I can literally double click an infinitely copieable .iso file, run an installer and I have far cry 3 up and running on any computer, double click the shortcut and it just boots right into the game, no getting double fisted by Ushite or steam
@@sourceeee Yes. Even if you do buy your games, in many cases it's just easier to still install a pirated copy to skip the launchers. I always buy games I like after I pirate them, with new games it's just a better experience to get patches without a hassle. But every game that's out longer than 6 months, I'll always play the cracked version even if I bought the regular game just to skip opening Steam, never mind any extra launchers the game might need.
Yeah, digital owership laws need to be changed. If you buy it digitally, it should come with all the same rights as owning it physically. They don't advertise it as renting, they don't price them as rented products (the prices are as high as physical), but they can remove your access to it at any time and their ToS say you don't own it. That's messed up. The quicker governments catch on to this and force physical and digital parity the better.
They did this to shut down GameStop. GOG licenses your game to the account, same as steam, and people are too dumb to realize. Impulse was going to allow license reselling, then GameStop bought them out. Which is kinda insane they didn't roll out the feature, but GameStop killed its own business.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq What do you mean by that? On GOG, you can download an offline and DRM-free copy of the game. Nobody in the world can take that away from your hard drive once it's there. Even if it turns out GOG would switch leadership and become a bad platform, they can't take away anyone's games, unlike Valve.
@@fakeninja4447 lol. Have fun fighting the piracy lawsuit without the account. Your offline installer is 100% illegal piracy without the online account. This is the problem with kids. I was around for actual disc based software, and your license was a key printed on the case. That's a physical offline license. GOG does NOT provide you an offline license. You clearly don't understand the definition of DRM, which is in the name. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT. GOG is managing your rights digitally. Like what IQ does a person have to have to not understand that. The whole DRM free thing is marketing lies, because they're referring to copy protection, which in itself is a lie because they have sold a few games with protection. The online account is an end run around users owning their licenses. They want to enforce everyone buying separate copies, eliminate legal resale, and license transfers. It's a scam like how discord claimed their service wasn't run like social media, while the EULA stated otherwise. People just believe marketing lies because they're gullible. Which is irritating. You're all signing petitions to ban women's suffrage and dihydrogen monoxide. Which honestly explains the vast majority of problems in modern society. Too many people believe lies, especially if it's lying by omission. If I go full conspiracy theory, this is why "global warming" became climate change to block lawsuits. Nobody questions anything or thinks for themselves.
@@fakeninja4447 The offline copy is PIRACY without a licence. You DON'T get an offline license. DRM = digital rights management. GOG is digitally managing your rights through the account. PC games used to be sold like console games on a disc. It's been tied to online accounts for 20 years, but that's not how it's supposed to work. The online account is the Trojan horse. It doesn't give you the license, your software is locked LEGALLY to the account. GOG is lying.
Great thing about GOG is that you can download and backup an installer. Even if GOG gets cancelled, shut down, game is removed from GOG, or game content is changed, you still have the installers if you backed them up. So you still can use what you legally bought.
@@jQuse Purchasing a physical disk is also just a license, just one that happens to allow resale because you technically do own the disk, just not the data on it. That's just how software distribution works -- otherwise, anyone who bought a disk with anything could just copy the contents and sell it as though they've made it.
That is the thing people can't seem to understand. Steam also gives you that power, you can download the game, save it like that or you can make a backup, and restore it offline. That's not the problem. STEAM is just distribution, IT'S NOT A DRM. The problem is that most developers make their game ping to a random server, even offline games. Having said that, there are games on steam that do let you download and use them outside of steam, a quick example is literally a valve game like Half-life 1 (and probably 2 too). So, No, GOG is not doing anything steam hasn't already been doing for like 20 years.
Back in the day, Steam also said that they would release all the games to you, DRM free, if they went under. This was obviously before they had thousands of games under their belt.
Thank you. Someone else said it. At this point, i think it'd come down to publisher. Steam would contact who they could, kf they don't respond, game is lost, but if they greenlight the removal of the drm you can get it from a server before x date.
@@forgotten893 It's too late. They already removed access to Steam games you bought (Sorry. "Licensed") if you didn't update Windows. They should have said "You won't have access to your Steam profile and achievements anymore and you can't redownload what you delete after this point, but you can still play what you paid for," so long as you keep the files on your computer."
@cvdinjapan7935 Which games have been removed from people's libraries that have been published by Valve? I know Half Life: Source got taken off the Steam Store, but it's still giving me the option to re-install it
@@forgotten893 I didn't say removed from the library. I said removed access. A few months to a year ago, I got a message on Steam that the Steam application would no longer run on Windows 7 past a certain date. Meaning at that point, I would lose access to all of the games on my account (even though they could run perfectly well on Windows 7). I can only regain access to the games if I get a new operating system. I had hoped that they would still let me play the games after they stopped supporting Windows 7, but no. Sony did a similar bone-headed move with the PS3, wherein the latest update requires me to validate the PS3 with a QR code. I don't have a phone, so I can't validate it. I can't access trophies or download games from the store anymore. Although I can play most of what's already saved on my PS3, Scott Pilgrim VS the World associates your user ID with your save. When I tried to play it, the game demanded a user ID and could not start a game, even while offline. I could only watch the intro.
@@sens_120ms His son or sons would take over. Assuming he instilled same ideals and morals and does not make valve public company beholden to shareholders.
??? family sharing got a regional restriction and one year cool down, instead of fully copying consoles and streaming sites they took one feature out and replaced with another while being intrusive asf
@@be0wulfmarshallz I don't know anything about Assassin's Creed. I just don't want to "license" games. I want to download them and then have free access to them on my own terms.
Gabe has established a strong reputation, and I'm concerned that once he leaves, the values he upholds may not be maintained by the next CEO or whoever takes charge.
I don't remember where I read this so take this with a grain of salt, but supposedly the whole upper board of Valve is built of people who share Gabe's vision and even if Gabe dies everything will go on like it has until now.
To be honest this has the potential to blow up into finally discussing the issue of “Game ownership” in court. And I think it may need to happen. With most products you spend a one time fee for (usually called purchasing or buying) you get a bill of sale to show ownership of said item(s) do you not still receive such things after a game purchase? Physical or digital? You could argue that they define it differently in their terms, which is fair but is exactly why I think it may finally need to be pushed to court. And I think Valve would be the best way to set a precedent. It’s a scary thought of what could happen if we lose, but we could stand to gain much and more if we win. I’d risk my entire game collection to set precedent that we do indeed own our games. If several thousand people are willing to do the same, then we may have a case in our hands. At least that’s one man’s opinion
Yep. It’s worked well because Valve is generally a decent company, but it’s insane that massive sums of real money that you spent on games are dependent on the existence of an account which can easily be lost/terminated. If you buy a game digitally, you should get to keep it regardless of what happens to your account. Online games are still free to deny you access to their servers for violations of rules around cheating/behaviour, but outright not being able to play even an offline game anymore that you paid money for is insane.
They send you "receipts" and it's logged to your account transactions, but they are still "licenses". It's weird, because I swear I thought I heard a decade+ ago that Gabe had said that Steam would "figure out a way to keep players to access their games if the company went down. Of course, that's not in the EULA at all. This new family sharing feels a lot like passing physical copies of games you own, which is great and technically how it always should have been, but it is publisher/dev opt in. As long as Gabe is alive, I think it'll be "fine" but when he goes I am hoping his son fills in and doesn't ruin it.
I agree; I wouldn’t want to be banned and lose access to the games I love just because of a rental agreement. When you purchase a game on the Steam platform, it clearly states "buy" rather than "rent."
As much good will as Steam gets these days, they've had the same iron grip on the PC gaming community that Microsoft does over the OS landscape. They might be a little friendlier on the surface, but having read through the last several TOS agreements, they are slowly sliding into the less consumer friendly 'devil you don't' kind of company.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oqDownload the offline files and save them to your storage drive. I have 6TB of GOG game files. I always play installed GOG games from the desktop. No one has the ability to restrict my playing their games in any way. They are my owned games. That’s why I don’t use Galaxy, just in case they change their mind one day.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oqFuck does that mean? You can hold the installer and use it without an account. Technically if you distribute it, it's a copyright violation. That's all. There is still no drm and obviously no ties to any online service to USE the said installer/game. What is your argument even? That you can't distribute it? Yeah, obviously. Or you're just wrong
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq yes, I do, that's literally what they are about. I've copied my gog installer on another laptop(one where I didn't have gog client installed and didn't log into the account there) and the game installed perfectly and worked. This is a perfect alternative to piracy. A gog representative said in an interview once "we are all about being DRM-free. So you could go to a forest if you wished so, installed the game on your laptop and played as much as you wanted without the need for online connection"
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq yup we dont own the offline installer but we have a copy of the said installer that we can use anytime we want right? thats the same as owning it, pretty sure they can't do anything once we have our own copy of the installer that we can use to install the game anytime, the good thing about GOG is that if you lose that installer you can just go back to them and download the installer how many times you want, steam dont do that which is why its better if you ask me downside about GOG is that they only have few games compare to steam
Imagine if the "monopoly" (it's actually market leadership ;) ) was in the hand of ANY other game company in the world. We'd be cooked. Zero consumer-friendly policies, zero user reviews, poor features, no mod support, nothing. Thank God it's Valve and not another company!
The problem is Gabe won't live forever and then some typical "nickel & dime'er" corporate shill will take over and try to maximize profit above all else.
@@JamesSmith-sw3nk it always happens ....Walmart was the best damn retailer for both customers and employees all through out the late 70's and 80's . then in 1992 sam walton died. first his son took over and wanted to cut cost further to increase profit margins , so they started producing their own generic brand of foods (great value). this allowed them to raise prices of the name brands to what every one else was charging for them , while stil being able to claim that wal-mart cost less than the competition. from there it was jsut a downward roll.
Not really worried. If Valve goes rouge, I'll just remove their DRM from my digital games and continue to play them without Steam. And I do think they could go rouge eventually. I don't trust Steam, I trust myself, which is why having an open platform is important. I have choices and control.
The "license" is just a term made up by companies to take away rights from consumers, like the right to resale. You DO own the copy of the game you buy.
@@Razumen What copy? Do you have the right use the first download you made and no redownloads? Licensing as a practice started due to unclear copyright laws surrounding software, this was cleared a while ago for physical mediums, nonetheless it becomes even more complicated with digital storefronts instead of disks, where you could still theoretically depend on copyright instead of a license.
@@anonymousx6651 correct me if i'm wrong but in GOG pretty sure you can download the installer of the game that you purchase as many times as you want right?
I’ve had steam since 2004 and have 332 games. The only reason I’d ever sue steam is if they took access to them away. Otherwise I ain’t worried about it.
What makes you think you can sue them? It is stated in the agreement that you don't own the games and STEAM can terminate your account. You clicked Agree.
But steam does take access to your games if you get forum ban in rare circumstances You don't see the post in social medias like Facebook or reddit because of the moderators and you can only see them in niche corner of internet called 4chan or 2chan
steam currently disabled family sharing across regions and added a one year timer on top (after netflix rolled around their regional restrictions for some companies )on the excuse they are combating "account sellers" like that is ever going to ever come up in their radar financially and even matters to them when it's poor people getting banned later. Then they took out custom music from launcher which is still on this day has memory leak issues and eats up performance. I could go on and on but this is very clearly they are degrading services just to have more control and of course just like every other pc publisher make sure the pc market they have no rights in owning. Steam is not your friend, better start making preparations now.
