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Comment by anshumankmr

4 years ago

Seriously, what happens if the games I bought on Steam are no longer valid due to some potential disagreement between the game publisher and Valve?

11 comments

anshumankmr

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worble  4 years ago

This has happened a few times (e.g Deadpool), in those cases the game has still remained available for users who had already purchased it, just unavailable for new purchases.

  • anshumankmr  4 years ago

    Let's hope it stays that way. Lots of people have sunk quite a bit of cash into buying games. I personally have a collection worth 10K

  • anonymousab  4 years ago

    There have been a couple cases of a game being removed from both the store and users' libraries, such as Order of war: challenge.

kevingadd  4 years ago

Valve rarely has to pull games in this case, the agreements they have with developers seem to protect them. I can't remember the last time a game was removed from people's Steam libraries.

However, developers do have the ability to replace games in your library, so often an original game will be replaced with a low-quality remaster.

danpalmer  4 years ago

I suspect this won't happen, and that Valve have contingencies in contracts to ensure this never happens. You might no longer get updates to a game, but that would likely be it.

Why? How is this different to films?

Games are what Steam does. Films are not really what the Playstation Store does. Sure you can buy them, but who does? Not enough to cause irreparable reputational damage would be my guess. Also, the Playstation Store has far less negotiating power with film distributors than Valve/Steam does with game publishers, so the contract terms aren't likely to include contingencies for this sort of situation.

daveoc64  4 years ago

Steam has been around for almost 19 years, and with a vast catalogue of games nothing like this has happened to content on Steam.