Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mschuster91 37 days ago
A Steam purchase I have more confidence in than a physical game copy to survive. I trust Steam to honor its agreement with me more than I trust in myself and my feline overlords to keep a game CD alive.

In a previous timeline, this has led to me going on ebay to find CDs of a long lost game (EarthSiege 2), which I promptly uploaded to the Internet Archive as the one distributed by the current license-holder at the time had an older, unstable version with bugs and, more importantly, no audio and my own original copy got damaged to hell and beyond...

[1] https://archive.org/details/sierra-earth-siege-2
1 comments
embedding-shape 37 days ago
Sure, I agree with all of those things, but the fact still stands, Steam is actively lying to customers as the store pages say "Buy" and "Purchase", not "Rent" or "Lease", which are more accurate. You don't actually own the product.

Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.

link
bbddg 37 days ago
I think it would be extremely confusing for customers if the steam “Buy” button was renamed to “Rent” or “Lease”.
link
account42 37 days ago
It would only be confusing because customers are currently being misled and the new label would no longer match their faulty mental model.
link
embedding-shape 37 days ago
How could it be confusing when that's actually what happens? Imagine HN showed "Delete comment" instead of "Reply" under the comment input, don't you agree that be misleading?
link
branon 37 days ago
how about "Purchase License"
link
wtetzner 37 days ago
When I check out on Steam it displays this text to me:

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

link
embedding-shape 37 days ago
This is what I see on the checkout page: https://i.imgur.com/diOkyCM.png

There is a product in the cart, which is a game, and the button says "Purchase", no where does it say anywhere that it's a license (although that's obvious), nor that I don't actually "own" this game after I "purchase" it.

Sure, minor detail perhaps, but I'd still argue that something Steam could do better, and since the industry is lacking self-regulation about this, I'd argue more regulations are needed for this even.

link
wtetzner 37 days ago
It's on the cart page, before you check out. And I do agree that it should be much more front-and-center, rather than the sort of fine-print thing they have now.

https://imgur.com/a/D1LKUUi

link