Are you just completely stupid? 'family sharing across regions' is something the service was literally never intended to be used for. It absolutely WILL come up for them financially when publishers realize what it was being used for and start threatening lawsuits over aiding and abetting piracy. Valve has a consistent history of looking the other way while whistling while consumers use their services for out of the ordinary things, until it is brought to them by publishers alongside threat of lawsuits. Believe it or not, Valve does have to act when they can't lean on plausible deniability anymore. 'custom music from launcher'? Steam music player was buggy, wasn't used by most users, and was basically a drain on resources that took time to maintain, let alone fix, that could be better aimed at other things. It also didn't work across all games, as some had varying issues with the overlay. Noone I know of actually used the steam music player. Pretty much everyone used winamp, Foobar, Jaangle, WMP, whatever else external player and simply set up their playlists before going in-game, as well as learning the basic windows media shortcuts to let them skip tracks, start/stop music, etc. God forbid we talk about this 'making sure you have no rights in owning' valve is a DISTRIBUTOR. They are not the ones who decided noone would own games. The only games they have ANY legitimacy in deciding ownership of, are those they themselves develop and publish. Valve's power in this situation is limited to content delivery and their social features. There is nothing stopping an indie dev from declaring that by purchasing a license for their game, you are granted a perpetual, non-retractible right to have access to a copy at any point in the future, until such time as the indie dev is no longer able to provide resources to grant you access to that copy, after having sent you a USB drive or CD with a non-drm installer on it containing the latest and final version of the game. This would not magically be undone by steam having an agreement regarding passing the terms of sale and licensing for individual products back to the publishers of games should those publishers wish to have separate agreements. Which is what that change in terms actually means. It basically says 'steam does not grant you rights to stuff purchased through the store and associated services', because steam CANNOT grant those rights.
The thing you say at 7:05 is factually wrong. Valve enforces that rule ONLY for Steam keys. You can sell your game at whatever price you want on other platforms as long as it is not a Steam key. The reason is that when you buy a key from another store like Green Man Gaming for example, Valve doesn't get a single cent but it still allows you to redeem the key on their platform, keep the game in your library forever and use their servers to download it. In other words you are taking advantage of the benefits of the Steam platform like the workshop and the availability to download it whenever you want and as many times as you want for free while Steam is shouldering all the server costs without getting anything from you. So get your facts straight first and be very careful with what you wish. If Steam and Gabe go away and the only alternatives are Epic, MS, Sony and EA things are going to get really really bad for us gamers.
Imagine being a steam fanboy lol and falling for valve pr marketing lies There's entire lawsuit which proved that Steam enforced price parity rule for developers and publishers this was without the steam keys like you are mentioning and Steam lost that lawsuit recently that's what lead to Steam subscriber agreement changes because Law companies found the loophole with the price parity abuse with the consumer side and valve changed the agreement so steam customers can no longer participate in the upcoming arbitration lawsuit which gives more power to small individuals 10k steam accounts which participated in the lawsuit that steam lost are losing their games becuase of the new steam user agreement rule clause of retroactive meaning from the past to future and do you see their complaints on social media no its all shadow banned and censored You don't get it Steam literally took another consumer right away and you praise it as its good for consumers Its obvious fanboy like you don't understand inb4 I get called epic shill I have Steam account with 1k+ paid games
This! I was going to write that there is a lot of misinformation in this video. This is one of them. Other things is that even on GoG you dont own the game. You still only own a license, just like on steam. The only difference is that they allow you to physically back up game installers. You dont actually own physical games either in a pure legal sense, but physical copies are easier to resell.
My comment got deleted interesting You're so wrong its insane Valve lost the arbitration lawsuit because the rule was not about steam keys why do steam fanboys always have to lie and say its about Steam keys if lawsuit really was about steam keys they wouldn't have lost that lawsuit even the judge decision was based on that go read the court files before making this misinformed comment and get the facts straight smh Who says you have to buy games from them or even Steam
@@mickmoon6887 What are you talking about? The arbitration in the video was not finished and was not lost by Valve. It was just a claim by one the party making the lawsuit. In no way does it prove anything. The only thing they won was that part of the suit was not dismissed before trial. But another part of it was. So now we have to get an actual trial to have a look at the claims.
Indeed. The fact that certain games and visual novels need to be censored first before they're allowed on Steam is insanity. Who decides what is "too extreme" and what isn't?
@@Cyborg647 Most visual novels require an "uncensor patch" that has to be downloaded from a third party website. So the Steam releases are almost always censored. And some games are even banned completely from the Steam store. Look up Evenicle 2 for example, that game wasn't even allowed on Steam to begin with because of its adult content. Kinda weird since Steam allows games like GTA 5 but not certain other games? Yeah I don't get it.
@@Cyborg647 They're wishy-washy with no reliable policy, plus they can be pushy in censoring things. Since they have such a hold on game sales, a lot of publishers will just censor stuff. The companies that offer patches are cool, but offering a patch is always extra work, so it's never a guarantee they will. Steam is west coast, so there's an underlying hate of anything anime or anime-like in particular.
Japanese indie fans know how scummy Steam is Its worse than what Visual novels had to endure if you can access 2chan japanese 4chan archives you could read the plight of those devs against steam they couldn't do anything instead they sell their games on Comitket
The day Valve goes public is the day we are screwed. If Gabe is still working at 61, he might just keep going. If he really wanted to retire he would have retired by now. Shoot he would have retired years ago.
The big companies don't pay 30% of sales. There was big news a couple years ago about how big companies can pay a massive multi-million dollar fee to negotiate a different percentage. I can't remember the details.
I remember the day Steam came out. Myself and friends thought it was bonkers to not own games and trust a company to live long enough to keep our games. Took us a few years to trust Steam but you know, one must go with the flow. And here I am 12 years a Steam user. I don't like not owning games. We don't get a box set with trinkets like we used to, that I miss. Not saying Steam is perfect but they are like those companies that look after their customers, no crappy corporate tactics. They just treat their customers nicely and just leave you alone. Buy a game, play it when you want, offer you a forum, a place to say if a game is good or rubbish so people can make a formed choice. A lot of greedy unfriendly corporate souless companies could learn a lot from steam. They don't have to be sh*tty.
I have never trusted Steam, and I rarely buy games there. When I buy a game on GOG and download (and back up) the offline installer, that game can't be taken away from me even if GOG goes under or massively changes how it operates. Steam is a well designed and functional service, but the risk of having games disappear is always present. Gabe might be mostly doing things right, but he won't be around forever. New leadership could take the company in a very different direction, or the current owners could decide to sell the company and take the cash. What if one of the bad actors in the industry, such as Tencent or Electronic Arts, buys Valve? I've been a gamer since the late 1970s, and I take the long view of things. I still play games that are 40+ years old. I've seen many seemingly solid video game companies either go bad or go out of business. Electronic Arts and Activision used to be great companies. Atari collapsed, and the name got purchased. Nowadays, it's a shadow of its former self. Commodore, once an industry giant, is no longer with us. When I'm rotting away in the old folks' home in twenty years or so (assuming I live that long), I still want access to the collection of games that I have accumulated over my lifetime. I am confident that the games I downloaded from GOG will work as long as I have hardware that is compatible with them, but as for Steam, I can't be confident that my small Steam library will be intact in twenty years. It's possible that some games will go away and I'll have to sail the seven seas to recover them. It's also possible that Steam will go out of business, and I wouldn't count on their promise to remove DRM if this happens. This possibility may seem absurd now, but fortunes for companies can take a drastic turn. If someone had told me back around 2000 that Sears would totally collapse and would be nearly gone in twenty years, I wouldn't have believed it. A few serious mistakes by top management could send Steam into a death spiral, and nobody will see it coming. The vultures will swoop in and buy up the pieces, and the service, if it remains online, will surely degrade considerably.
@@Bullminator As far as I know, nobody has ever discovered such a thing. If it existed and someone discovered and publicized it, I'm sure it would be a major scandal.
Valve and Steam is: - Not Facebook, not Microsoft, not Google, not Apple, not Amazon, not Nvidia, not Tencent etc.. - Well-balanced in price/performance hand-held gaming hardware with Linux-based OS. - Properly working platform with no high, critical, logical, or deception bugs. - Solid customer service with responsive issue-solving practices. - Not Chinese and not Russian company. It's enough to convince me to become a consumer. I use GOG as well. Both are good platforms. I've never had any problem with these two. All of the other gaming online stores - don't work, don't care about customers, and have security questionable practices.
@@chrismay2298 Dude, Russia is literally tricking people into the military, then makes them pay for their equipment and gets them killed in pointless battles. They have like 50k losses for a town of pre-war population
I'm not a lawyer, I approach this topic from a societal and philosophical point of view: I see a few issues with digital goods and ownership. The best example I could come up with is to compare it to a book. A book is a physical object, you can own a book, you can use it in various different ways, as a stand, as kindling, rip out the pages build paper planes with them, scribble in it and read it's contetnts. A computer is a physical object you can use it as a stand, you can use it as a paper weigt, trebuchet ammunition, spacial heater and in a roundabout way scribble into it and read it's contents. What you don't own in a book is the specific way the characters in it are arranged, you are not allowed to copy and redistribute this specific arrangement of characters. That's called copyright. The same is true for software, to use it you have to aquire a copy. Now there are different ways of optaining a copy. The rights holder prints you a book or presses a cd and sends you a physical copy. With this specific copy you can do anything you like. The rights holder allows others to produce a copy and to distribute it to you, that's a license. Now it get's tricky. From this perspective you can argue that Steam is a giant xerox machine and you press the button to get a copy, so you are the one copying the work. So you need a license that allows you to copy and distribute the book to yourself. If you were to recieve a copy like a book, you'd need to keep tabs on your gmaes yourself and might even be forced to buy them again once you deleted them from all your devices. So while, yeah you seem to be in a leagally more precarious situation, sicne you "don't own the game", it's a legal agreement that makes the way Steam works for you (keeping the stuff in the cloud and grabbing it on demand) possible in the first place. Once you obtained your copy(s) you can handle them as you see fit as long as don't exploit the copyright past the scale granted to you by said licnese.
when you purchase a game you press the "buy button" right? At what point does logic bend so far that "buying" becomes renting or even leasing and stops being owning?
It's correct. But in the vast majority of games sold on Steam, you still depend on Steam to check your license ownership, now there are methods to workaround that check because it doesn't work like anti-tamper, but in stores like GOG, you don't need to go through a license check, you have full control over your files and therefore your copy. There isn't a true sense of ownership without owner's perpetual control over it.
@@TioRataMaybe it's just because I mostly play indie games but pretty sure the majority of my Steam library is DRM free, and I have over 100 games. The list of DRM free games on Steam seems pretty damn big to me.
7:01 this is factually untrue. You can sell your game cheaper on any other platform you'd want at any point in time. What you can't sell cheaper is a Steam key, which Valve lets you generate for free with no limits as a publisher, without taking the 30% cut. Otherwise, you selling Steam keys cheaper would cost Valve money for maintaining the user accounts and providing them with the download for your game without them getting a penny for it, and that is why they don't want you to do it. As long as you aren't selling your game cheaper on another platform AS A STEAM KEY which Valve doesn't take a cut from, you're all fine.
Market leadership is not "monopoly" and my problem with most of the other store fronts is that they don't have a review section, no workshop/mod support, no steam input or similar, no proper support for friend lists/group chat/group calls, no gaming groups, no invisible mode, no offline mode, no family share, no cloud saves for many games, also no proper game recommendations, no discussions, no comment sections on updates, if they even show the updates/patch notes, also none of the others offer VR support, no multi PC usage as they log you out soon as you log in on another PC... and probs a lot more things... Is not even worth considering the others competitive as they are so far behind 😂.
Steam input is Very important for me, because i use a ps4 and steam controller. Neither of them work in 90%+ of games out of the box Like i have very few games with native ps4 controller support and not all of them support wireless use (Helldivers, rocket league)
@@willywonka6487 you should look it up... Monopoly - the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service. They don't have exclusive possessions except their own games/hardware, 3rd parties come to publish, while they publish everywhere else. You wanna say that because the players chose it is a monopoly? No man, is free will, the other services are just worse.
