[FVYPblNGl7R9ZAc]

That is how all of this works. If Valve went out of business then you wouldn't have any legal right or way to get the games you purchased on Steam. If Amazon shut down Prime Video then you couldn't watch the movies you purchased on it. This is not a unique problem to Google Stadia.

[srmarm]

If google were going out of business I'd agree with you, but they're not. As a business they have plenty of money. What they're (possibly) doing is shutting this service to save some money. I suspect they'll refund or at least credit the relatively small number of people who purchased games on the service.

It was always an odd setup to sell something for a fixed fee that potentially has an endless cost to deliver. Google have always been vague about how to square that circle. They could have sold fixed term or rolling licences but chose not to. I suspect had Stadia game sales reached a certain threshold they'd have done something like that but it's not something you want to talk about with a new system.

[staticassertion]

I doubt they'll credit anyone. Why would they? You purchased a license to play a game through their service. Their service is no longer there. I haven't gone through any terms of service for Stadia but I can't imagine that they aren't covered for this.

[srmarm]

They can put what they want in the TOS but they are selling to consumers in jurisdictions around the world and if it stops working so soon then they were clearly 'selling' something that wasn't fit for purpose. They could have sold it time limited or laid out their limitations if they wanted to protect themselves but they didn't.

I used the service and as a techie knew it wasn't really sustainable but the average consumer buying in good faith wasn't warned that their purchase might be so short lived. Might have been hidden in the TOS but that won't cut the mustard in many jurisdictions and will be an expensive battle.

I suspect they made a small amount of sales and it'll be cheaper and easier for them to credit than fight.

[staticassertion]

I'm not so convinced. Maybe in the EU, but that would be it, certainly I think in the US you'd be fucked for sure. It might be cheaper in the short term to pay out vs the worst case scenario of fighting this, but they may never even get sued, the case may get thrown out if they do, it may be in their interest to protect that precedent on TOS and fight it in court, etc.

I'm not saying Google won't pay out, but I just think there's a lot of reasons why they might not.

[bushbaba]

How many game sales did stadia even have. If it’s less than 100m usd just issue full refunds for all game purchases.

Might sound crazy but the 100m would be more effective to the brand than spending 100m on marketing.

[staticassertion]

Well, the smaller the number of purchases the less impactful the negative marketing effects. The larger the purchases, the higher the financial impact on Google.

Further, Google exited this market. Do they really care about marketing to these people anymore? Their main revenue is non-consensual tracking, it's not like being mad at Google is going to matter unless you really go out of your way because of it.

[tpxl]

Something something EU consumer protection law, stuff needs 2 year warranty, and if it breaks in that time you either have to replace or refund the customers. Doubly so if you knew the product wouldn't last 2 years.

[7steps2much]

Not sure if the German Gewährleistung applies to video games, but if it does you might be able to wield that since not being able to play the game anymore definitely is a major defect.

[bliteben]

Seems likely there will be lawsuits though. Just too good of a case for publicity.

[danpalmer]

Why would they? Because of the reputational damage of not doing so.

[ethbr0]

The Google play would have been to track user gameplay. That's currently a large number of user-hours that Google is blind to, given they have no offering in the dedicated console space.

... that said, I'd expect the margins were far lower / cost was higher than what Google was used to, and they financially decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

[bushbaba]

Suspect that the service saw poor growth or even shrinkage of users. Costs were fixed to rising and nobody provided an answer on how to address. So google cut it.

[gambiting]

The obvious difference is that games downloaded from steam are on your machine and are yours to keep forever - if Valve goes bankrupt you can still have copies(whether they would launch or not is a different question, but I'm sure someone would find a technical solution). When Stadia shuts down that's it, the games are gone, because you can't make an offline copies of them.

[MichaelCollins]

If you have to download a pirate's crack to play a game, you may as well download a pirate version of the game in the first place. I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios.

