A new law has been passed in California which prohibits the use of words like "buy" and "purchase" on digital storefronts like Steam.
A new law has been passed in California which prohibits the use of words like "buy" and "purchase" on digital storefronts like Steam.
A new law has been passed in California which prohibits the use of words like "buy" and "purchase" on digital storefronts like Steam.
Essentially, the new law will mean that storefronts like Steam will no longer be able to use terms such as “buy” or “purchase” when advertising a game that always requires an online connection. Since you won’t technically own the product and servers being taken offline would render the product useless, a different word will have to be used.
The official phrasing in the bill’s summary reads, it will “prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand.”
That's actually a very good reason IMO.
Not exactly accurate. The button can still say Buy. The law says that they have to get extra acknowledgment from the buyer that they actually mean license. So it will say buy, and then it will pop up and say you aren’t buying the game, only a license, and then you have to click ok I understand. More nags. What we really need is another license agreement to pop up that nobody reads.
A while back I was discussing Ross Scott's 'Stop Killing Games' proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.
If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.
If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.
If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.
Someone popped in and said 'well I think they should just make it more obvious that you're not buying a game, you're buying a temporary license.'
To which I said something like 'But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.'
So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We're not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we're just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.
All this does is make it so you can't say 'Buy' or 'Purchase' and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like 'You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.'
US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.
EDIT: A few days after I posted this, Ross put out a video with more or less the same angle as I presented, that this solves nothing, changes nothing, and arguably actually makes it technically worse as this functionally acts as the government officially endorsing the status quo: You have no legal standing to contest your evaporating game, as it followed the rules and put a warning or changed some wording.
So it must be "Rent" now? Logically you still purchase a subscription. So this is a very weird solution.
A better solution would be that it has information on what you're buying. "You can use this even if the game is removed", "You can play this online and even without starting up Steam", "Dedicated servers will be released when the game is stopped", etc etc
Which is why I buy games on GoG whenever it's an option.
As a purchaser of many games online, that makes sense to me. Especially for younger people growing up with this kinda stuff it would be nice to differentiate the two.
They'll just change the button from "Buy $59.99" to just "$59.99".
As much as I lament the fact that we can't just own things anymore, it's not like this legislation will change anything. Storefronts aren't going to drop their DRM just so they can use the word 'buy' again.
If https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ gets to go before the EU commission, this might even go much further.