@@willywonka6487op guy listed a lot of features that dont exist in the competition. That means it's not a monopoly in the way that it just forces others out, but by providing a FAR Supperior service
The PMFN is actually incorrect, what the article actually refers to is that developers can create how many keys they want of their game, if you sell those you get 100% cut, valve just prohibits you to sell those keys below the price on steam (basically they prohibite you from ripping them off)
youre buying a license to access the game, so no, youre wrong. You do own the license to access the game. Steam is very clear that youre buying a license, not the game.
if you want to actually own your game, go with Gog. They are all for owning games, and legally. Unlike Steam, it allows to keep the installer forever AND they optimize old games to work on modern operating systems.
Call me live under the cave, but I never know why people use GOG I thought it just a launcher for old games, now I’m surprise that still there is a place where you can actually have the game on PC. However do you guys remember DVD for PC?
Well now you know why people use GOG. I have over 400 games on GOG that are mine forever. I can play them direct from shortcut and never have to sign in anywhere to play. Because I download the game files and save them on a storage drive, the games are mine forever. No licensing use like everyone else.
No, it's not just a launcher. In fact, using their launcher, Galaxy is completely optional. I only download the offline installers and game files and save them. I run the installers and then play the games from a shortcut. It's much the same as it was for non-drm DVD and CD games.
Valve is by far the most end user friendly company in the whole gaming space. + they did soooo much towards Linux Gaming. The reason Steam is the market leader is because it's simply the best. And the reason why others (like Epic) take less of a cut is because otherwise not a single game would be released there. Guess what'd happen if they had the biggest user base?
I bought a native game that the dev removed its support 6 months after and it was basically deleted from my machine (never downloaded the windows version). Dev says I'm entitled to a refund, and to contact steam because that's where I bought the game from. Steam says I can't refund because I owned it over 14 days. Yeah really "friendly". And also against the law in EU (since 2022) where nowadays digital goods need to have a 2 year warranty.
The part about Valve doing much for Linux gaming is true. They deserve huge respect for that, and I say that as someone who has never used Linux. However, saying that Steam simply is the best I think is a bit strange when GOG exists and allows you to actually own the games you buy with no DRM. I can never call a subscription based storefront that can take away your games at any time the best (and Valve has done that before).
Sure, There are some physical games will need a digital download to get the full game, But those are few and far between and the majority of them don't have that issue.
You don't ACTUALLY own your favorite video games, especially if you get them in discs from GameStop. I say this because these games are software, which software CANNOT be bought physically, and can ONLY be bought digitally. Physical copies of games on discs or cartridges don't help because those things are still software. So therefore, the "You'll own nothing and be happy" myth is actually true. Nobody owns games AT ALL. "oH bUt PhYsIcAl MeDiA iS bEtTeR tHaN dIgItAl MeDiA bEcAuSe YoU aCtUaLlY oWn YoUr GaMe!!!!!1111!!!11!!" Bullshit. You will NEVER own a single video game you pay for. You will ALWAYS only own the license to play them. You can't just own the software of the game. You own a copy of the disc, but you DON'T own the software of the game. GOG or physical discs do NOT count as owning the entire game, only a copy of it through a license.
@@ThunderTheYellowJolteonThe game files I have are mine. When you pay for a game once and download it, that's not renting. Renting would be something like paying a monthly fee to play an online game like WOW, or ESO. What companies can take away is access to online services, like banning your account. That's exactly what's going to happen here, except now this will extend to singleplayer games. If I buy a singleplayer game, their company can't legally take it from me, or come to my house and demand to return the product. People who say, "i owwwwn the gameeeee" aren’t wrong-they have a point. It’s not unreasonable to want ownership rights or to push back against the idea that licensing replaces that. Supporting this just makes it easier for companies to take more control away from consumers. In other words, I don't understand what's with people like you wanting to be screwed over by companies. What do you even get from this? An "I'm a corporate shill" medal?
Once again, for those who were born yesterday or who are unable to read. We have NEVER owned games we 'buy'. Ever. Period. Even physical copies grant you a licence to use the software on that disc/cart/whatever. The licenser may not have been able to just pull your ability to play it, but that doesn't change the fact that at no point have we had unfettered ownership of any game or software product we 'bought'. It has always been buying a license. It has always been very clear, too, as it's all spelled out in the License Agreement that everybody agreed to when creating an account or installing the game. You have all stated that you read and understood the terms, yet, here everyone is, demonstrating that they did not, in fact, read or understand the terms.
Eh, CS2 is an update to a 10+ year old game. BUT, It was a terrible update. It should've been a seperate launcher, like Source to GO. TF2 is 17 years old. Deadlock's a new IP and I doubt they aren't going to try and pimp it through esports and battle passes like DotA for atleast 3 years.
Some things to note. All games (physical/"digital") are licensed, not all games have DRM, Steam lets it up to the developer if their game should have DRM, GOG forces no DRM. Disks being under license has historical reasons, since copyright around software used to be unclear. Digital storefronts use a license simply because you don't or can't buy a copy, you download a new copy whenever you want and on any device, this wouldn't be possible if the store sold you a copy instead of license. Perhaps you could buy unlimited access to copies, but per first sale doctrine you'd be able to legally sell anyone one of your infinite copies.
I'd have to find it again, just an interesting thing about steam, is that I beleive they've said that they have internal system and plans that if for some reason steam as a company would no longer be able to function, they do have or are developing ( we don't know the state) a way to release your steam library to you / remove the steam DRM for them. I remember reading this, but I haven't got the source- just it sounds far more genuine coming from Steam than it would any other company.
Steam is still printing money, though? Piracy has never really hurt them. People will always pirate, and that really only becomes an "issue" when they lose a considerable amount of money because of it.
It depends on the region I guess, here in Canada and my province there are arbitration laws against digital storefronts revoking access to games. The license you purchase is considered the same as a digital copy and thus cannot be revoked.
Remember that the physical media is often not the solution, because: - The box only has a digital code to download the game. - There's a disc, but it only has a few files, the actual game must be downloaded and the disc is only a key. - Sometimes, only parts of the game are available on disc, you can play without internet, but not the full game. - You can play the game without internet with just a disc, but not the good version of the game, because at launch, the game is full of problems and you need to download a patch later or there's a patch since day 1. - Sometimes, the patch is so big that you are almost downloading the whole game. - You still need to connect to the internet to buy and download DLC. - To play online, you need to download the most recent version. - Many games are online-only, require a constant connection to the internet, even on single-player, and to make things worse, the servers often close, making your physical copy a paperweight.
no its not. stop listening to these type of people bro nothings gonna happen literally. people kept crying since the xbox 360 era about this and nothing happen.
One of the big things for me about Steam that stands out. Is that even if a company gets shut down or their game gets removed from the store on Steam due to licensing problems or something else. I still do not lose access to the game I purchased and if I build a new gaming PC I can still re-download and install it with no problem. And on top of that I can still obtain Steam keys through other sites like G2A. If this was Sony, not only would they keep you from ever downloading it again. They may even delete the files or do something that keeps you from ever launching the game ever again.
@@Betonoszlop we already have seen in history the top corporative empires being destroyed by the uninterested descendency of the one who raised said empire. also his son is a nascar pilot, pretty much sure he will not care about the company and the other executives will just do with it as they like. i truly hope im wrong here.
No. Youre not renting them, youre not paying continuous fees, there is no return date. Youre not buying games, youre buying a license to access the game.
That was always the case. There is a new law in California that forces companies to spell out that you dont own the game in the EULAS. Thus they have clarified the EULA but nothing in practice have changed because this was already always the case.
The difference between PC and consoles is that on PC when it comes to buying digital games, if a game gets taken away from you, you can acquire it by other means... I've using Steam since 2004, so far no complaints, BUT you're absolutely right you DON'T own your games, the reason why in 2020 I set up a file server and started downloading ISOs all of the games I have on Steam, just in case S hits the fan. I know MP games cannot be backed up but I would say I have 90+% of my 20 year library backed up and secured.
@@manarya190 I have a 16TB NAS, I also have several 4tb external drives with copies all of al my family pic and games, inside a fireproof box… if anything happens to me, it will be just plug n play for wife and kids 🤣
It's not about trust but who you prefer to give your money to. Steam: people who bring you great service Corporation: people who lure you with goodies and when you're on the hook, they'll hike up the price of the goodies I am fully aware that Steam is a private, for profit company. But when you put on the table Steam, Epic, Ubi, GOG... I will still buy the games on Steam, even at slightly higher cost
This looks like some institution needs to force the monopoly to have them remove those problematic clauses from their TOS, by a court order, so they can be held liable if they go against the court order.
Correct me if i am wrong but isn't it Steam Keys that Valve looks after? If a Dev generates a Steam key and sells it somewhere else for 10 Euro, Steam looses on its cut and still has to pay for the Servers. So it makes Sense that Vavles pushes this Rule. There is also the point that for example Darkest Dungeon is 3,50 Euro (huge sale) on GoG right now while it is 25 Euro on Steam it is also 23 Euro on Epic. So how is Valve the evil guy here if the Consumer is loyal to Steam? Is this just an american thing that i am to europen to understand? Or am i actually stupid and missing something?
My account turns 16 in a few months. My original account was created January 2005. Because it was required to install Half Life 2. I thought Steam was stupid back then. It was one of the first games that required an internet connection to install and play for the first time. Well in Australia 2005 dial-up internet was still the most widely service. Every other game PC game was on CD. You could install and uninstall as many times, on as many machines, as you wanted.
Gog is still better. 1. Zero DRMs 2. No online activation required 3. Always optimized for latest operating systems 4. Allows to download installers and *actually own* games as opposed to just renting them. 5. And despite the first 4, reasonable prices. I wish I found out about it earlier, and not like a month ago.
Id love that too but considering that they cant hold as much data as most Triple A or Quadruple A Games these days, and how many Companies are basically trying to ditch it along with most Gaming PC’s not having Disc Drives anymore, its chances Currently returning to popularity are slim.
I kinda agree, but at the same time it's nice not having to insert the disc of every game you want to play. In the digital age, being able to download a completely DRM-free copy of the game you have bought on GOG is the best experience you can get.
Welcome to the age of the Retroactively Amended Purchase Experience (R.A.P.E.) where corporations believe they are entitled to strip you of all your constitutional rights because they coerced you under duress to tick a "yes" box on a screen without providing any option to say "No" to them. Also, it's real nice that the various consumer protection agencies response to this absurdity has basically been "drink Brawndo, it's got what plants crave, it's got electrolytes!"
Without even looking at the comments, I already know that thousands of soulless, non-self-thinking creatures will defend Valve to the death in a completely alien and reality-distorting way. Exactly those that are the biggest problem here.
Valve helped create and funds the development of an open source gaming platform. You can trust Steam enough to guarantee you'll always have access to your games regardless of what Microsoft and Apple do.
@@evaone4286 i wasn't there when steam first launched but ive been 'part' of steams environment since 2007. never have i had any experience when i couldn't access my games in those years. it is true steam has gone down a few times over the years but i could still play most of my games regardless, which means i am accessing them all be it locally when steam was down. please understand the question and/or statement a person makes.
@@evaone4286as long as they don’t pull bullshit then yes, hearing about this news has me in a bit of a 50/50 with valve but i kind of trust them…i still prefer that gamers should have Digital Ownership of their games. And not have it taken away from them
I bet all my coins that at this part, 15:44, any lawyer in the world can classify this as blackmail. How can someone stop playing their 1K+ games because Valve says that you accept the terms by accessing the games in your library? Remember, the counterpart to this is that Valve doesn't allow you to transfer or sell your account. You are essentially a hostage of Valve, for better or worse. From their perspective, the 'good' is that you buy their games, but the 'bad' is that you can’t do anything except delete your account. You can’t play, sell, or transfer your account. Here in Brazil, any EULA that is completely one-sided in favor of a company is easily broken. I hope the same thing happens in a developed country like the USA. On the other hand, I hope this problem forces Valve to let us sell our accounts.