Steam is a DRM system with good branding, that gamers treat as special because it comes from Valve. Anecdotally, a lot of gamers believe and trust that Valve would free their games of DRM if Valve ever went out of business or otherwise shut down Steam. Of course this isn't true, they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own (which is the vast majority of the games on Steam) and whatever informal promises Gabe made years aren't worth a damn. Nevertheless, this sort of mistaken expectation affords Valve/Steam a lot of good will they really don't deserve.

[somenameforme]

> "..they wouldn't have the legal right to do that with any game that wasn't their own.."

Both Gabe Newell, the founder/owner of Steam/Vale, and the official support response is now to state that they would provide means for users to continue to have access to their games should Steam shut down. Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.

When game companies go out of business, Steam will remove their product from the store, but continue enabling users who already purchased it access to it, and I expect this independence/guarantee of of access is part of their normal licensing. There is also already 'offline mode' for Steam, and setting the expiration of this mode to e.g. 100 years would be trivial from their side.

[MichaelCollins]

In the case of first party games owned by Valve, they may earnestly intend to do as they say, and consequently aren't lying when they say it. Nevertheless, such promises about what will happen when the company is departing are worth approximately jack shit. Whether it's Gabe (or his heirs) later deciding to sell the company or creditors carving up the company after it fails, there are many scenarios in which those earnest promises will fall through. Notch once promised to eventually open source Minecraft. Maybe he wasn't lying when he said it, he might have earnestly meant it. But that went straight out the window when Microsoft wrote him a big fat check.

In the case of third party games with DRM on Steam: Valve doesn't have a license to distribute those games without DRM, so they're effectively promising to become a pirate software distributor. They have the technical means to do this, but not the legal right. They're almost certainly self-deluding if not lying outright when they promise to do this. I lean towards flagrantly lying; they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising but they're promising it anyway. And if they're willing to lie about this, I think you should reevaluate their promises respecting first party games as well.

[Aeolun]

> they know they don't have a license to do what they're promising

Do they not? Did you read the terms for publishing a game on Steam?

I didn’t, but it’s within reason it contains a provision for just this eventuality.

[MichaelCollins]

Such a term would be poison to most game developers, particularly in the early days of Steam when it had nothing more than a handful of first party games. Before Steam achieved market dominance, how would they have convinced third party developers to accept it?

Unless somebody shows me that term in the contracts, I don't believe it exists. It doesn't make sense for it to exist; the only reason to think it does is because you like Gabe and don't think he would lie to you.

[toast0]

> Suggesting they are lying demands more evidence than a random claim, especially as that lie itself would likely be unlawful and open the door to lawsuits against them from any user who claims they would not have purchased their games if they knew this statement to be untrue.

If they shutdown due to bankruptcy (which seems unlikely at the moment, but could change, without much notice since they're private and don't have required public reporting), there may not be anything to collect or anyone to compell to fulfill the promise.

[majewsky]

I don't disagree, but there are other reasons to like Steam. I like Steam because they heavily invest into Linux support, even for games that are not theirs. I understand that they're not doing this out of altruism, they have several business-level reasons, but they happen to align with my interests and that's really all I can ask for in a for-profit company.

[anonymousab]

> If you have to download a pirate's crack to play a game, you may as well download a pirate version of the game in the first place. I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios

You can at least crack the local files or pirate a steam game. You can't do that for stadia games - they are special Linux versions running on bespoke hardware and they will be lost to time when stadia goes.

You can play the windows/Linux/console versions of most of the games, at least. Technically different but outside of preservation purposes, they won't be meaningfully different from the stadia versions as Google never really delivered on any of the game feature promises of their platforms. But stadia exclusives will vanish with the platform. Maybe one day they will get ports, assuming the stadia developer licensing allows it.

[gambiting]

>>I don't see much substantial difference between these two scenarios.

In one you paid for the product, in other you didn't.

I'd think that's a pretty substantial difference?

[justanorherhack]

His point is highlighting that even if you pay for it you don’t actually own the game. In this weird market you only own the game if you pirate it.

