Evil Tactician wrote:
Just for completeness sake, and to point something out to Steam nay-sayers: You don't own your physical media either. What you own is a LICENSE to use the media on the disc, which can be revoked by the company issuing said license at any time, and for any reason. I'd recommend carefully and thoroughly reading the agreements they force down your throat when you install a game.
To be honest, I wouldn't worry overly much. No company is ever going to get away with leaving players completely unable to play their game from a legal point of view. Even if Valve/Steam would collapse, the companies which released their games there would go out of their way to enable you to play their game or the planet would be too small to contain the fury of PC gamers everywhere.
Steam/Valve collapsing is not the issue that concerns me. You're right that many developers might make an effort to give you another way to access their games that were formerly on Steam if that happened, but I'm not convinced they all would.
Commander McLane wrote:Case in point is Amazon and the Kindle: Amazon reserves the right to completely erasing your Kindle's memory anytime, at their own discretion, without any prior warning, if they suspect you of some misuse of their license. And they have done this already. This couldn't happen so easily of they would ship their ebooks by CD.
That is my problem with Steam. If you disagree with a change they make to their Subscriber Agreement, such as adding mandatory arbitration like they've already done, and you don't hit the "I Agree" button when Steam updates, you no longer have access to any of the games you've shelled out good money for. Sorry, license revoked. At least with physical media you can feel free to ignore the licensor when they revoke your license and keep playing the game you bought anyway. Moreover, I'm not sure what circumstance would arise where the licensor of a physical disc would contact you and tell you to stop using it...?