If the games were transferable, they would lose out on a lot of revenue. They don't do it, because it would be a bad business move. No one is forcing them, so they don't have any incentive to do so. If Epic wanted to compete, they would have to make their games transferable.
There's this thing called piracy that everyone who complains about not owning their games likes to hate on but is one way to ensure you own what you own. You can even pay for the game on Steam if you want and then download it again with a magnet link on another site as a backup Nobody likes monopolies but there's already a ticket around it and I know people will say they shouldn't have to pirate something to own it, and I agree but it is what it is until it changes which it doesn't look like it will any time soon
6:54 Seems 100% reasonable to me. It's already extremely generous that Steam allows you to sell Steam Keys without taking a cut. Letting them also sell those keys at a discount? Every game dev on Earth would just slap the price down by 20% below Steam and Steam would quickly go bankrupt providing the servers and whatnot for those games for free.
Epic Launcher is shit compared to steam, Steam has everything, player profiles customization, screenshots, servers list, groups, worshops, collections, proton support, big picture, controller support, steam input, inventories, steam cards and so on. Nobody delivers anything simillar to that. Steam is just better launcher.
Are you sure you'd have to cancel your Steam account to sue Valve? At 14:40 when you start talking about this, in the first paragraph you have highlighted (I think it's paragraph 8 section B) it says you have to either cancel your account OR cease use of the subscriptions. To me the second option in the or statement is saying you can just stop using Steam instead of having to cancel it, so that would mean you temporarily sacrifice your use of Steam to sue them instead of full on cancellation.
It's simple. When you are in a position where you need an account to login to a platform to be able to buy, download and play a game. It simply means that you are at the mercy of the platform's company and your internet connection. There's no such thing as " owning games ". You simply get access when you " buy " a game on any of these platforms. The only thing you " own " if it can even be considered " owning ", is your account login info. That's it. When everything requires you to have an internet connection to use. That automatically means you don't own anything. That's just the way it is. There used to be a time before the internet when games were on physical media and didn't get updates and were complete products. But these times are long gone now. I don't even understand why conslow players are still buying games on discs as if the whole game is on the disc, when in reality they still have to download the game after they put in that disc, which is nothing more than an authentication for you to download the game. It makes no sense. Ownership died a long time ago and now we're simply paying for access.
Okay, but that doesn't give the store the right to withdraw your legitimately purchased copy. In the case of always online games, obviously, this type of game needs a server to work. But removing access from a single player game, for example, would be absurd. It looks more like a thief thing.
@@Seehara Isn't it obvious in what i said? The moment you sign up for any of these platforms, be it Steam or whatever. You should realize that when you invest into getting games on a platform. More or less that platform always has a chance, simply said, to collapse in a way, and for you to lose your stuff on it. I myself have over 250 games on Steam. And i'm completely aware that Valve has all the control over all my stuff i paid for. I've always known before i buy a game, that i'm paying for something that'll never truly be my own, instead i'll simply have full time access to it 24/7 in the case of games. Heck not even my Steam account is my own. It is in a sense a property of Valve. Gaben can do what he wants with anyone's Steam account at anytime. No account you have wherever is truly yours. And that's because of it being on the internet on a server which isn't yours in the first place. Simply put. If it's online it ain't ever truly yours. We don't own anything anymore, only the hardware we actually have in our hands be it a PC, conslow, smartphone, tablet or whatever. That's the only thing you own, the machine itself, nothing else.
@@Gielderst What worries me is not being the owner of the game, but rather someone simply starting to remove my access to the games simply because they decided to do so. Like what Ubisoft did with the Crew. And games start to leave my library, which would be terrible for me, especially since most of my games are single player, they don't need servers, matchmaking or anything like that.
I think most people are confused about owning games. Games are virtual theme parks and you buy a personal lifetime access ticket(license) to that theme park when you buy a game. You own the ticket, but not the theme park. The theme park operators reserves the right to deny access to the park. The only reason games sold on physical hardware feels like we owned them was because there was no other way to distribute games before the internet. Technically sharing physical games would be against the terms of service since the license is granted to the the person purchasing the game/ticket and it is not transferable but there was no real way for game companies to police that practice until we had online accounts.
We could NEVER trust Steam, they just had first mover advantage. The fact that Steam could simply remove my access to those purchases and essentially destroy my leisure time is sickening. I hope to see them sued into the stone age.
@@Martial-Mat so you rather see Steam get sued to the stone ages, are you hearing yourself? Steam is the last beacon of gaming and Linux and not only that if Steam/Valve goes down all chaos will break loose especially people who own Steam deck and people who want Valve to fund Linux, I’m a windows guy and Steam deck guy and I don’t want Linux to go down in shambles if Steam goes down especially Valve, again I will repeat this if Steam goes down that’s where everyone panic’s and the Linux community would panic without Steam do you really think other Launcher’s support Linux like Epic games and Ubisoft, I don’t get why people hate Valve even tho they are literally a last beacon of gaming and Linux.
@@rainbowdash3419 Another steam shill detected Steam last beacon of hope common shill narrative Steam created the battle passess popularized DRM Valve didn't fund linux Valve took credit of Wine devs and steam shills argue its Valve work insane People hate Valve because of the shady shit Valve did to the people like me and several others If you look at linux gaming commitments Nvidia and AMD did more pr commit for graphics drivers than Valve taking credits
Oh god, if steam was sued into non-existence, the entire PC gaming space would crumble. EA, Activision, and Microsoft would pounce on it and you'd be stuck with 100x worse companies running the whole show
@@rainbowdash3419 I don't want them to go down; I want them to have to try harder, be more honest, and more pro consumer, and less anti-competitive. I want them to be fined at least a billion and have to change the way they do business, including guarantees that our libraries will be permanently available, are transferable on death, and to see them stop controlling the market.
Asking for publishers is like asking an employee to not work for a competitor company in a way that would hurt your own company. It makes sense. But it's possible due to the fact that other launchers are trash. The only way to make steam not be able to do that is to give the ability to publishers to use an other launcher, but it implies using a much lower quality launcher to sell their games. As long as those launchers aren't improved, Steam will be in a monopoly because no one is actually trying to enter the market at that segment level. Monopoly exist because companies are trying to do indirect competition. Most launchers are just glorified windows explorers.
It's still really goofy that pirates actually own their games while paying customers don't
fr
So true 😂
I can literally double click an infinitely copieable .iso file, run an installer and I have far cry 3 up and running on any computer, double click the shortcut and it just boots right into the game, no getting double fisted by Ushite or steam
@@sourceeee Yes. Even if you do buy your games, in many cases it's just easier to still install a pirated copy to skip the launchers.
I always buy games I like after I pirate them, with new games it's just a better experience to get patches without a hassle. But every game that's out longer than 6 months, I'll always play the cracked version even if I bought the regular game just to skip opening Steam, never mind any extra launchers the game might need.
@@nilsholgersson7316 same. everything on point.
Yeah, digital owership laws need to be changed. If you buy it digitally, it should come with all the same rights as owning it physically. They don't advertise it as renting, they don't price them as rented products (the prices are as high as physical), but they can remove your access to it at any time and their ToS say you don't own it. That's messed up. The quicker governments catch on to this and force physical and digital parity the better.
They did this to shut down GameStop. GOG licenses your game to the account, same as steam, and people are too dumb to realize. Impulse was going to allow license reselling, then GameStop bought them out. Which is kinda insane they didn't roll out the feature, but GameStop killed its own business.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq
That's new news to me, interesting if true tbh.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq What do you mean by that? On GOG, you can download an offline and DRM-free copy of the game. Nobody in the world can take that away from your hard drive once it's there. Even if it turns out GOG would switch leadership and become a bad platform, they can't take away anyone's games, unlike Valve.
@@fakeninja4447 lol. Have fun fighting the piracy lawsuit without the account. Your offline installer is 100% illegal piracy without the online account. This is the problem with kids. I was around for actual disc based software, and your license was a key printed on the case. That's a physical offline license. GOG does NOT provide you an offline license. You clearly don't understand the definition of DRM, which is in the name. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT. GOG is managing your rights digitally. Like what IQ does a person have to have to not understand that. The whole DRM free thing is marketing lies, because they're referring to copy protection, which in itself is a lie because they have sold a few games with protection. The online account is an end run around users owning their licenses. They want to enforce everyone buying separate copies, eliminate legal resale, and license transfers. It's a scam like how discord claimed their service wasn't run like social media, while the EULA stated otherwise. People just believe marketing lies because they're gullible. Which is irritating. You're all signing petitions to ban women's suffrage and dihydrogen monoxide. Which honestly explains the vast majority of problems in modern society. Too many people believe lies, especially if it's lying by omission. If I go full conspiracy theory, this is why "global warming" became climate change to block lawsuits. Nobody questions anything or thinks for themselves.
@@fakeninja4447 The offline copy is PIRACY without a licence. You DON'T get an offline license. DRM = digital rights management. GOG is digitally managing your rights through the account. PC games used to be sold like console games on a disc. It's been tied to online accounts for 20 years, but that's not how it's supposed to work. The online account is the Trojan horse. It doesn't give you the license, your software is locked LEGALLY to the account. GOG is lying.
Great thing about GOG is that you can download and backup an installer. Even if GOG gets cancelled, shut down, game is removed from GOG, or game content is changed, you still have the installers if you backed them up. So you still can use what you legally bought.
This is why GOG is the best solution for owning games even better than physical media.
GOG is also just giving you a license; however the face that they give you the installers is a plus.
And if you didn't have a chance to back up the game for some reason there's a site with every gog game ever made backed up.
@@jQuse Purchasing a physical disk is also just a license, just one that happens to allow resale because you technically do own the disk, just not the data on it. That's just how software distribution works -- otherwise, anyone who bought a disk with anything could just copy the contents and sell it as though they've made it.
That is the thing people can't seem to understand. Steam also gives you that power, you can download the game, save it like that or you can make a backup, and restore it offline. That's not the problem. STEAM is just distribution, IT'S NOT A DRM. The problem is that most developers make their game ping to a random server, even offline games. Having said that, there are games on steam that do let you download and use them outside of steam, a quick example is literally a valve game like Half-life 1 (and probably 2 too). So, No, GOG is not doing anything steam hasn't already been doing for like 20 years.
If steam dies one day fitgirl is my new game launcher
I see you😂
This 💯
me too
😂 I can hear the Eastern acoustic orchestra playing in the Background when you lunch it
fitgirl does good work, definitely my go to when I visit the dark side for something.
Back in the day, Steam also said that they would release all the games to you, DRM free, if they went under. This was obviously before they had thousands of games under their belt.
Thank you. Someone else said it. At this point, i think it'd come down to publisher. Steam would contact who they could, kf they don't respond, game is lost, but if they greenlight the removal of the drm you can get it from a server before x date.
Could still apply, but only to the games they published specifically.
@@forgotten893 It's too late. They already removed access to Steam games you bought (Sorry. "Licensed") if you didn't update Windows. They should have said "You won't have access to your Steam profile and achievements anymore and you can't redownload what you delete after this point, but you can still play what you paid for," so long as you keep the files on your computer."
@cvdinjapan7935 Which games have been removed from people's libraries that have been published by Valve? I know Half Life: Source got taken off the Steam Store, but it's still giving me the option to re-install it
@@forgotten893 I didn't say removed from the library. I said removed access. A few months to a year ago, I got a message on Steam that the Steam application would no longer run on Windows 7 past a certain date. Meaning at that point, I would lose access to all of the games on my account (even though they could run perfectly well on Windows 7). I can only regain access to the games if I get a new operating system.