Ip laws are the worst and terrible for the market. Especially the media companies that just recharge you for for the same content just to watch it on a different medium.

[staticassertion]

> In this weird market you only own the game if you pirate it.

That's a really good way of putting it, I'm gonna steal that (irony unintended). It's totally true - when you purchase software or services it's conditional. You have some voucher that can be redeemed at the discretion of the provider, and there are always many ways (EULA violation, company goes away) that the voucher can be negated.

But when you steal something you aren't beholden to anyone. You actually "own" that piece of software in a way more concrete way. Yes, someone could pursue legal charges and force you to remove it, but it's a totally separate system vs the built-in contract between customer/ service.

[gambiting]

>>His point is highlighting that even if you pay for it you don’t actually own the game

In the EU at least, you absolutely own the copy and are free to do with it as you please though, including making more copies for your own safekeeping. There are other comments in this thread pointing out that even in US with its crazy laws you also have this right, although I cannot comment on that personally.

[MichaelCollins]

The two scenarios I'm comparing (and finding not much difference between) are:

> You "buy" the game from Stadia, it's taken from you, so now you pirate the game.

> You "buy" the game from Steam, it's taken from you, so now you download the pirate's crack to the game.

In either case, the original developer received compensation so I don't think you should feel any moral obligations to anybody. Morally they're equivalent, the only real difference is whether you have the gamefiles already downloaded or not. In both cases you need to dip into the shadier side of the net to get the game you "bought" to run.

[gambiting]

Yeah I think I can agree with that. The two scenarios you posted are equal in my mind. I was thinking more about a scenario where you bought a game from steam, then used a pirate crack to play it, vs a scenario where you didn't buy a game, just pirated it. Those two aren't the same - obviously.

[Wowfunhappy]

But the product you're using isn't the one you bought.

[LadyCailin]

They're completely fungible, and the "damage" to the manufacturer, even a potentially contrived "piracy is theft" argument doesn't hold up. You already bought the game, the developer got paid as much as they would have if the service stayed up. Just because the service provider shuts down doesn't change those facts.

[gambiting]

That's like saying that if you're watching a blu ray rip of your own purchased disc, it isn't the same product you bought. Technically correct, but it's completely legal to rip your own discs(at least in the EU, can't comment on other countries).

[Wowfunhappy]

I'm not even thinking about legality.

My issue with "just download a crack" is that I have to spend time hunting down the crack, and I can't be sure the crack won't include malware, or won't introduce bugs which only appear later in the game. The last of these has happened to me on multiple occasions. A cracked game is no longer the product I bought.

By contrast, when I buy a game on GOG, I get a product that is DRM Free and will work forever—and because it's the product I actually purchased, I receive some minimal level of assurance from the retailer.

I would feel somewhat differently if there was a single "universal" crack that worked on all Steam games, or even which worked on 95% of Steam games and failed in a predictable way on the remaining 5%. This is the case for iTunes TV Shows, and so I have no problem paying for those, because I can run them through some software and I know the DRM will get stripped correctly every time with no quality loss. I'm not aware of any such software for Steam games.

[Cederfjard]

You seem to be saying (and be certain of) that in the EU, were Steam to be discontinued, it'd be completely legal for you to download a crack to bypass the DRM for the game you were previously licensed to play through Valve's platform. Is this established as a matter of law? Could you share any links on the topic?

If it wouldn't be legal, then downloading the crack to the game you paid to play through Steam but can't anymore would presumably be just as illegal as pirating the whole game to begin with. Did you really purchase the game or just an indefinite (but not necessarily eternal) license to play it?

[mrighele]

Steam’s DRM “just works” and that’s why gamers don’t complain much about it. Also it’s the best way to play games under Linux.

I have a few hundreds games in steam and while maybe one day I may lose access to all of them it’s a risk I am willing to take because:

- I don’t think it will happen anytime soon because it’s a money making machine. The biggest risk for me is Microsoft acquiring it and stopping any work on Linux related stuff (I have been using steam solely on Linux for the past 7+ years)

- Even if I lose access to the library, Steam will have done a better job that I could. I know for sure that I lost the media for the first steam-enabled games I bought but I can still play them.

