I also joined Steam to try Portal free.

I have bought a few games since though (I think all in the sale weeks)... I generally prefer to properly own what I buy too, but ultimately with Steam the cheap prices are woth the slight risk of you being shafted in the future. So far I have spent only £17, and have 20 games to show for it (admitedly 10 of them make up Half-Life and Half-Life 2 with their episodes and multiplayer versions, but IMO I have at least 14 games worth of content)

It was never totally about the digital copy thing.  I have a ton of physical games sitting on my shelf that I need to get through.  I have been trying not to buy more games until I finish them.

It just doesn't make me very confident in digital copies to see stuff like this.

I don't think that their words would be meaningless in a court of law anyway.

LIke what stopping them going a step further and saying we can't be sued lol.

Damnyouall said: Saw this on another forum and thought I'd share it with you: Just a friendly reminder that you don't actually own anything tied to distribution services such as Steam, PSN, XBLA, and that they can change the rules at any time, giving you no real option but to accept their terms, because they hold your game library hostage and you are completely at their mercy. A correct point of view would be to treat anything obtained digitally as rented.

This is why the free games on PSN are good. The more the better. This is the main reason I do not like digital copies you cannot download.

It's convenient, they said. You can re-download any time, they said. It's the future, they said.

All the while I said I don't like digital only distros and want to be able to touch what I buy. Now publishers act like you only buy the license and the media is just the delivery method. Pretty soon we won't have any rights of ownership left.

I see it as a rental and never pay more then $10 for anything on Steam. I'm not going to pay $60 for a new release for just a download. Steam is great for sales to play the games you didn't want to pay full price for anyway. But if I expect I want to keep the game I'll get a physical copy.

Another trend I dislike is having to buy several copies to play a game in lan setup. You used to only need one copy of Unreal tournament, half-life etc to play each other in lan. Nowadays you have to buy a copy for each player, sucks.

Those agreements are invalid when push really comes to shove anyway. You can sign whatever and never really forfeit your basic consumer rights, especially because most consumer protection laws in a lot of countries (i definitely know the EU is required to sign onto this) make it so that fine print EULAs like that are basically unenforceable.

In reality class action lawsuits are a scam ran by lawyers. Preventing class action lawsuits do not prevent individuals from suing them so in the long run if they do something really stupid it could end up cost them more with this "protection". And at least in the US you cannot sign away your right as an individal so they cannot legally protect against individal suits.

Class action suits were created to protect companies and reduce the load on the justice system, so you can say any company "protecting" themselves from that are in reality signed away their rights to protection. And if their is a mass of suits brought against the company the chance the justice system may also fine them because as said they are made to reduce the stress of that system of government.

What a class action lawsuit is a group of lawyer decide to pick up a suit that potentially has a lot of money involved. Usually initiated by a single person, but then they sue them as a group. The overall payout looks big but in the end the "clients" of the lawyers really get nothing and forfeit their right to sue the company over this issue again. Usually reward @ $20 per person spread out over a few thousand people and represents only about 45% of settlement amount the rest go to the lawyers.

As said by protecting themselves against class action law suits they are technically dropping their pants to individual lawsuits. Though the amount of effort needed to go through on usually turn people off they can cost the company more, because damages for each person can rack up into thousands of dollars per suit. So in the end it could go badly this way.



ON TOPIC: I have to say digital distribution is a way of the software industry as a whole to remove the rights of the end users in the ownership of the title itself. It really isn't buying to license also. If you lose the game after they fold. (Hard drive failure etc) You lose all right to titles. That is what happen to me and it wasn't a small company either, they still are doing business but because they are owned by another company and doing a slightly different type of business they don't have to honor my purchase with them when they where owned by another company.

Class action suits are not a scam, you just don't understand the purpose. If a company does $10 dollars of damage to you, you won't sue them. But if the company does $10 of damage to a couple of thousand people, they can band together and make the company pay a few Million in damages and thus make sure it won't be repeated. If some comapny puts a DRM rootkit on an audio CD, the damage to your PC is small, and you won't sue them because a lawsuit would cost you a lot of money with little potential gain. But if a couple of thousand consumers get together and sue, they stand a chance to make a difference and punish the offending company. And they did: A class action suit is what dissuaded Sony (and anyone else) to ever try any DRM bullshit with audio CDs again.

By the way, it's even worse than expected. I just saw this elsewhere:

"http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Valves-Steam-Latest-to-Erode-Your-Legal-Rights-With-Fine-Print-120625

Points of interest:

1. If Steam decides to ban you from the service, they get to keep all of the money in your wallet (up to $2,000)
2. If you lose, get banned, or in any other way get denied access from one game you purchased in a bundle, they will take away ALL the games in the bundle from you.
3. You agree to ignore your own local laws (in terms of your interaction with Steam), and instead follow US law if you're not located in Europe. If you're in Europe, you still must ignore your own local law and abide by Luxenberg law.
4. You agree to never sue them (class action or individually), instead you agree to ONLY ever us arbitration.
5. You are only renting access to the games. You don't own them in any way, shape or form. If Steam goes under, you will never get access to the games you purchased.
6. If Steam decides to remove a game from it's library that you purchased, too bad. They don't owe you the game, you just lose all access to it.
7. Steam can ban you from the service for any reason they want.

Why is this bad?

Glad you asked! Let's say you decide to write up a critical blog post about Valve or Steam, and they read it and dislike it."