I had hoped that they would still let me play the games after they stopped supporting Windows 7, but no.
Sony did a similar bone-headed move with the PS3, wherein the latest update requires me to validate the PS3 with a QR code. I don't have a phone, so I can't validate it. I can't access trophies or download games from the store anymore. Although I can play most of what's already saved on my PS3, Scott Pilgrim VS the World associates your user ID with your save. When I tried to play it, the game demanded a user ID and could not start a game, even while offline. I could only watch the intro.
The only time I will lose my trust to Steam and go back pirating is when Steam goes public.
No one cares about you. See ya!
Capitalism ruins everything : fact
Gabe can't die.
I'm scared of this, Gabe is old and he can't live forever, if Gabe is gone, steam could very well be doomed.
@@sens_120ms His son or sons would take over. Assuming he instilled same ideals and morals and does not make valve public company beholden to shareholders.
steam families is INSANE to come out in 2024, thank god steam isnt on the stock market
??? family sharing got a regional restriction and one year cool down, instead of fully copying consoles and streaming sites they took one feature out and replaced with another while being intrusive asf
@@MGrey-qb5xz Consoles arre far less share friendly than steam.
wasn't there something like that in 2014 ish......
i may be thinking of something else
@@caliginousmoira8565there was a simplified and more restrictive version but it's been revamped
@@DragonOfTheMortalKombat wtf where did you pull that nonsense from?
"You will own nothing, and be happy" -WEF
Yawn.
the toucans allied with china wants you to acclimate to maoism
You vill eat ze bugz and live in ze pod
Does that mean I don't "own" the Steam Deck I bought from Valve directly? It's my hardware, I can do what I want with it.
piracy is freedom !
Long live GOG
Good topic. Thanks.
I just wish I could buy GOG cards at a store. All I ever see around here are Steam cards.
Is everyone really mad about AC: Shadows? Go back 4 years ago and everyone was raving about how AC should be in Japan.
@@be0wulfmarshallz I don't know anything about Assassin's Creed. I just don't want to "license" games. I want to download them and then have free access to them on my own terms.
Gabe has established a strong reputation, and I'm concerned that once he leaves, the values he upholds may not be maintained by the next CEO or whoever takes charge.
they wont. you will own nothing and you BETTER BE HAPPY
I don't remember where I read this so take this with a grain of salt, but supposedly the whole upper board of Valve is built of people who share Gabe's vision and even if Gabe dies everything will go on like it has until now.
@@lycanthoss until it doesn't..
I really hope gaben has a contingency plan to leave the company in good hands once he dies
Gabe must name a successor. One trained directly under him and has the same values as him.
To be honest this has the potential to blow up into finally discussing the issue of “Game ownership” in court. And I think it may need to happen. With most products you spend a one time fee for (usually called purchasing or buying) you get a bill of sale to show ownership of said item(s) do you not still receive such things after a game purchase? Physical or digital? You could argue that they define it differently in their terms, which is fair but is exactly why I think it may finally need to be pushed to court. And I think Valve would be the best way to set a precedent. It’s a scary thought of what could happen if we lose, but we could stand to gain much and more if we win. I’d risk my entire game collection to set precedent that we do indeed own our games. If several thousand people are willing to do the same, then we may have a case in our hands. At least that’s one man’s opinion
Yep. It’s worked well because Valve is generally a decent company, but it’s insane that massive sums of real money that you spent on games are dependent on the existence of an account which can easily be lost/terminated. If you buy a game digitally, you should get to keep it regardless of what happens to your account. Online games are still free to deny you access to their servers for violations of rules around cheating/behaviour, but outright not being able to play even an offline game anymore that you paid money for is insane.
They send you "receipts" and it's logged to your account transactions, but they are still "licenses". It's weird, because I swear I thought I heard a decade+ ago that Gabe had said that Steam would "figure out a way to keep players to access their games if the company went down. Of course, that's not in the EULA at all. This new family sharing feels a lot like passing physical copies of games you own, which is great and technically how it always should have been, but it is publisher/dev opt in. As long as Gabe is alive, I think it'll be "fine" but when he goes I am hoping his son fills in and doesn't ruin it.
I agree; I wouldn’t want to be banned and lose access to the games I love just because of a rental agreement. When you purchase a game on the Steam platform, it clearly states "buy" rather than "rent."
As much good will as Steam gets these days, they've had the same iron grip on the PC gaming community that Microsoft does over the OS landscape. They might be a little friendlier on the surface, but having read through the last several TOS agreements, they are slowly sliding into the less consumer friendly 'devil you don't' kind of company.
This is why stop killing games movement is so relevant, go support it if you can.
I wish more games were available on GOG or that all PC games were DRM free in general.
GOG still ties the license to the online account. You DON'T own the offline installer.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oqDownload the offline files and save them to your storage drive. I have 6TB of GOG game files. I always play installed GOG games from the desktop. No one has the ability to restrict my playing their games in any way. They are my owned games. That’s why I don’t use Galaxy, just in case they change their mind one day.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oqFuck does that mean? You can hold the installer and use it without an account. Technically if you distribute it, it's a copyright violation. That's all. There is still no drm and obviously no ties to any online service to USE the said installer/game. What is your argument even? That you can't distribute it? Yeah, obviously.
Or you're just wrong
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq yes, I do, that's literally what they are about. I've copied my gog installer on another laptop(one where I didn't have gog client installed and didn't log into the account there) and the game installed perfectly and worked. This is a perfect alternative to piracy.
A gog representative said in an interview once "we are all about being DRM-free. So you could go to a forest if you wished so, installed the game on your laptop and played as much as you wanted without the need for online connection"
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq yup we dont own the offline installer but we have a copy of the said installer that we can use anytime we want right?
thats the same as owning it, pretty sure they can't do anything once we have our own copy of the installer that we can use to install the game anytime, the good thing about GOG is that if you lose that installer you can just go back to them and download the installer how many times you want, steam dont do that which is why its better if you ask me
downside about GOG is that they only have few games compare to steam
tip: dont trust any company :/
you dont need to thats why there are contracts, but nobody is reading it ^^ and/or just accepts anything
Read the agreement before you sign it.
@@benedictjajo 😅
Steam isn’t just going to take all your games away
💀
Imagine if the "monopoly" (it's actually market leadership ;) ) was in the hand of ANY other game company in the world. We'd be cooked. Zero consumer-friendly policies, zero user reviews, poor features, no mod support, nothing.
Thank God it's Valve and not another company!
The problem is Gabe won't live forever and then some typical "nickel & dime'er" corporate shill will take over and try to maximize profit above all else.
@@JamesSmith-sw3nk that's what scares me too. When Gabe will step back, that's when we're gonna need to be worried...
@@JamesSmith-sw3nk Gaben plans to be immortal
@@JamesSmith-sw3nk it always happens ....Walmart was the best damn retailer for both customers and employees all through out the late 70's and 80's . then in 1992 sam walton died. first his son took over and wanted to cut cost further to increase profit margins , so they started producing their own generic brand of foods (great value). this allowed them to raise prices of the name brands to what every one else was charging for them , while stil being able to claim that wal-mart cost less than the competition. from there it was jsut a downward roll.
@@JamesSmith-sw3nk Damn that I am very fear
Not really worried. If Valve goes rouge, I'll just remove their DRM from my digital games and continue to play them without Steam. And I do think they could go rouge eventually. I don't trust Steam, I trust myself, which is why having an open platform is important. I have choices and control.
how can you even do that
@@Celatra Yes, I'd like to know too.
@@Celatra cracked EXEs
@@MisterChief711 that doesnt give any answers
@@Celatra what? do you not know what pirating games and cracks are? it's sure illegal but everyone knows that
5:12 "Good Old Gamer" you're so wrong and so right at the same time 😭
If you read GOG terms, legally u don't even own the games there but we own the license to play those games. Only difference is GOG games are DRM free.
The "license" is just a term made up by companies to take away rights from consumers, like the right to resale. You DO own the copy of the game you buy.
@@Razumen What copy? Do you have the right use the first download you made and no redownloads? Licensing as a practice started due to unclear copyright laws surrounding software, this was cleared a while ago for physical mediums, nonetheless it becomes even more complicated with digital storefronts instead of disks, where you could still theoretically depend on copyright instead of a license.
@@anonymousx6651 The copy you buy, duh.
@@anonymousx6651 correct me if i'm wrong but in GOG pretty sure you can download the installer of the game that you purchase as many times as you want right?
As long as Steam stays private we dont have to fear anything. Once its public you better look for a new Launcher
Do you remember your video "why steam Monopoly is a good thing", that's why any kind of Monopoly is not good.
steam monopoly is a good thing (its not even a monopoly)
I’ve had steam since 2004 and have 332 games. The only reason I’d ever sue steam is if they took access to them away. Otherwise I ain’t worried about it.
What makes you think you can sue them? It is stated in the agreement that you don't own the games and STEAM can terminate your account. You clicked Agree.
@@feizai245 Yes, but steam wont terminate your account because you're a customer.
But steam does take access to your games if you get forum ban in rare circumstances
You don't see the post in social medias like Facebook or reddit because of the moderators and you can only see them in niche corner of internet called 4chan or 2chan
Just pirate
@@knijn The point is, that users' legal standing is next to non exist and totally at STEAM's mercy.
steam currently disabled family sharing across regions and added a one year timer on top (after netflix rolled around their regional restrictions for some companies )on the excuse they are combating "account sellers" like that is ever going to ever come up in their radar financially and even matters to them when it's poor people getting banned later. Then they took out custom music from launcher which is still on this day has memory leak issues and eats up performance.
I could go on and on but this is very clearly they are degrading services just to have more control and of course just like every other pc publisher make sure the pc market they have no rights in owning. Steam is not your friend, better start making preparations now.
Are you just completely stupid? 'family sharing across regions' is something the service was literally never intended to be used for. It absolutely WILL come up for them financially when publishers realize what it was being used for and start threatening lawsuits over aiding and abetting piracy. Valve has a consistent history of looking the other way while whistling while consumers use their services for out of the ordinary things, until it is brought to them by publishers alongside threat of lawsuits. Believe it or not, Valve does have to act when they can't lean on plausible deniability anymore.
'custom music from launcher'? Steam music player was buggy, wasn't used by most users, and was basically a drain on resources that took time to maintain, let alone fix, that could be better aimed at other things. It also didn't work across all games, as some had varying issues with the overlay. Noone I know of actually used the steam music player. Pretty much everyone used winamp, Foobar, Jaangle, WMP, whatever else external player and simply set up their playlists before going in-game, as well as learning the basic windows media shortcuts to let them skip tracks, start/stop music, etc.
God forbid we talk about this 'making sure you have no rights in owning' valve is a DISTRIBUTOR. They are not the ones who decided noone would own games. The only games they have ANY legitimacy in deciding ownership of, are those they themselves develop and publish. Valve's power in this situation is limited to content delivery and their social features.
There is nothing stopping an indie dev from declaring that by purchasing a license for their game, you are granted a perpetual, non-retractible right to have access to a copy at any point in the future, until such time as the indie dev is no longer able to provide resources to grant you access to that copy, after having sent you a USB drive or CD with a non-drm installer on it containing the latest and final version of the game.
This would not magically be undone by steam having an agreement regarding passing the terms of sale and licensing for individual products back to the publishers of games should those publishers wish to have separate agreements. Which is what that change in terms actually means. It basically says 'steam does not grant you rights to stuff purchased through the store and associated services', because steam CANNOT grant those rights.
