4 ms·
No, steam is the worst of both worlds of digital selling: It is a mandatory subscription service, on top, to access your games, not just a one time purchase.
by a3w 2y ago
No, steam is the worst of both worlds of digital selling: It is a mandatory subscription service, on top, to access your games, not just a one time purchase.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dialup_sounds 2y agoHow much is a Steam subscription?
- ApolloFortyNine 2y ago... Do you think steam is a mandatory subscription service?
- Maxatar 2y agoThe subscription is mandatory to play your games.
- inexcf 2y agoWhat subscription? And if anything it is only necessary for games with Steam DRM.
- Maxatar 2y agoThe very subscription that the article posted is about. I suppose no one bothers reading submissions before commenting on them, but anyways here you go, the Steam Subscriber Agreement. https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/ https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
- pseudosaid 2y agothats some standard TOS. if making a free account is a subscription, then so is making a gmail account.
- Maxatar 2y agoI think the point is that most people know that Google can terminate your subscription to GMail, whereas most people would be surprised to know that Valve can also terminate your subscription to Steam and lock you out of your game library. That's effectively what this article is about, Valve is complying with a new law where they must disclose to customers that they can terminate access to games that a customer already paid for because the relationship between the customer and Steam is of an on-going subscription. GoG on the other hand explicitly states that you do not have a subscription to their service and so a suspension from GoG does not revoke your access to play purchased games. In fact GoG has no means whatsoever to revoke your access to play games you purchased from GoG. It would be like going to Best Buy and buying a video game, even if in the future you decide to be Best Buy's worst enemy, or you get into a dispute with them, who knows what... Best Buy can't take away what you already bought from them because your relationship with Best Buy was that of a vendor rather than an ongoing subscription.
- gregoryl 2y agoCan you link to the page with the subscription costs?
- wizzwizz4 2y agoI'm sure there are some services that work like this (whichever console has an online service called "Live" comes to mind), but Steam doesn't appear to – unless there's some fine print I've forgotten.
- to11mtm 2y agoIt depends whether they are using Steam's form of DRM (AFAIR it can require at minimum some form of time-based token auth where you can still play offline so long as you have done so recently.) PS4/PS5 as well as XBox%whatever% have a setup close to this, however based on my observations the tokens tend to 'auto-refresh' (at least on PS4/PS5) so long as you actually turn the thing on once in a while.
- bugfix 2y agoOnce you buy a game on Steam, you don't need to pay any kind of subscription to play it. The vast majority of games sold there are, in fact, one-time purchases. The games stay in your library even if the developer/publisher decides to delist them. There are games like MMOs that do require a subscription, but that has nothing to do with Steam itself.