Hope you enjoy your Steam game library being ripped out of your hands or a forced subscription or recurring purchase or mandatory timed video ads showing up whenever someone who can make decisions for the future of the Valve LLC believes that is the right decision.

The fact is, whoever has possession (e.g. OWNERSHIP) of the decisions for a company can choose to do this, to not do this, or to do something else, or nothing at all. Inevitably decisions by whoever owns that control will change from the predecessors and eventually someone or some combination of someones constituting the deciding majority will sell out. No one lives forever.

[–] Wodge@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Epic Games Store, Gog, UPlay (or whatever ubisoft's is called), Origin/EA Downloader have all not done this and yet they're not controlled by Gabe Newell.

Fact is that steam, no one else, started the road down the licensing and not ownership of games path we are firmly on with regards to PC.

Most PC's don't even have a disc drive any more, it's all downloads.

And Gog is the only one that still allows ownership and not licensing of software.

So yeah, you do know nothing at all.

[–] just_change_it@lemmy.world -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

"hurr durr nobody else has does it yet so clearly it can never happen"

Nobody else has 70%+ market share. The others are all competing for a bigger slice, they can't afford to be predatory.

The market leader can and the rest will follow suit. Haven't you seen overdraft charges (just now having laws change...decades after becoming a problem), minimal interest rates on savings accounts, ads in streaming services across the board (netflix wasn't first but the second they did it prime announced it), a reigning in of account sharing based on IP addresses for streaming services (happening across the board after a couple of big players did it)...

I get that you just can't imagine a world where your game library is RIPPED out of your hands after a 30 day notice of service changes... i've seen it happen time and time again for various platforms and games. Digital services can and will fuck you eventually.

Signed: Hellgate London lifetime subscription holder