[paulmd]

> I have a few hundreds games in steam

those are rookie numbers, a couple months of humble bundle and your library can be full of shit you'll never play

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Steam's DRM is also completely optional, publishers are under no obligation to use it and many don't.

[dijit]

That’s not really as true as you say, I remember in the mid-00s when I had trouble with the internet at home, that I couldn’t play offline games without logging in to steam.

There was a “remember password” option, but the session would still expire.

There would have to be some effort to unlink those games from the auth services.

[gambiting]

Hi ;-)

Also, yes, but I mean you could find a solution I'm sure. As long as you have the copies a solution would be found - just like I can play my PS1 games without owning a PS1. With Stadia there aren't any copies to speak of. Once the servers go down that's it.

[mywittyname]

I believe Valve has promised to unlock all games purchased through their platform in the event that they go out of business. Whether they stick to that is another story, but it should happen for at least some games.

They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.

Plus, the most likely thing to happen to Valve is a MS acquisition.

[branon]

I hope Valve isn't acquired by Microsoft. Gabe left Microsoft to found Valve so as long as he's around I can't ever see that happening.

Is it known who will helm Valve if Gabe decides to leave? Plagman has been a big name there with the recent SteamOS platform development but I'm not sure who the actual second-in-command would be.

[ansible]

If Stadia is shut down, they should offer activation keys for each user's purchased games on Epic, GOG, Xbox, GeForce Now or Steam. Or where ever, really, it doesn't matter.

[itsoktocry]

>They've been operating Steam for 20 years now. So the company has staying power.

This is true, but also this is all new. Sooner than later there will be a case of a 20 year old company who licenses media that burns their customer base. It's inevitable.

[ece]

They have a backup option built into the Steam client, so you're free to do that anytime. Offcourse, there's no guarantees with multiplayer games or always-on DRM as that's always been the case with publishers who choose to go down that route.

[kmeisthax]

They almost certainly can't. If I remember correctly the "we can just release an unlock patch" comment was back when Steam was just that really annoying thing Valve forced you install to play Counter-Strike. The moment they started including third-party games was the moment that no longer became available. DMCA 1201 is very very clear that you cannot unlock other people's games for any reason, even a legal one.

[kabdib]

It depends on the contract between the parties involved.

[fariszr]

After their Linux move, Vlave really want to have nothing to do with Microsoft.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I don't think that's true so much as Valve really doesn't trust Microsoft, which is a very reasonable position given the company's history.

[pjmlp]

It would be a pity to lose the income from those 95% steam customers.

[Ken_At_EM]

You’re of course entirely correct.

Valve feels different because you can install the games and play them on a machine of your choosing.

Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that. There are so many games that my machine can play and I don’t want to deal with even the slightest lag, but I’ve never been one to own an impressive gaming rig and dealing with a tiny bit of lag to avoid spending $3000 on a solid rig would be totally worth it.

Maybe valve should add a Stadia-like service in the future to allow you to play the game on their machines and stream it back when you want to.

[NikolaNovak]

>>Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering. Personally, I would have loved a service like that

GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes, with geforce now offering more permanence. You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now. I was skeptical but loved it for the last year or so when my computer couldn't run cyberpunk 2077 and I didn't want to sell kidney for a rtx card :)

[kmeisthax]

Geforce Now was probably the most consumer-friendly version of game streaming possible and every game publisher shat their pants and blocked it. Hell, even some indie developers blocked it. From a user perspective it's equivalent to renting an EC2 instance and installing Parsec and Steam on it, just automated. But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

The only reason why this didn't happen with Xcloud is that Microsoft already had pre-existing agreements that covered all the games on consoles. But that's moreso a testament to how much monopoly power platform owners have rather than Xbox developers being more consumer friendly.

