• Foster Hangdaan@lemmy.hangdaan.com
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    1 day ago

    It IS a scam since a lot of subscription services do not make it clear that the buyer is only granted limited access, and not ownership of the product.

    Just last year, due to legal reasons, Steam placed a notice on their cart page stating that purchases only grant a licensemuch to the surprise of some Steam users. Steam has been around for 20+ years, and it took a piece of legislation to force the company to inform their buyers of this very important fact. It is clear that they would rather have misinformed customers, much like in a scam.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      20 hours ago

      uh…all software is like that. Has been for decades, you don’t actually own shit, even if you bought the discs.

      • Foster Hangdaan@lemmy.hangdaan.com
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        1 day ago

        Steam is not a subscription service

        Steam provides a cloud service. Not dissimilar to other subscription-based services. Had they been using AWS, they would also have been affected by the outage, resulting in Steam also being mentioned in the headline. So it’s just as relevant as the others.

        you’ll never own a piece of software by buying it in a video game store.

        Sure, I’m both granted a license on both Steam or GOG, but the crucial difference is still about offline access. If GOG stopped existing tomorrow, I’d still be able to install, and play, all my GOG games. The same cannot be said for Steam. Which one, then, grants the most ownership? License or no license.

        • riquisimo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 hours ago

          All true, one small caveat. If GoG went down, you would still have all your games as long as you downloaded the installer.

          But then again, you could just copy the installed files around. That works for most games. So it’s close to the same.