not coming up on GOG.
Nah, I’m good 😂
If only there was a Girl who was Fit that could, I don’t know, Repack this situation, thus saving us from it…
Hey thanks for describing this hypothetical situation, I pay Steam for a lot of game licenses so I’ve lost touch with the current philosophy of hypothetical alternatives.
Instructions unclear, looking up Wii Fit Trainer on e621
I wonder if theres a direct link to something like that on a subreddit about it…
Can you dumb it down a little doc?
Before Steam you bought a physical disc and it didn’t matter that you technically only purchased a license, the disc was yours and nobody was coming to your house to take it away if the publisher started fighting with the developer or whatever.
True, with some modifications:
Some games had online activation built in. Some games would simply not install on a second or third machine without getting permission from the publisher.
Regular CDs have a lifespan of 5-10 years, shorter if not stored ideally. Almost all games had sophisticated mechanisms to prevent backups being taken.
Even if you could take a backup, record associations and publishers lobbied to make it illegal and punishable by severe fines in many countries.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software. EA shipped CDs with autoexexuting software that would actually delete CloneCD and other CD copying software and prevent new installes from working. My copy of Sims 2 came with that bullshit and OH MAN I was not happy about it.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.
Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.
The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.
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I’ve got CDs I’ve had for 25+ years and they’re still fine
Yeah good ones allegedly last 200 years if stored correctly. Cheap ones are 5-10. 20 can be expected for quality CDs stored correctly.
But no matter the claimed quality, it’s a gamble. Our local library had a lot of 10-20 year old CDs that had developed microbubbles.
5 years is low range for CDs, but common enough that you should be taking backups for anything you keep longer.
Don’t conflate a mastered CD with an aluminum data layer with a recordable CD-R or CD-RW, which use organic dyes that have a significantly shorter lifespan.
A properly manufactured CD can last 200+ years if it’s stored in a dry environment free of UV exposure and high levels of moisture.
Even a quality CD-R can’t really be expected to retain all of its data integrity for much more than 10 years.
First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc technology to be invented (–Wikipedia)
Sorta doubting whatever study found proof that a CD can last 200 years…
Obviously no one’s seen it happen first hand. It’s a projection based on what’s known about the materials and how they’re made. Burned CD-R’s have definitely been out in the real world for people to learn how short their lifespans can be, though.
Nobody could “prove,” for instance, that the Voyager 1 could stay operational in deep space for 47+ years when it was launched in 1977, but the engineers could still predict and they launched it anyway, and it did. I don’t think your argument really holds water.
That’s what I think when I read endurance/mtbf of hard/solid state drives of like 100+ years. Bitch you released this last week and I know for a fact that you didn’t withhold sales for 100 years for validation of your claims. Also funny how I should reasonably expect 100 years out of it, but you will only provide a warranty for the first three…
Before Steam (esp. right before Steam) it was common for a disc to have nothing but a 100mb installer that attempted to download the game, or an actual game build so buggy that you were forced to download patches that required you to be online.
Prior to this, games came with serial numbers and needed to be activated online. This made reselling PC games no longer a thing as you needed to trust who you were buying the game from.
In both cases, the physical disc was yours, but it was pretty useless. It wasn’t the game, but also was required to play the game.
Before that, we had truly resellable DRM: “Enter the 3rd word on the 20th page of the manual 🤣”.
No, dialup was still common in the early days of Steam, game content was not largely being delivered as downloads yet and discs were still useful because it could not yet be taken for grated that a customer would be always online.
But I’d still rather download a game straight from the developer or publisher without an additional middleman. Privacy aside, the cost of that rent seeking from Steam gets passed along to you.
I vaguely remember having on the order of 5mbps “broadband” when Steam worn me down enough for me to give it a shot over the alternatives 🙄. It was pretty bad at first, but it worked. But maybe broadband adoption was more of a thing in Canada back then.
The modern equivalent would be to make cold backups of your steam stuff.
Thanks, new California law!
The answer is to introduce law which would force digital products to be owned, not licenced for non commercial users.