The general principle that copyright owners have is "any time our work winds up on a new medium, we should get paid". This is the reason why game publishers won't help you port licenses out of failing platforms and successful platforms won't let publishers port them in[0]. Nobody wants license portability for game purchases. Why have that when we can charge people to buy a new one!? Sideloading? Emulators?! That's just piracy with extra steps!

The actual law doesn't support their level of copyright maximalism:

* RIAA v. Diamond supports a right of consumer format shifting (and also carved a huge hole into the AHRA DRM mandate in the process)

* Sony v. Connectix supports the legality of game emulation, including non-clean-room reimplementation of necessary system software to run games

The only reason why they are even remotely able to insist that ownership ends with the licensing platform is that the Copyright Office is afraid of adding DMCA 1201 exceptions for format shifting.

[0] Valve is one of the few exceptions; they will let their partner developers generate unlimited new license keys for free. Or at least they did - I do remember at one point they had to crack down on some scams that were abusing this.

AFAIK everyone else either does not allow partners to generate keys at all or has a strict cap of 100 or so.

[ascagnel_]

> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

nVidia was preloading games onto their service without licenses, and so they needed publisher approvals to do this. There are other cloud services that offer a gaming-capable PC and block storage and don't run afoul of this, since you need to install the games yourself.

[kmeisthax]

This seems like a distinction without a difference. Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.

It's broadly legal to run caching proxies, remote-hosted DVRs, and shared/deduplicated cloud storage. There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?

[ascagnel_]

> Them preloading game files shouldn't matter, because the actual games still require a DRM license in order to work.

> There's even specialized cache proxies for Steam. What would be the difference between what Nvidia did and, say, having a shared Steam cache server sitting between all of their streaming instances and Valve's servers?

The difference is that Valve, as part of their distribution agreement that publishers and developers sign to list on Steam, claims the right to host and distribute the files. Preloading the files is important, because it's a differentiation of the service -- you're not renting a PC in the cloud, you're signing on to a service where all your games are just sitting there, without your input, already patched and ready to go.

[bigmattystyles]

>> But the publishers looked at it like Nvidia had stolen their games to make their own bootleg streaming service.

You still bought the game, you're just running elsewhere. They're worried about ports - they want to sell you that sweet android/iOS port of their game. That's why they block the games.

[anjbe]

> GeForce now and xbox cloud both seem to check those boxes … You buy a game on steam or GoG or epic or whatever, than play it offline on your computer or stream via geforce now.

XBox Cloud doesn’t check that box, at least not on PC. You can transfer your streamed game saves to an XBox but as far as I know there’s no way to export them to a PC, and it wouldn’t matter because save files are not going to be compatible between your PC game and the streamed version which is an XBox port.

[horsawlarway]

Gaming rigs don't cost 3k.

You can get a great machine for under the price of the latest iPhone.

And at least for most games - I'd MUCH rather deal with lower graphics than latency. Latency makes games not fun. And I'm not even talking about intense actions games... I mean any game that's not turn-based (and sometimes - even those are not fun if latency starts hitting ~200-500ms).

Assuming your rig lasts 5 years, you're almost certainly better off just buying it outright at $800, than paying google $10 dollars a month for 5 years for vaporware. Plus at the end of it, you likely still have a perfectly functional computer, more than capable of handling basic mail/web/videos, or serving content (I have machines going back 18 years sitting on the dirt in my basement serving content).

[mminer237]

Plus you can play more than the ~100 games Google's hand-picked to play on their platform.

[xxs]

you can buy a decent system that runs the games better than stadia under $1k. you need 6600xt ($330), 16MB ram ($50), virtually any cpu ($150), motherboard $120, SSD - $80. That leaves you >250 for case, keyboard and mouse.

[MauranKilom]

> 16MB ram ($50)

An amusing typo :)

[barbazoo]

No one would ever need that much RAM.

[xxs]

true that

[gambiting]

>>Maybe if Stadia allowed you to play the games on your machine OR Stadia, the would have been a more compelling offering.