The thing you say at 7:05 is factually wrong. Valve enforces that rule ONLY for Steam keys. You can sell your game at whatever price you want on other platforms as long as it is not a Steam key. The reason is that when you buy a key from another store like Green Man Gaming for example, Valve doesn't get a single cent but it still allows you to redeem the key on their platform, keep the game in your library forever and use their servers to download it. In other words you are taking advantage of the benefits of the Steam platform like the workshop and the availability to download it whenever you want and as many times as you want for free while Steam is shouldering all the server costs without getting anything from you. So get your facts straight first and be very careful with what you wish. If Steam and Gabe go away and the only alternatives are Epic, MS, Sony and EA things are going to get really really bad for us gamers.
Imagine being a steam fanboy lol and falling for valve pr marketing lies
There's entire lawsuit which proved that Steam enforced price parity rule for developers and publishers this was without the steam keys like you are mentioning and Steam lost that lawsuit recently that's what lead to Steam subscriber agreement changes because Law companies found the loophole with the price parity abuse with the consumer side and valve changed the agreement so steam customers can no longer participate in the upcoming arbitration lawsuit which gives more power to small individuals
10k steam accounts which participated in the lawsuit that steam lost are losing their games becuase of the new steam user agreement rule clause of retroactive meaning from the past to future and do you see their complaints on social media no its all shadow banned and censored
You don't get it Steam literally took another consumer right away and you praise it as its good for consumers
Its obvious fanboy like you don't understand inb4 I get called epic shill I have Steam account with 1k+ paid games
This comment should be pinned, not enough people know about Steam key stores or how keys work.
This! I was going to write that there is a lot of misinformation in this video. This is one of them. Other things is that even on GoG you dont own the game. You still only own a license, just like on steam. The only difference is that they allow you to physically back up game installers. You dont actually own physical games either in a pure legal sense, but physical copies are easier to resell.
My comment got deleted interesting
You're so wrong its insane
Valve lost the arbitration lawsuit because the rule was not about steam keys why do steam fanboys always have to lie and say its about Steam keys if lawsuit really was about steam keys they wouldn't have lost that lawsuit even the judge decision was based on that go read the court files before making this misinformed comment and get the facts straight smh
Who says you have to buy games from them or even Steam
@@mickmoon6887 What are you talking about? The arbitration in the video was not finished and was not lost by Valve. It was just a claim by one the party making the lawsuit. In no way does it prove anything.
The only thing they won was that part of the suit was not dismissed before trial. But another part of it was. So now we have to get an actual trial to have a look at the claims.
Visual novels fans know how bad the approval process is on Steam.
Indeed. The fact that certain games and visual novels need to be censored first before they're allowed on Steam is insanity. Who decides what is "too extreme" and what isn't?
Censored in what way may i ask? Only because i seen some raunchy stuff on that catergory probably meant for adults only
@@Cyborg647 Most visual novels require an "uncensor patch" that has to be downloaded from a third party website. So the Steam releases are almost always censored. And some games are even banned completely from the Steam store. Look up Evenicle 2 for example, that game wasn't even allowed on Steam to begin with because of its adult content. Kinda weird since Steam allows games like GTA 5 but not certain other games? Yeah I don't get it.
@@Cyborg647 They're wishy-washy with no reliable policy, plus they can be pushy in censoring things. Since they have such a hold on game sales, a lot of publishers will just censor stuff. The companies that offer patches are cool, but offering a patch is always extra work, so it's never a guarantee they will.
Steam is west coast, so there's an underlying hate of anything anime or anime-like in particular.
Japanese indie fans know how scummy Steam is
Its worse than what Visual novels had to endure
if you can access 2chan japanese 4chan archives you could read the plight of those devs against steam they couldn't do anything instead they sell their games on Comitket
The day Valve goes public is the day we are screwed. If Gabe is still working at 61, he might just keep going. If he really wanted to retire he would have retired by now. Shoot he would have retired years ago.
The big companies don't pay 30% of sales. There was big news a couple years ago about how big companies can pay a massive multi-million dollar fee to negotiate a different percentage. I can't remember the details.
I remember the day Steam came out. Myself and friends thought it was bonkers to not own games and trust a company to live long enough to keep our games. Took us a few years to trust Steam but you know, one must go with the flow. And here I am 12 years a Steam user. I don't like not owning games. We don't get a box set with trinkets like we used to, that I miss. Not saying Steam is perfect but they are like those companies that look after their customers, no crappy corporate tactics. They just treat their customers nicely and just leave you alone. Buy a game, play it when you want, offer you a forum, a place to say if a game is good or rubbish so people can make a formed choice. A lot of greedy unfriendly corporate souless companies could learn a lot from steam. They don't have to be sh*tty.
I have never trusted Steam, and I rarely buy games there. When I buy a game on GOG and download (and back up) the offline installer, that game can't be taken away from me even if GOG goes under or massively changes how it operates. Steam is a well designed and functional service, but the risk of having games disappear is always present. Gabe might be mostly doing things right, but he won't be around forever. New leadership could take the company in a very different direction, or the current owners could decide to sell the company and take the cash. What if one of the bad actors in the industry, such as Tencent or Electronic Arts, buys Valve?
I've been a gamer since the late 1970s, and I take the long view of things. I still play games that are 40+ years old. I've seen many seemingly solid video game companies either go bad or go out of business. Electronic Arts and Activision used to be great companies. Atari collapsed, and the name got purchased. Nowadays, it's a shadow of its former self. Commodore, once an industry giant, is no longer with us. When I'm rotting away in the old folks' home in twenty years or so (assuming I live that long), I still want access to the collection of games that I have accumulated over my lifetime. I am confident that the games I downloaded from GOG will work as long as I have hardware that is compatible with them, but as for Steam, I can't be confident that my small Steam library will be intact in twenty years. It's possible that some games will go away and I'll have to sail the seven seas to recover them. It's also possible that Steam will go out of business, and I wouldn't count on their promise to remove DRM if this happens. This possibility may seem absurd now, but fortunes for companies can take a drastic turn. If someone had told me back around 2000 that Sears would totally collapse and would be nearly gone in twenty years, I wouldn't have believed it. A few serious mistakes by top management could send Steam into a death spiral, and nobody will see it coming. The vultures will swoop in and buy up the pieces, and the service, if it remains online, will surely degrade considerably.
I wonder, but does the gog instaler have some type of time switch? Like if you set your date to year 2050 will the game launcher still work?
@@Bullminator As far as I know, nobody has ever discovered such a thing. If it existed and someone discovered and publicized it, I'm sure it would be a major scandal.
Valve and Steam is:
- Not Facebook, not Microsoft, not Google, not Apple, not Amazon, not Nvidia, not Tencent etc..
- Well-balanced in price/performance hand-held gaming hardware with Linux-based OS.
- Properly working platform with no high, critical, logical, or deception bugs.
- Solid customer service with responsive issue-solving practices.
- Not Chinese and not Russian company.
It's enough to convince me to become a consumer. I use GOG as well. Both are good platforms.
I've never had any problem with these two.
All of the other gaming online stores - don't work, don't care about customers, and have security questionable practices.
Hilarious that you guys still think that the governments are different and you have the good one... LOL!!
@@chrismay2298 Dude, Russia is literally tricking people into the military, then makes them pay for their equipment and gets them killed in pointless battles. They have like 50k losses for a town of pre-war population
@@chrismay2298 compared to ruzzia(terrorists) and china yes we are the good guys
@@chrismay2298 Hello there bot, what other anti-American sentiment may you harbor?
@@chrismay2298 Oh, by mistake I treated you seriously for a while... My bad.
I'm not a lawyer, I approach this topic from a societal and philosophical point of view:
I see a few issues with digital goods and ownership. The best example I could come up with is to compare it to a book.
A book is a physical object, you can own a book, you can use it in various different ways, as a stand, as kindling, rip out the pages build paper planes with them, scribble in it and read it's contetnts.
A computer is a physical object you can use it as a stand, you can use it as a paper weigt, trebuchet ammunition, spacial heater and in a roundabout way scribble into it and read it's contents.
What you don't own in a book is the specific way the characters in it are arranged, you are not allowed to copy and redistribute this specific arrangement of characters. That's called copyright.
The same is true for software, to use it you have to aquire a copy. Now there are different ways of optaining a copy.
The rights holder prints you a book or presses a cd and sends you a physical copy. With this specific copy you can do anything you like.
The rights holder allows others to produce a copy and to distribute it to you, that's a license.
Now it get's tricky. From this perspective you can argue that Steam is a giant xerox machine and you press the button to get a copy, so you are the one copying the work. So you need a license that allows you to copy and distribute the book to yourself.
If you were to recieve a copy like a book, you'd need to keep tabs on your gmaes yourself and might even be forced to buy them again once you deleted them from all your devices.
So while, yeah you seem to be in a leagally more precarious situation, sicne you "don't own the game", it's a legal agreement that makes the way Steam works for you (keeping the stuff in the cloud and grabbing it on demand) possible in the first place. Once you obtained your copy(s) you can handle them as you see fit as long as don't exploit the copyright past the scale granted to you by said licnese.
underrated comment.
when you purchase a game you press the "buy button" right?
At what point does logic bend so far that "buying" becomes renting or even leasing and stops being owning?
It's correct. But in the vast majority of games sold on Steam, you still depend on Steam to check your license ownership, now there are methods to workaround that check because it doesn't work like anti-tamper, but in stores like GOG, you don't need to go through a license check, you have full control over your files and therefore your copy. There isn't a true sense of ownership without owner's perpetual control over it.
A ton of us didn't read all that shit
@@TioRataMaybe it's just because I mostly play indie games but pretty sure the majority of my Steam library is DRM free, and I have over 100 games. The list of DRM free games on Steam seems pretty damn big to me.
7:01 this is factually untrue. You can sell your game cheaper on any other platform you'd want at any point in time. What you can't sell cheaper is a Steam key, which Valve lets you generate for free with no limits as a publisher, without taking the 30% cut. Otherwise, you selling Steam keys cheaper would cost Valve money for maintaining the user accounts and providing them with the download for your game without them getting a penny for it, and that is why they don't want you to do it. As long as you aren't selling your game cheaper on another platform AS A STEAM KEY which Valve doesn't take a cut from, you're all fine.
Market leadership is not "monopoly" and my problem with most of the other store fronts is that they don't have a review section, no workshop/mod support, no steam input or similar, no proper support for friend lists/group chat/group calls, no gaming groups, no invisible mode, no offline mode, no family share, no cloud saves for many games, also no proper game recommendations, no discussions, no comment sections on updates, if they even show the updates/patch notes, also none of the others offer VR support, no multi PC usage as they log you out soon as you log in on another PC... and probs a lot more things... Is not even worth considering the others competitive as they are so far behind 😂.
Steam input is Very important for me, because i use a ps4 and steam controller. Neither of them work in 90%+ of games out of the box
Like i have very few games with native ps4 controller support and not all of them support wireless use (Helldivers, rocket league)
it absolutely is a monopoly....look up what the word means. Some of you guys think it means 100.0%, nope.
@@willywonka6487 you should look it up... Monopoly - the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
They don't have exclusive possessions except their own games/hardware, 3rd parties come to publish, while they publish everywhere else.
You wanna say that because the players chose it is a monopoly? No man, is free will, the other services are just worse.
@@willywonka6487op guy listed a lot of features that dont exist in the competition. That means it's not a monopoly in the way that it just forces others out, but by providing a FAR Supperior service
Market leadership is monopoly
Why are you twisting words here?
Another shil detected
Seems crazy to me that some people have their entire game library on Steam. No business or service lasts forever.
The PMFN is actually incorrect, what the article actually refers to is that developers can create how many keys they want of their game, if you sell those you get 100% cut, valve just prohibits you to sell those keys below the price on steam (basically they prohibite you from ripping them off)
Basic research too hard for lazy RUclipsr.
Ha Ha PMFN Pay Me Fucking Now Straight up
This is some content I don't understand anything about but you made a solid job of breaking down things into digestable information. Good work.