I think the answer was to introduce a law which would force digital market places to clearly describe what users are paying for, for folks who weren’t around during the controversial time when Steam and Xbox Live Arcade came out and can’t grasp the concept; folks who didn’t observe the reality before and after this shift.
Even though it was abundantly clear already, this is what the California law is all about.
If, with this clear explanation, you still want to merely get a license to use games via a service, you should be able to do it.
Valve isn’t doing anything wrong: far from it. Steam is awesome and I understand that one day, it could all go away and with it, all the games I have access to.
I also understand that, at any time, Valve may decide that they don’t want me to use Steam anymore, or that someone may hack into my account and I won’t have access anymore.
Finally, I get that even now, things that I could do with physical games; I can’t do with my Steam library (eg. Easily play a game on my Steam Deck while someone also plays another game on my desktop, or sell a game disc that sits on my desk).
I understood this when I reluctantly signed up to Steam to play Half Life 2 back in the day when it was a complete dumpster fire of a buggy mess of a service. But it has improved so much since then.
Hey, do you, but I don’t see what the big deal is. We’ve already protested that Steam was a bad idea, and Valve was literally the devil, but it’s actually turned out to be objectively more convenient than any alternative to play games, and it’s no longer Valve forcing us to install Steam to play their games. Practically the entire industry has shifted, plus there are now alternatives (besides piracy) like GoG. Hopefully this law causes more competition in that DRM free space.
What exactly would that entail? I “own” Hades, thus I can depict Zagreus in my own works, as his likeness is my property? I’m allowed to copy the game to a dozen thumb drives and sell them on the street?
It would mean that you were allowed to sell your license to somebody else, just as you would be able to with a physical copy.
It would mean that you could continue to have it, and be able to reinstall it on future hardware if Valve closed shop tomorrow.
Currently you can do neither of those things.
Somewhat ironically, both of those things would actually require a license as opposed to ownership
What exactly would that entail?
Go figure 🙄
Hey, at least they’re clearing the air a little bit
Isn’t this only because it’s soon to be legally required in California? I don’t think they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
The amount of comments on social media that I saw of people surprised by this means this really wasn’t something the average person knew about, it’s natural to think if you paid for digital content it should’ve the same rights of physical. Though reselling will get messy.
“EA, play the license”.
We all know here that you don’t own anything on Steam or any other client with DRM. Duh…
B this shit should be illegal, I buy a product, game, license whatever you call it, it is mine. This farce of consumer protection… "do you understand the words coming out of my mouth!?..License!!'. Yeah we do, let us own our purchased games.
If the game is FOSS, does this warning still show? 🤔
Yes.
And that’s why the bulk of my game library comes from GOG, and I have Steam more out of commitment than taste.
We know about we been buying a license not a game.
gestures to the other 99% of gamers
Maybe the average lemmit, not the average gamer.
We knew it 10 years ago, we know it now, how is this news to anyone consuming online digital content?
what’s old is new again! they tried to pull this shit back in the day but physical media was the only delivery method. now that everything is downloaded there’s a bunch of legal grey area they’re hiding in.
so the next question, is this retroactive? if so, then when will I get my money back? Licensed software is cheaper than the full MSRP I paid for titles that had physical options I could have bought at a store. this is because licensed software usually has an expiration date while physical media with software can be installed anytime after purchase.
so, Valve, one last question.
yeah no, this is just fixing the wording to better represent the truth that has always been.
this is because a California law recently passed requiring these kinds of purchases to inform consumers that they don’t actually own these games. valve decided it would be easier just to do this for everyone.
this has always been true for all digital games you purchased. the fact that you didn’t realize this is why the law was needed.
thanks California for being the only force fighting for consumers rights in the United States. i can see why conservatives give you so much shit. you do things that matter.
I think there’s one key thing you missed: you have never bought a copy of the game on Steam! It’s always been a license. Valve simply made the fact clear now because of legal changes.
so the next question, is this retroactive
So the answer for this is a solid no.