And this is the #1 problem with stadia - it's a completely different platform, it's as far away from Windows as PS5/Xbox are. You can't just run Stadia version of games on your PC, even if you could download them. GeForce NOW is a much better product, because it runs normal Windows executables(just in the cloud).

[fluoridation]

A game streaming service is a solution to a different problem, not yours. It's much more reliable to control the performance by running it locally and tweaking the graphical fidelity than by running it remotely and adding unpredictable network performance as a factor. Instead, game streaming is meant to solve the problem of playing a game on a system that could never ever hope to run it, or to play it away from one's main system.

[roody15]

It is unique in that Google has plenty of money and is not going out of business. In fact it just posted excellent earnings this week.

To say this project failed and everyone is just out of luck would really shows what kind of company Alphabet/Google really is.

[ocdtrekkie]

If they do this, they're probably hoping that developers of the games themselves will hand out free Steam keys to their now-angry customer base. More than likely this would happen for several titles, and they're probably counting on it.

[drumhead]

It really does feel like the company isnt being run by humans but a rudimentary AI somewhere.

[MichaelCollins]

Corporations may be comprised of humans, but the corporation itself is not human. This is particularly true for large corporations with a lot of organizational complexity, like Google. They are forms of artificial intelligence, but instead of running on silicon they run on the organizational chart. Corporations are capable of doing things that no individual human in the organization personally agrees with but go along with anyway because of the way the organization is structured and enforces compliance with itself. Even the executives at the top, who may believe they're in charge, are ultimately components in the machine whose perspective and insight into the true workings of the machine are filtered by the machine itself.

Don't expect human decency from a corporation, because corporations aren't humans. They're alien intelligence constructed out of humans, but that humanity is not inherited.

related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

[gre]

Amazon once told me that the music I had purchased was no longer available. I lost access to a digital music purchase...

[jaywalk]

But Amazon sells MP3 downloads?

[gre]

I can't download them anymore.

[jaywalk]

Once you download an MP3, you should protect it as you'd protect anything else you purchased instead of expecting that it would be available to re-download indefinitely.

[gre]

Oh, my bad, it was from iTunes from ten years ago, not Amazon. I found the support email. (I still have the mp3s)

""" Thank you for contacting iTunes Store Support!

My name is Dianne, and I'm sorry to hear that you have been unable to redownload the album "Rachmaninov: Complete Piano Concertos", on your new computer. I can certainly understand how this could be disappointing for you, please be assured that I'm happy to help.

Unfortunately, this item is no longer in the iTunes Store, and only items that are currently available can be redownloaded.

If the content provider no longer offers these purchases on the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBookstore, your content will not be available for you to download again.

However, if you still have this album on the original computer, you can certainly transfer it to you new computer. You can do this in several ways. See the following article for how to transfer iTunes Store purchases using Home Sharing, an external drive, an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, or iPod), the Windows Migration Assistant, and CDs/DVDs: """

[TurkTurkleton]

In addition to what everyone else who has replied said, Valve (or at least a support rep, so this doesn't carry as much weight as Gabe Newell himself saying it, but it was at least someone speaking in an official capacity) has said that in the event that the Steam service has to be discontinued, "measures are in place to ensure that that all users continue to have access to their Steam games".

[bzxcvbn]

Hearsay in an HN comment about an unnamed support rep making a promise in a comment taken out of context isn't a legal contract.

Meanwhile, here is what Steam's subscriber agreement says https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/english/

> Steam and your Subscription(s) require the download and installation of Content and Services onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license. The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.

> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally [...]

[hbn]

At least I can rest assured that pretty much anything that's been put on Steam has a cracked version out there, and if one day Valve disappears and I lose my entire library, I'll just go pirate whatever I want to play again.

Good luck doing that for a game that consumers were only ever sent frames of. If/when there's a streaming-exclusive game, it'll be conclusively lost to time when the company stops letting people play it.

[endominus]

Versions of this have been going on for years now. MMOs and multiplayer-focused titles die all the time, often with no way for players to access any of the content in those games. There might be a few exceptions where an extremely devoted fanbase reverse engineers the server code and runs instances of it, but that is hardly the rule.

