US copyright law 'forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods' for game preservation, say historians who are 'disappointed' after being denied a DMCA exemption

Sorry to break it to you, but this has been the state of games purchasing/preservation since at least the 90s. Check instruction manuals for old cartridge games, most have disclaimers in the back that you only purchased a license.

The bright side is that despite all of that, games preservation is still going quite strong. Just through piracy and not entirely legal means. This really doesn't change anything, except online only games won't be as easy to preserve as people had hoped. This isn't a step back in any way. It's just a confirmation that things are still what they have been for decades.

You were never actually able to buy a game, it has always been a "license" to play it. Even for physical cartridges and disks. The difference being, legally speaking, if you actually owned it, you could make and sell copies of it or take the assets from the game and make a new game with them and then sell that. Owning a license means you can play it, but cant make copies or reuse the assets.

Even with physical media, that license could in theory be taken away if the rights holder chose too. Realistically it would be impossible to enforce since there is no way of tracking down all the physical copies, so no one has ever tried to do it. But legally it works exactly the same as on steam. The only change is that a new california law is going to require steam, and other stores, to be transparent about it, but nothing is actually different.

Even on GOG, where they give you a DRM free binary, if the rights holder doesnt want it available anymore, they have to take it away. You wouldn't be able to download it and if you had saved a copy of the DRM free binary, playing it would legally be the same as piracy at that point.

Despite all of this, game preservation is alive and well and isn't going anywhere.

Buying isn't owning from literally any game company. When you buy digital you own a license to play that game. The license can be revoked at any time.

When you buy a physical game you still only buy a license to play that game, and the license can be revoked at any time. The only difference here is you own the physical disk that media is on, and it's harder (not impossible) for the owner of that media (the one who sells the license) to revoke the license to that media.

I appreciate that people are pissed about this but it was a thing before digital media took off and the only difference between a steam game and a game from Epic is the inclusion (on Epic) of an offline installer store that allows you to install the game without connecting to the internet.

It's the same license.

I'm also going to add the PlayStation, Xbox, and even Nintendo have removed titles from people's libraries when their agreement to license the media to the users lapsed or were removed. So it's not just Valve.

This is how I feel about it:

Best chance to own a game is a DRM-free digital store (GOG, a few games on Humble, itch.io, some others). But own always means "a license for personal use". Has been like that forever. Even if you buy a disk - you own the (physical) disk and a license to use the software contained on it. You can't of course own "the game" because that would mean you'd be free to distribute it. It's all just semantics... You own a game for personal use! Just like you own a baseball bat... but still aren't allowed to purposefully use it to bash somebody's head in. Ownership has never been a 100% or nothing thing.

It's just that DRM turns that ownership effectually into a usage license.

There is no ownership for digital files, because ownership would mean freedom to distribute. Semantics. So, we all have licenses to everything we "own" digitally.

As such, I don't really feel slighted by Steam because this has been my understanding the entire time. Digital ownership =//= ownership. It's the same for if you ever bought music from iTunes in the 2000's.

I would feel different if Steam actively used DRM on everything (developer has no choice), and things like Steamless to remove Valves trivially easy DRM weren't as accessible/were actively prevented.

I buy games on Steam and if they act up then I use my license in fair use for myself and format shift or whatever else I see fit to make my game functional, and I doubt that I would ever be taken to court or that the account could be compromised from doing this. Quite frankly, once the games files are on your computer Steam can't do too much unless you let it.

And for me personally, I don't mind the tradeoff for cloud saves, per game notes, community control schemes and per game personal bindings, access to community forums - I understand that not everyone feels this way, nor should they, but given that everything digital is a license anyway, it seems clear to me that Valve is interested in providing a service beyond a storefront for games, while competitors aren't doing much of anything outside of litigation or twiddling thumbdrives.

The alternative to this is not using Steam, getting what you can from Itch.io and GOG, and not having access to pretty much everything I just mentioned unless you set it up yourself somehow (cloud saves are feasible but that's a hassle, and everything else would be much harder, save community forums). Which is absolutely fine, but I like the services that Steam offers and I was never under the impression that I "own" the game any moreso than I "owned" my PS2 games. What's more, there's no license limit to these titles, so I can have my account for 20 years and play the games on as many computers as I want. I have encountered storefronts that limit your licenses to 3 to 5 uses, or sometimes slightly better ones sometimes have authorization revoking.

All this said, the gaming landscape is certainly struggling, it seems quite telling to me that all these companies are more interested in engaging in litigation to tear down competitors than they are in bolstering their own platforms to make them more appealing to gamers.

I only buy games on steam when they're like $5 or less.

I have less than $200 spent in total over the last 16/17 years on steam, and I don't see myself breaking the $5 limit.

I even pay GOG non sale prices if a steam sale jogs my memory of a game I want.

Sailing the high seas isn't feasible right now since I don't control the internet here and I'm not going to risk me not knowing something and landing the owner with potential legal trouble. But I will hopefully be dusting my hat off soon.