Steam makes a valuable change to how it sells games, and the whole world will benefit

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Getting ahead of the State of California making it happen anyway, you're now told exactly what it is you're buying.

Steam Deck displaying Great on Deck page.
Steam is now being honest about what you're actually buying from its store. (Image credit: Rebecca Spear / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • The State of California recently made it law that digital stores have to be upfront about whether a consumer is only buying a digital license to a product.
  • Ahead of this, Steam appears to have rolled out a new feature in its cart that makes it clear to its customers that this is what's happening.
  • It isn't limited to California, or even the U.S., as the same message shows up in other parts of the world.

Recently, the U.S. State of California signed into law a valuable consumer protection surrounding digital content. The short version is that unless someone was buying a product that would be available to them eternally, offline, a disclosure needs to be made that you're only buying a digital license to said content.

The law there doesn't come into effect until 2025, but Valve has got ahead of this and has already rolled it out into its Steam game store, as highlighted by Engadget.

Now, when you go into your cart to checkout, you'll be greeted with the following message:

"A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam."

The new message (highlighted in red) that greets Steam customers at checkout. (Image credit: Windows Central)

I'm in the UK and lo and behold, if I go to my Steam cart I now see the message before I commit to paying. I'm most delighted that Valve hasn't simply limited this to where it is legally obligated to, and has rolled it out to all of its customers.

This all came to a head most recently with Ubisoft, with the company turning off the servers for The Crew and leaving every single player who ever bought the game with no way to play it any longer. With no offline mode, when the servers went away, so did the game, lost to the sands of time.

The backlash was real, and it brought into the very public eye that we simply don't own our games anymore. In the case of The Crew, even those of us with a physical copy now have little more than a keepsake. Ubisoft has at least learned a valuable lesson, and will be putting offline modes into the newer games in the series, so this doesn't happen again.

But it's a different world we live in now to when I started gaming over 30 years ago. Back then we bought a game, online gaming didn't exist, and we could play it indefinitely (or until an 8-year-old damaged the cartridge). In the digital age we don't own our music, our games, our movies and TV, it's all just a rental agreement for as long as the provider wants to keep providing.

It's sad. But at least Steam has made the right move and is finally being ultra clear about what it is you're getting. Over to the rest of the crowd, now.

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Richard Devine
Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • fjtorres5591
    And...?
    25 years after people started paying for digital content and 50 years of consumer software there are still people who don't understand the rules? Do they also think the earth is flat?

    Catering to willful ignorance solves nothing.
    And Idiotpoliticians™ grandstanding changes nothing.
    Reply
  • 85d06
    fjtorres5591 said:
    And...?
    25 years after people started paying for digital content and 50 years of consumer software there are still people who don't understand the rules? Do they also think the earth is flat?

    Catering to willful ignorance solves nothing.
    And Idiotpoliticians™ grandstanding changes nothing.
    What are you rambling about? Are you a bot? Did you even read the article? I suggest doing so. Requiring offline versions of sunsetted games rather than being left with nothing is a good thing. Stop it
    Reply
  • fjtorres5591
    Not a bot.

    Just somebody who has been around long enough to buy ebooks since the 90's and digital music since the aughts and who has seen the whingeing over licensing of content by the uninformed for a generation-plus.

    Idiotpolitician pandering aside, everybody who signs off on the freaking "LICENSING TERMS AND CONDITIONS" of shrinkwrap sofware Or online storres who understands plain english should know they are not buying the freaking game at all. Not even on physical media, where you only buy the package and the right to access the content, aka a LICENSE.

    This has been litigated ad nauseum for decades, most recently in the Internet Archive lawsuit, and the outcome is always the same: consumers buy a license to consume, usually NON-TRANSFERABLE (even if DRM-free) and in many cases REVOCABLE.

    If you never heard of any of this, look it up.
    The licensing wars go all the way back to the 60's in enterprise markets and the 80's in shrinkwrap software. And every few years some uneducated whiner finally realizes they can't legally make copies of their CDs to give to ten thousand of their closest friends or resell their digital games and make a meaningless fuss. Or end up in court.

    And in case you hadn't noticed, most games on Disk use the disk as a form of DRM to prove you have a license to download it from the company server. And if the company chooses to shut them down, well that's what you agreed to when you bought the disk.

    Sucks? yeah.
    But it also sucks when your neighboring country invades yours, barbarians cross your borders to randomly kill concert goers, or your own neighbors riot and burn half your city, or a hurricane wipes out your town or an earthquake destroys your house and property.

    Life isn't all "unicorns and fuzzy bunnies" all summer.
    Life isn't risk free and the world doesn't run solely the way you want it.
    Life is hard and then you die.
    You make choices and live with the consequences.
    You choose to buy digital content? If you bother to read the TOS then you know you are only paying for a license. If you didn't read them then that is on you, not Steam, not Amazon, not Sony, Nintendo, Apple, or Amazon.

    You live in a consumer society.
    Learn the rules. Don't let pandering IdiotPoliticians lead you by the nose.

    And in digital gaming, those are the rules of the business.
    Because those are the only rules that make digital content a business in the first place. Otherwise, write your own book, compose and record your own song, code your own game. (I've done two of those. Those I OWN. Everything else, I license.)

    As for STEAM, their little notice costs them nothing and changes nothing. A big of unnecessary grandstanding because their TOS already said that when you agreed to it to sign up to the store.

    If you don't like it, move on.
    And reserve your vitriol for those around you in real life, not random dudes on the internet.
    It's bad form.
    Reply