This is the tragedy of game development. I heard the other day that copies of Anthem are selling for a penny at GameStop. When EA abandons that game (any day now), all of the work of those programmers, artists, and everyone else will basically be lost. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, gone.

[tokai]

You would still have your games files and be able to run them. Steam is not a rental or streaming service.

[NikolaNovak]

That's how GoG works.

That's not how steam works on its own. Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission to execute the files through proprietary framework that might one day disappear.

Don't get me wrong, steam is my preferred digital delivery platform and where I play majority of my games. But I am under no illusion that gives me any sort of permanence (without potential hacking and mods). If I want permanence I get a DRM free downloadable game from GoG.

[tokai]

>Steam explicitly a service where you buy a defined and limited license for permission

Simply not true. There is really no arguments here. You can run most games directly from the game files without steam. In the cases were you can't you would have issues with DRM in all other venues of purchase.

[flohofwoe]

It may look like that from the outside because you can go to the Steam library directory and double click a game executable directly, but this will still start the Steam runtime and do a DRM check. You can run a game in 'offline mode' for up to two weeks before another online DRM check is required though.

[jeltz]

Not necessarily. The DRM part is optional.

[anjbe]

Runtime DRM is sometimes optional with Steam, but install‐time DRM never is.

[fluoridation]

You're not describing how Steam is meant to work, but rather how things are likely to play out for a lot of titles if Steam ever shuts down. Yes, if Steam shuts down, any game that (due to technical requirements) requires Steam to be up will be left unusable, and the customers will be left with pretty much no recourse. Not because legally they're not entitled to the products they paid for, but because it would be impractical to enforce such a right.

No, Steam sells permanent licenses.

[MauranKilom]

> No, Steam sells permanent licenses.

I don't know where you're getting this from.

To quote from https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/:

> [long list of things you can obtain/do via Steam] are referred to in this Agreement as "Content and Services;" the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."

> Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms). This license ends upon termination of (a) this Agreement or (b) a Subscription that includes the license.

> Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.

There is zero legal entitlement to any given subscription in this agreement. The fact that they call it a "subscription", and that this is the "Subscriber Agreement" is not by accident. Rather, they explicitly reserve the right to cancel your "rights to access and/or use" their offers (aka subscriptions).

[NikolaNovak]

>>Steam sells permanent licenses.

I mean, no? Just no. Kindle doesn't sell you permanent irrevocable licenses and neither does steam, nor origin etc. They've each been revoked in the past and it's demonstrably true. Their TOS is clear and trivial to read. They all grant personal, limited, non-transferable, revocable and non-exclusive licenses.

You may be able to crack the downloaded steam game files to get them to run. But that's lateral to steam and irrelevant to discussion. if you're going to run cracked files skip steam and go to piratebay.

[delecti]

Many/most Steam games use Steam servers to authenticate ownership. It's a store, but it's also a DRM provider. Many games would require cracking to keep working.

[tokai]

>most Steam games use Steam servers to authenticate ownership

Not true. Maybe if you mainly play ubisoft tiles.

[delecti]

Can you be more specific or offer any evidence? That Valve offers DRM through Steam is unambiguously true. Here's their developer document on it: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

And here's a list of games which are sold through Steam but which nonetheless do not use Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...

Why would such a list be necessary if games sold through Steam that used Steam DRM were the minority?

[Karunamon]

Any game using Steamworks behaves this way, which is a pretty massive chunk of them. Ubisoft uses their own DRM which is an entirely different system.

I think what you may be saying is the behavior if you open a Steamworks game while Steam is opened, it just executes as normal. Any authentication or nonsense happens in the background. Try opening a Steamworks game with steam closed, it will force steam to open and login before the game can be played.

[vorpalhex]

You can test this. Delete steam, restart your computer and launch a title.

You'll get a message about steam.dll missing or being unable to authenticate.