If buying isn't owning then pirating isn't stealing.
youre buying a license to access the game, so no, youre wrong. You do own the license to access the game. Steam is very clear that youre buying a license, not the game.
me when i try to be original
wow ive never seen that statement like ever. wow ur so original bro
if you want to actually own your game, go with Gog. They are all for owning games, and legally. Unlike Steam, it allows to keep the installer forever AND they optimize old games to work on modern operating systems.
Call me live under the cave, but I never know why people use GOG I thought it just a launcher for old games, now I’m surprise that still there is a place where you can actually have the game on PC. However do you guys remember DVD for PC?
I mean DVD games for PC
Well now you know why people use GOG. I have over 400 games on GOG that are mine forever. I can play them direct from shortcut and never have to sign in anywhere to play. Because I download the game files and save them on a storage drive, the games are mine forever. No licensing use like everyone else.
No, it's not just a launcher. In fact, using their launcher, Galaxy is completely optional. I only download the offline installers and game files and save them. I run the installers and then play the games from a shortcut. It's much the same as it was for non-drm DVD and CD games.
At least steam is still more trustworthy then every single other game launcher.
GOG is trustworthy.
@@Doomdog4 sure but they sell outdated trash
GOG is more consumer friendly come now
@@doublecrossedswine112 You're gonna wish you had that trash when the digital revolution is complete and you own nothing.
Damn epic didn’t even felt like a launcher but a browser
Valve is by far the most end user friendly company in the whole gaming space. + they did soooo much towards Linux Gaming. The reason Steam is the market leader is because it's simply the best. And the reason why others (like Epic) take less of a cut is because otherwise not a single game would be released there. Guess what'd happen if they had the biggest user base?
I bought a native game that the dev removed its support 6 months after and it was basically deleted from my machine (never downloaded the windows version). Dev says I'm entitled to a refund, and to contact steam because that's where I bought the game from. Steam says I can't refund because I owned it over 14 days. Yeah really "friendly". And also against the law in EU (since 2022) where nowadays digital goods need to have a 2 year warranty.
@@DanielMircea I've never heard of steam deleting a game from someones PC. What game was this?
The part about Valve doing much for Linux gaming is true. They deserve huge respect for that, and I say that as someone who has never used Linux. However, saying that Steam simply is the best I think is a bit strange when GOG exists and allows you to actually own the games you buy with no DRM. I can never call a subscription based storefront that can take away your games at any time the best (and Valve has done that before).
@@NotRenjiroit's Last Epoch. I only played it offline BTW. Had installed and it disappeared.
@@DanielMircea seems like some other people had that issue too. Idk why Steam would just remove that game without a refund. Weird as hell
You own nothing and you'll be happy. But buy from GOG on PC, or Buy Physical Disc's on Consoles.
Sure, There are some physical games will need a digital download to get the full game, But those are few and far between and the majority of them don't have that issue.
You don't ACTUALLY own your favorite video games, especially if you get them in discs from GameStop.
I say this because these games are software, which software CANNOT be bought physically, and can ONLY be bought digitally. Physical copies of games on discs or cartridges don't help because those things are still software.
So therefore, the "You'll own nothing and be happy" myth is actually true. Nobody owns games AT ALL.
"oH bUt PhYsIcAl MeDiA iS bEtTeR tHaN dIgItAl MeDiA bEcAuSe YoU aCtUaLlY oWn YoUr GaMe!!!!!1111!!!11!!" Bullshit. You will NEVER own a single video game you pay for. You will ALWAYS only own the license to play them. You can't just own the software of the game. You own a copy of the disc, but you DON'T own the software of the game.
GOG or physical discs do NOT count as owning the entire game, only a copy of it through a license.
@@ThunderTheYellowJolteonThe game files I have are mine. When you pay for a game once and download it, that's not renting. Renting would be something like paying a monthly fee to play an online game like WOW, or ESO. What companies can take away is access to online services, like banning your account. That's exactly what's going to happen here, except now this will extend to singleplayer games.
If I buy a singleplayer game, their company can't legally take it from me, or come to my house and demand to return the product. People who say, "i owwwwn the gameeeee" aren’t wrong-they have a point. It’s not unreasonable to want ownership rights or to push back against the idea that licensing replaces that.
Supporting this just makes it easier for companies to take more control away from consumers. In other words, I don't understand what's with people like you wanting to be screwed over by companies. What do you even get from this? An "I'm a corporate shill" medal?
Once again, for those who were born yesterday or who are unable to read. We have NEVER owned games we 'buy'. Ever. Period. Even physical copies grant you a licence to use the software on that disc/cart/whatever. The licenser may not have been able to just pull your ability to play it, but that doesn't change the fact that at no point have we had unfettered ownership of any game or software product we 'bought'. It has always been buying a license. It has always been very clear, too, as it's all spelled out in the License Agreement that everybody agreed to when creating an account or installing the game. You have all stated that you read and understood the terms, yet, here everyone is, demonstrating that they did not, in fact, read or understand the terms.
Just like how after CS2 Valve has basically gone silent, I expect the same to happen with Deadlock. Just like TF2.
Eh, CS2 is an update to a 10+ year old game. BUT, It was a terrible update. It should've been a seperate launcher, like Source to GO. TF2 is 17 years old. Deadlock's a new IP and I doubt they aren't going to try and pimp it through esports and battle passes like DotA for atleast 3 years.
Some things to note. All games (physical/"digital") are licensed, not all games have DRM, Steam lets it up to the developer if their game should have DRM, GOG forces no DRM. Disks being under license has historical reasons, since copyright around software used to be unclear. Digital storefronts use a license simply because you don't or can't buy a copy, you download a new copy whenever you want and on any device, this wouldn't be possible if the store sold you a copy instead of license. Perhaps you could buy unlimited access to copies, but per first sale doctrine you'd be able to legally sell anyone one of your infinite copies.
I'd have to find it again, just an interesting thing about steam, is that I beleive they've said that they have internal system and plans that if for some reason steam as a company would no longer be able to function, they do have or are developing ( we don't know the state) a way to release your steam library to you / remove the steam DRM for them.
I remember reading this, but I haven't got the source- just it sounds far more genuine coming from Steam than it would any other company.
I've heard about this too. I personally keep a pirated version of all the games I own on a hard drive, as a sort of back up.
no wonder pirating has grown so much, even steam is going down the "you don't own your games" route /:
Gabe didn't realize the quote he made would come back to haunt him "Piracy is a service issue"
Steam is still printing money, though? Piracy has never really hurt them. People will always pirate, and that really only becomes an "issue" when they lose a considerable amount of money because of it.
how? steam is literally THE place for pc gaming. i can barely see people complaining about it, its literally perfect
Dude, I use and enjoy GOG, but I had no idea the differences here. Thanks for the info! Sharing this pronto.
5:32 ohh thats why I cant open singleplayer games without steam opening
Yea u can use nodvd style cracks from pirate forums to remove steam checks
It depends on the region I guess, here in Canada and my province there are arbitration laws against digital storefronts revoking access to games. The license you purchase is considered the same as a digital copy and thus cannot be revoked.
Piracy for life
If it ever turns out that we can't trust steam anymore, I'll probably quit gaming for good.
Well, I'll definitely quit paying for games.
Its what the elites want you to do. "Quit playing video games welcome to the NWO"
that's okay, if steam users don't own their games then they're commiting no crimes with piracy
Hi, Tim Sweeney here, CEO of Epic Games. Thanks for making the video we requested! Check your account's balance :)
@@VRGStudios lol
I own nearly 600 game on Steam and I fear losing them for any reason. Been there since 2004(Half Life 2)...
You better start backing them up with pirate versions.
@@Bullminator Something... GOG alone won't save me...
Remember that the physical media is often not the solution, because:
- The box only has a digital code to download the game.
- There's a disc, but it only has a few files, the actual game must be downloaded and the disc is only a key.
- Sometimes, only parts of the game are available on disc, you can play without internet, but not the full game.
- You can play the game without internet with just a disc, but not the good version of the game, because at launch, the game is full of problems and you need to download a patch later or there's a patch since day 1.
- Sometimes, the patch is so big that you are almost downloading the whole game.
- You still need to connect to the internet to buy and download DLC.
- To play online, you need to download the most recent version.
- Many games are online-only, require a constant connection to the internet, even on single-player, and to make things worse, the servers often close, making your physical copy a paperweight.
People are too immature and ignorant to understand this.
It looks like the gaming era is nearing its end.😢😢😢
Ah yes gaming is dead we need to pack up and say gaming is dead to everyone so they can pack up as well we are so cooked!. (sarcasm)
@@rainbowdash3419 ok let me post every social media 😏
no its not. stop listening to these type of people bro nothings gonna happen literally. people kept crying since the xbox 360 era about this and nothing happen.
One of the big things for me about Steam that stands out. Is that even if a company gets shut down or their game gets removed from the store on Steam due to licensing problems or something else. I still do not lose access to the game I purchased and if I build a new gaming PC I can still re-download and install it with no problem. And on top of that I can still obtain Steam keys through other sites like G2A.
If this was Sony, not only would they keep you from ever downloading it again. They may even delete the files or do something that keeps you from ever launching the game ever again.
fear when gabe dies, because valve is gonna die with him, like all the great empires before his.
He already stated that he will give leadership to his son. The company is mostly owned by Newell family
@@Betonoszlop we already have seen in history the top corporative empires being destroyed by the uninterested descendency of the one who raised said empire.
also his son is a nascar pilot, pretty much sure he will not care about the company and the other executives will just do with it as they like. i truly hope im wrong here.
@@Betonoszlop How can you be so sure we can trust his son?
@@slazeblaze319 Because Gaben has been good father of us all, most likely to his own son aswel
by the way Vex You know Steam Says on their pages This We dont Have Leadership no one here is Boss Statements !!
If "buying" games in Steam we're not the owners, then we're not buying them, we're "renting" them.
Licensed copy
No. Youre not renting them, youre not paying continuous fees, there is no return date. Youre not buying games, youre buying a license to access the game.
@@DageLV How many times do you pay for a renting car?
That was always the case. There is a new law in California that forces companies to spell out that you dont own the game in the EULAS. Thus they have clarified the EULA but nothing in practice have changed because this was already always the case.
@@M4K1N4 depends on how much time you want to keep it?
The difference between PC and consoles is that on PC when it comes to buying digital games, if a game gets taken away from you, you can acquire it by other means... I've using Steam since 2004, so far no complaints, BUT you're absolutely right you DON'T own your games, the reason why in 2020 I set up a file server and started downloading ISOs all of the games I have on Steam, just in case S hits the fan. I know MP games cannot be backed up but I would say I have 90+% of my 20 year library backed up and secured.
Respect u man, also is it hard to maintain a file server (on a monthly/annual basis) ???
@@manarya190 I have a 16TB NAS, I also have several 4tb external drives with copies all of al my family pic and games, inside a fireproof box… if anything happens to me, it will be just plug n play for wife and kids 🤣
"Can we Trust Steam Anymore?" Could we ever?
It's not about trust but who you prefer to give your money to.
Steam: people who bring you great service
Corporation: people who lure you with goodies and when you're on the hook, they'll hike up the price of the goodies
I am fully aware that Steam is a private, for profit company. But when you put on the table Steam, Epic, Ubi, GOG... I will still buy the games on Steam, even at slightly higher cost
they say its licensed not sold but then the entire store has buttons where you "buy" games not "rent" licenses
I only joined Steam, cause Epic did (and does) not support mods for Ark - even tho they promised for YEARS.
This looks like some institution needs to force the monopoly to have them remove those problematic clauses from their TOS, by a court order, so they can be held liable if they go against the court order.
Now we all understand why they chose to call it STEAM back in 2004..
I mean, think about it. One day, it's all gone like vapor... like "Steam".
Scary.
All fun an games will evaporate from your deck
such wow, very deep, made me think.
