You’ve never owned games. You’ve always owned a license to run a game. The license used to be tied to a piece of physical media. Now it’s not. But the underlying legal model never changed.
Bullshit. You could sell your physical copy on the second hand market. This is protected by the “doctrine of first sale.” When you buy a a copy of a work, you have the right to lend it, trade it, or sell it. This right was functionally eliminated by platforms like Steam.
There already was no used game market for PC games before Steam. The vast majority of publishers were already requiring you to activate your CD key, and limiting the number of times a key could be activated.
I can tell you that there used to be, I was a part of it. But I’m talking about 20+ years ago.
Having online verification for offline video games was something that Valve pioneered and made the standard for all PC games. So much of todays shitty gaming climate was pioneered by Valve including loot boxes, achievements and always on drm.
Good on them. Steam is the reason that you don’t ‘own’ games anymore, you pay a company a fee to be able to access it.
GOG is better in that respect
You’ve never owned games. You’ve always owned a license to run a game. The license used to be tied to a piece of physical media. Now it’s not. But the underlying legal model never changed.
Bullshit. You could sell your physical copy on the second hand market. This is protected by the “doctrine of first sale.” When you buy a a copy of a work, you have the right to lend it, trade it, or sell it. This right was functionally eliminated by platforms like Steam.
I swear you people would start defending Monsanto licenses if they had sales for video games and supported porting games to Linux.
Removing the license from the actual media means that there is no used game market. It is a pretty significant step.
There already was no used game market for PC games before Steam. The vast majority of publishers were already requiring you to activate your CD key, and limiting the number of times a key could be activated.
I can tell you that there used to be, I was a part of it. But I’m talking about 20+ years ago.
Having online verification for offline video games was something that Valve pioneered and made the standard for all PC games. So much of todays shitty gaming climate was pioneered by Valve including loot boxes, achievements and always on drm.