You can also sign out of steam, unplug from the internet and try to launch - and again, you won't be able to except this time steam will launch and tell you to login.

[xen2xen1]

Or a single last update from the servers that made every server check come back legit.

[delecti]

That's always just been a wishful statement of intent with no legal backing. Valve might be unable or unwilling to actually follow through on that urban legend if they do ever shut down for some reason.

[RGamma]

Steam DRM might not easily allow this, although I trust in Valve's ethics to permit offline play if shit hits the fan.

In fact I remember reading from a community representative that there are plans for this in place (not the best source but whatever https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...)

[Karunamon]

It also helps that Steamworks DRM is trivially bypassed. All it takes are a couple of replacement DLL files in the games directory and it runs normally (minus multiplayer support, of course).

This isn't even a sketchy crack thing, it's an open source tool. Look up Goldberg emulator.

[gjsman-1000]

Not very much - many of those game files actually have Steam Runtime or Steam executables blended in. It is not a strong DRM - but you are still going to need to look for cracked copies if Steam went down.

[Ken_At_EM]

Yes but if Steam shut down you’d have no way to get to the installers again and you’d be left crossing your fingers the machine you installed them on doesn’t die.

[shagie]

I've bought a copy of Iron Dragon for the PC - I can even find the license key in my ancient google mail. It was published by http://www.antigravitybox.com/ and the game's website is http://www.irondragon.org/

I don't see too much of a difference other than Steam has more proven longevity - even if the developers that sold games on Steam don't. I can still download Dungeons of Dreadmor from Steam even though the company appears to have disappeared in 2016.

[tokai]

Think it through. Of cause you cant get the games files if the provider goes offline. You can make a backup of any of your games in steam, which will make it possible to install it again offline on other machines.

[flohofwoe]

The game won't run on another machine, at best you have a two weeks time window before the DRM checks start to fail.

There's this family sharing thing though, where you can share your Steam library between 5 accounts and up to 10 computers:

https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

[xen2xen1]

Hacks already exist to make the games not check the servers, and only stop working after new Steam updates. If Steam were to never update again it seems likely the hacked dlls would work forever.

[toastercat]

I've already resolved that if this were to ever happen, I would go back to my teenage ways of pirating every video game I want to play.

I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.

[anjbe]

> I already make an effort to buy games on GOG or itch.io before Steam in order to have DRM-Free copies when I can.

It’s important to save the offline installers too. I keep a rather large external for my GOG library.

[umanwizard]

Legally you may be right (probably depends on the country, idk) but it’s still an ethically shitty move and would make me think twice about doing business with Google in the future, even though I personally am not affected.

[User23]

That's absolutely false under US law[1]. Once you have a legal copy, you are free to run the software without a license, including making additional copies for archival or as necessary to use it (for example, copying the program from disk to memory for execution).

The anti-circumvention statutes mean DRM complicates matters, but you definitely have a legal right to the game files themselves. For what it's worth, I believe that a competent lawyer could successfully argue that disabling DRM is an "adaptation" that's an "essential step in the utilization of the computer program." Get the case in front of Judge Alsup or some other computer literate judge and the argument would probably even prevail.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

[sleepybrett]

I agree with you that their TOS and all the contracts say 'we leave the business you lose your content'. They are within their legal right to do that.

However is it the right thing to do? Will it damage their reputation to do that?

If they wanted to dodge that beating they'd offer steam/epic/xbox/ps5/switch keys to their customers to claim. Any game their customer bought is probably over a year old at this point and they can cut a deal with the publishers to get deeply discounted keys and eat the costs.

[chunkyguy]

So it isn't really a purchase but rather rental

[diffeomorphism]

Are you sure about that? It rather seems like the opposite, just like for buying/renting anything. You absolutely do have a legal right to compensation, but if a company goes bankrupt you might only get it in part and you will have to sue to get it.

[adamc]

The result of this will be that Google will be an anathema in the gaming space.

[unity1001]

That doesn't work that way outside the US. There would be repercussions.