"One day, it's all gone like vapor... like "Steam"." - that's life, really
20:38 you had me there 🤣🤣
Steam: you don't own the games
Also Steam: can you share your games up to 10 "family" members
Me: Heil Gaben!!!
FOF275 you have rights
Correct me if i am wrong but isn't it Steam Keys that Valve looks after? If a Dev generates a Steam key and sells it somewhere else for 10 Euro, Steam looses on its cut and still has to pay for the Servers. So it makes Sense that Vavles pushes this Rule.
There is also the point that for example Darkest Dungeon is 3,50 Euro (huge sale) on GoG right now while it is 25 Euro on Steam it is also 23 Euro on Epic.
So how is Valve the evil guy here if the Consumer is loyal to Steam? Is this just an american thing that i am to europen to understand? Or am i actually stupid and missing something?
You are correct, this issue was about STEAM KEYS, not about setting the price of the game itself. This video is going to misinform a lot of people 😮💨
My account turns 16 in a few months. My original account was created January 2005. Because it was required to install Half Life 2. I thought Steam was stupid back then. It was one of the first games that required an internet connection to install and play for the first time. Well in Australia 2005 dial-up internet was still the most widely service.
Every other game PC game was on CD. You could install and uninstall as many times, on as many machines, as you wanted.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Gog is still better.
1. Zero DRMs
2. No online activation required
3. Always optimized for latest operating systems
4. Allows to download installers and *actually own* games as opposed to just renting them.
5. And despite the first 4, reasonable prices.
I wish I found out about it earlier, and not like a month ago.
The problem with the others is that pricing went up when they are not on steam.
Forget Steam. I want CDs to make a comeback for computer games.
CD drives for laptops
I agree, but good luck find a case that fits a DVD or other optical drive. Though, these days a simple USB stick would work instead.
Id love that too but considering that they cant hold as much data as most Triple A or Quadruple A Games these days, and how many Companies are basically trying to ditch it along with most Gaming PC’s not having Disc Drives anymore, its chances Currently returning to popularity are slim.
I kinda agree, but at the same time it's nice not having to insert the disc of every game you want to play. In the digital age, being able to download a completely DRM-free copy of the game you have bought on GOG is the best experience you can get.
@@fredsas12 I use an external UHD blu ray drive. Works just fine.
Welcome to the age of the Retroactively Amended Purchase Experience (R.A.P.E.) where corporations believe they are entitled to strip you of all your constitutional rights because they coerced you under duress to tick a "yes" box on a screen without providing any option to say "No" to them.
Also, it's real nice that the various consumer protection agencies response to this absurdity has basically been "drink Brawndo, it's got what plants crave, it's got electrolytes!"
Without even looking at the comments, I already know that thousands of soulless, non-self-thinking creatures will defend Valve to the death in a completely alien and reality-distorting way. Exactly those that are the biggest problem here.
True
They actively report the comments that goes against Valve or their hive minded corporation
@@mickmoon6887 Did valve hurt you?
Even agreeing to terms of service, can be stated as an illegal contract when taken to court if it violates consumer laws.
Valve helped create and funds the development of an open source gaming platform. You can trust Steam enough to guarantee you'll always have access to your games regardless of what Microsoft and Apple do.
Can you really trust a Corp tho?
@@evaone4286 i wasn't there when steam first launched but ive been 'part' of steams environment since 2007.
never have i had any experience when i couldn't access my games in those years.
it is true steam has gone down a few times over the years but i could still play most of my games regardless, which means i am accessing them all be it locally when steam was down.
please understand the question and/or statement a person makes.
@@evaone4286 not really but its been this way for about as long as ive been alive with steam tbh, probably wont change any time soon
@@evaone4286as long as they don’t pull bullshit then yes, hearing about this news has me in a bit of a 50/50 with valve but i kind of trust them…i still prefer that gamers should have Digital Ownership of their games. And not have it taken away from them
@@evaone4286 more than a publicly traded one yeah sure.
If buying a game isnt ownership then piracy isnt theft.
I bet all my coins that at this part, 15:44, any lawyer in the world can classify this as blackmail. How can someone stop playing their 1K+ games because Valve says that you accept the terms by accessing the games in your library? Remember, the counterpart to this is that Valve doesn't allow you to transfer or sell your account. You are essentially a hostage of Valve, for better or worse. From their perspective, the 'good' is that you buy their games, but the 'bad' is that you can’t do anything except delete your account. You can’t play, sell, or transfer your account. Here in Brazil, any EULA that is completely one-sided in favor of a company is easily broken. I hope the same thing happens in a developed country like the USA. On the other hand, I hope this problem forces Valve to let us sell our accounts.
If the games were transferable, they would lose out on a lot of revenue. They don't do it, because it would be a bad business move. No one is forcing them, so they don't have any incentive to do so. If Epic wanted to compete, they would have to make their games transferable.
0:12 Don't post such blasphemous content.
mf chill
Christian nerd spotted
I remember Origin or something wouldn't allow you to download your game 3 times a day
just have to hope gaben doesnt die and leave his company to some shmuck
being wealthy doesn't always mean being healthy. i can't remeber who said that but whatever.
i do wish for Gaben to live long because he is the king.
GOG and Epic going to have Plugins soon for Steam OS/Steam-Deck... so yeah, they will forever be Winning.
Having equal pricing isn't an issue in my eyes.
There's this thing called piracy that everyone who complains about not owning their games likes to hate on but is one way to ensure you own what you own. You can even pay for the game on Steam if you want and then download it again with a magnet link on another site as a backup
Nobody likes monopolies but there's already a ticket around it and I know people will say they shouldn't have to pirate something to own it, and I agree but it is what it is until it changes which it doesn't look like it will any time soon
The lord has been corrupted
6:54 Seems 100% reasonable to me. It's already extremely generous that Steam allows you to sell Steam Keys without taking a cut. Letting them also sell those keys at a discount? Every game dev on Earth would just slap the price down by 20% below Steam and Steam would quickly go bankrupt providing the servers and whatnot for those games for free.
Epic Launcher is shit compared to steam, Steam has everything, player profiles customization, screenshots, servers list, groups, worshops, collections, proton support, big picture, controller support, steam input, inventories, steam cards and so on. Nobody delivers anything simillar to that. Steam is just better launcher.
bro you forgot about SteamVR and 90-95% PCVR games are only on Steam
@@PaVel-ik4dp We can go on and on cause steam has so many features while no other launcher supports any like it.
Are you sure you'd have to cancel your Steam account to sue Valve? At 14:40 when you start talking about this, in the first paragraph you have highlighted (I think it's paragraph 8 section B) it says you have to either cancel your account OR cease use of the subscriptions. To me the second option in the or statement is saying you can just stop using Steam instead of having to cancel it, so that would mean you temporarily sacrifice your use of Steam to sue them instead of full on cancellation.
It's simple. When you are in a position where you need an account to login to a platform to be able to buy, download and play a game. It simply means that you are at the mercy of the platform's company and your internet connection. There's no such thing as " owning games ". You simply get access when you " buy " a game on any of these platforms. The only thing you " own " if it can even be considered " owning ", is your account login info. That's it. When everything requires you to have an internet connection to use. That automatically means you don't own anything. That's just the way it is. There used to be a time before the internet when games were on physical media and didn't get updates and were complete products. But these times are long gone now.
I don't even understand why conslow players are still buying games on discs as if the whole game is on the disc, when in reality they still have to download the game after they put in that disc, which is nothing more than an authentication for you to download the game. It makes no sense. Ownership died a long time ago and now we're simply paying for access.
Okay, but that doesn't give the store the right to withdraw your legitimately purchased copy. In the case of always online games, obviously, this type of game needs a server to work. But removing access from a single player game, for example, would be absurd. It looks more like a thief thing.
@@Seehara Isn't it obvious in what i said? The moment you sign up for any of these platforms, be it Steam or whatever. You should realize that when you invest into getting games on a platform. More or less that platform always has a chance, simply said, to collapse in a way, and for you to lose your stuff on it. I myself have over 250 games on Steam. And i'm completely aware that Valve has all the control over all my stuff i paid for. I've always known before i buy a game, that i'm paying for something that'll never truly be my own, instead i'll simply have full time access to it 24/7 in the case of games. Heck not even my Steam account is my own. It is in a sense a property of Valve. Gaben can do what he wants with anyone's Steam account at anytime. No account you have wherever is truly yours. And that's because of it being on the internet on a server which isn't yours in the first place. Simply put. If it's online it ain't ever truly yours. We don't own anything anymore, only the hardware we actually have in our hands be it a PC, conslow, smartphone, tablet or whatever. That's the only thing you own, the machine itself, nothing else.
@@Gielderst What worries me is not being the owner of the game, but rather someone simply starting to remove my access to the games simply because they decided to do so. Like what Ubisoft did with the Crew. And games start to leave my library, which would be terrible for me, especially since most of my games are single player, they don't need servers, matchmaking or anything like that.
I think most people are confused about owning games. Games are virtual theme parks and you buy a personal lifetime access ticket(license) to that theme park when you buy a game. You own the ticket, but not the theme park. The theme park operators reserves the right to deny access to the park. The only reason games sold on physical hardware feels like we owned them was because there was no other way to distribute games before the internet. Technically sharing physical games would be against the terms of service since the license is granted to the the person purchasing the game/ticket and it is not transferable but there was no real way for game companies to police that practice until we had online accounts.
We could NEVER trust Steam, they just had first mover advantage. The fact that Steam could simply remove my access to those purchases and essentially destroy my leisure time is sickening. I hope to see them sued into the stone age.
@@Martial-Mat so you rather see Steam get sued to the stone ages, are you hearing yourself? Steam is the last beacon of gaming and Linux and not only that if Steam/Valve goes down all chaos will break loose especially people who own Steam deck and people who want Valve to fund Linux, I’m a windows guy and Steam deck guy and I don’t want Linux to go down in shambles if Steam goes down especially Valve, again I will repeat this if Steam goes down that’s where everyone panic’s and the Linux community would panic without Steam do you really think other Launcher’s support Linux like Epic games and Ubisoft, I don’t get why people hate Valve even tho they are literally a last beacon of gaming and Linux.
@@rainbowdash3419 Another steam shill detected
Steam last beacon of hope common shill narrative
Steam created the battle passess popularized DRM
Valve didn't fund linux Valve took credit of Wine devs and steam shills argue its Valve work insane
People hate Valve because of the shady shit Valve did to the people like me and several others
If you look at linux gaming commitments Nvidia and AMD did more pr commit for graphics drivers than Valve taking credits
Oh god, if steam was sued into non-existence, the entire PC gaming space would crumble. EA, Activision, and Microsoft would pounce on it and you'd be stuck with 100x worse companies running the whole show
@@rainbowdash3419 I don't want them to go down; I want them to have to try harder, be more honest, and more pro consumer, and less anti-competitive.
I want them to be fined at least a billion and have to change the way they do business, including guarantees that our libraries will be permanently available, are transferable on death, and to see them stop controlling the market.
@@bradleylauterbach7920 So Epic and GOG would also disappear? 🤔
What?! I thought Outlaws already came out and flopped hard! Glitch in the matrix, what the heck.
CS2 is a good example of how much Valve cares about their community.
Hint: They dont care
They care about community like they care about Half Life 3 😂
And other companies care? 😂
@@benedictjajo The point is that no one do.
Asking for publishers is like asking an employee to not work for a competitor company in a way that would hurt your own company. It makes sense. But it's possible due to the fact that other launchers are trash. The only way to make steam not be able to do that is to give the ability to publishers to use an other launcher, but it implies using a much lower quality launcher to sell their games. As long as those launchers aren't improved, Steam will be in a monopoly because no one is actually trying to enter the market at that segment level. Monopoly exist because companies are trying to do indirect competition. Most launchers are just glorified windows explorers.