I’ve been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I’ve got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I’m cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just… easy.
That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck plugged into the TV downstairs.
I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV… and that’s where everything breaks down. If she’s playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that “someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off” or some nonsense like that.
I’m suddenly face to face with the fact that I don’t actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren’t spent on what I expected. It’s… enraging to put it gently.
I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that’s bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware is not ok.
Technically: Yes. Legally: Doubtful.
Publishers can choose to no longer run servers but to remove games from the accounts without compensation, would be legal trouble.
When Sony axed Concord, all buyers got a full refund for a reason and that reason isn’t that Sony is such a caring company.
There is no doubt. Sony is actually a great example because they were the ones who tried to remove purchases from Discovery. They faced zero legal consequences. There wasn’t even any discussion of legal consequences because it’s perfectly legal. Ultimately Sony worked it out with Discovery to restore those purchases but they did not do that out of legality or out of kindness. They did it for their reputation. If Sony starts removing your streaming purchases, the same purchases you can make any a dozen other platforms, are you going to continue purchasing from them? Hail nah.
Concord was a bit different in that the content was only available for ~2 weeks so I’d imagine that would fall into some sort of legal grey area and they’d end up being sued or worse. As of yet, I don’t think “how long must ‘purchases’ be available?” has been tested in court.