Comment by dangus
1 day ago
Which is basically never. They have no incentive to do that except for extreme circumstances, and they have all the leverage in the world over game publishers.
Delisted games tend to stay in your library for redownload.
I never understood the cynicism for digital media, it’s been multiple decades now and the model clearly works.
Obviously I prefer zero DRM but it’s also not a hard line requirement for me personally.
All of this is based on the assumption that the way it was done is the way it will be done.
Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nepobaby next-CEO will be closing in on retirement if they don't check-out early to enjoy their vast wealth like Gabe has done.
What does Steam look like 60 years from now? Adults using it today are mostly dead and all of their licenses revoked forever, the games removed from circulation gone forever because nobody can ever have a license to use them again. They might be onto their 4th, 5th or 6th CEO by then, half a century removed from Gabe and any expectations we have around the ways he did things.
There's a lot of room for improvement securing some sort of legacy for Steam.
I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20 or whatever OS will be the dominant for PC in 30 or 60 years time.
Most C64, MSX, Apple,Amiga, Atari ST and Dos games can still be played on all majors operating systems.
In fact I used "most" but I can't name one that couldn't be played.
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If it works on WINE today, I would expect it to work on WINE tomorrow. Worst case, you can probably just install an older WINE on a newer OS to ensure it.
> I can assure you that offline installer you got today from GOG will not work on Windows 20
Given the lengths the Windows development team has gone to, to preserve backward compatibility, to the point that there was individual-game-specific workarounds codified in Windows, makes this claim the same as the GP’s, that Steam will change 30-60 years from now.
The cynic in me thinks you’re both right, mind.
You can literally run 30 year old software on your Windows computer today.
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It would presumably work in a virtualized environment.
I bet it'll run on Wine.
Are you willing to put monies on that?
I mean I don't really give a shit. Im buying a game to play it now, maybe next year.
Besides you only need Steam if the publisher chooses to use Steam DRM. There's clearly an incentive for it, don't think its purely Steam's fault.
If that's the model the publisher offers, that's the model you have. Its your choice to participate in it or not.
No. At least in some countries (e.g. Germany) they would be forced to reimburse every buyer if they removed access to a game someone bought.
The fact that somewhere deep down in their EULA there might be words that make it clear that you're not really "buying" anything, just renting/leasing/whatever, wouldn't stand in court since the important part is the big shiny "Buy now" button, and "buying" has a specific meaning here.
So yeah, the only way they could "take the games away from you" is if Steam went bancrupt
> So yeah, the only way they could "take the games away from you" is if Steam went bancrupt
Yeah, that's not impossible, and I'd rather keep what I buy even if the seller does go bankrupt.
I don’t care because I’ll be dead.
Data-hoarding archivists don’t like to hear this, but this is how it’s worked for all of human history. It’s not practical to consume and remember all the media every person has ever published.
This is getting totally beside the issue of DRM.
What will happen is that the greatest games will be remembered if they’re lucky and the rest will be discarded by time, even if they are DRM-free and unencumbered by reaching public domain status.
Can you name your favorite silent movie? How about your second favorite? How about your 10th favorite?
What’s your favorite song from 1492?
> It’s not practical to consume and remember all the media every person has ever published.
It's not about you being able to "consume it all", it's about future generations being able to look back and see how gaming and humanity evolved and explore this history. Many people will research the greatest hits, the greatest developers, the greatest accomplishments, just like any other historically-interesting thing.
My favorite song from roughly 1492 is a small ditty I came across some years ago called Branle Englese, amongst many centuries-old pieces of classical music I enjoy playing. I don't know if it's specifically 1492, as the details have been lost to time unfortunately.
Do you recognize the value of other history? Should we 'delete' it all or just games, rather than challenge a fairly recent status quo that emerged and undermines their preservation?
> What does Steam look like 60 years from now?
Does it matter? You are treating this like these games are some valuable collector's items, when they really are just toys you play once and then never touch again for the most part.
But let's assume you had physical copies of all of these games you own on Steam. Once you are gone, there is a > 90% chance that whoever inherits it, will throw it away, just like Millenials now are throwing away all this junk they are inheriting that Boomers used to collect.
The point is, Steam is good enough for all practical purposes, which is to acquire and play games in the now.
My library includes games I played with my father and games I played with my own children. Given the option my children would certainly revisit their favourite titles with their own children one day, or for their own nostalgic memories.
One thing you are missing with your logic is that "throw it out" is probably more like "give to charity", the unwanted goods are not necessarily being destroyed and may be redistributed to people who do value them. If my kids didn't want my Steam account I'm sure there's others who would, and preservation groups and museums that would probably take it.
Ever bought anything from MSN Music? Yahoo Music? Desura? Microsoft eBook Store? Walmart MP3s? Anything using Adobe Content Server? MusicNet? CinemaNow? UltraViolet?
It is laughable to think that digital media "clearly works". Companies shut down and stores shutter all the time. In most cases there is no recourse for customers, because – surprise – you didn't actually own the rights to what you bought, just a revocable license. You have to be pretty young and/or naive to think that this can't eventually happen to Steam as well.
And even if you fully trust Steam to stick around and keep its word, digital licensing means you can still get screwed. For example - if the publisher's license to in-game music expires, the game will automatically be updated to remove all the tracks (e.g. GTA Vice City and San Andreas). For larger issues and conflicts the game might be removed entirely (e.g. Spec Ops: The Line). Or the publisher might decide to just switch off the DRM servers, even for single player games (e.g. The Crew). Outside of gaming there are countless examples of publishers "upgrading" music tracks you own to different versions or censoring/altering content of books you own.
The only recourse to all this is to buy and store DRM-free versions of your media.
> "buy" Hozier's album
> change countries
> oh, you own this album for Bulgaria, but not for the US, so you can no longer play it
Region-locked physical media (and before explicit region locking, PAL vs NTSC vs SECAM vs variants like PAL-M) also have this problem to some extent.
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Censorship. Like GOG?
You never know, Gaben is getting older. Who knows what the next CEO of Valve will do?
At least with Valve we can hope its gonna be okay for 4 reasons:
1. Even though Gabe is formally CEO he from his own words was barelly controllibg company for years. He spend more time on his other projects.
2. Flat structure and and a small team. I know few people who has worked at Valve and while there are some downsides company of ~400 employees with a lot of internal power play is just more resilient than normal corporation. Many of people on the team are just rich enough already and they dont need to go and cash out.
3. From what is publicly known Valve is family owned basically since Gabe own major part of company. And while a lot of people would hate example of e.g Ubisoft its good example how family controlled business often sink before selling out.
4. It would be just hard to sell Valve and remove control from the team without destroying both company and gaming community goodwill.
Yet I fully agree that Valve just like other company can be sold off just for userbase and run to the ground.
Valve just have better chance to stay customer friendly than your overall VC/PE/BlackRock owned corporation with 10,000 employees and 50 for-hire top managers / board directors.
They can't control the licenses rights for some assets like music that can expire and become undistributable. You may not know it until you install them on a new computer n years from now.
I find even just the possibility of this happening frankly insane - if the current licensing or copyright system allows something like this, the we need a new one.
It has already happened and been documented here.
There have been several earlier generation game consoles that have had their online stores closed already.
Physical media rots too. I don't watch my DVD collection anymore because I don't have access to a working DVD player, but I've read that a lot of those discs don't play anymore because the publishers cheaped out on materials when they minted the discs.
This in not an equivalence.