Steam Now Makes It Clearer That its Users Don’t Own Their Games

Steam is becoming more transparent about the potential ephemerality of digital game libraries. Engadget is reporting today that the company has started warning consumers who are about to purchase games on the platform that they will just purchase a license to play the game, which they won’t actually own.

I’ve been able to verify that by myself after adding a game to my Steam shopping cart. Below the button for proceeding to the payment, Steam now displays the following message: “A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.”

Of course, none of this is actually new, and this also applies to physical media. These days, many PlayStation and Xbox games that ship on disk don’t include the full game. In practice, this means mandatory downloads when gamers insert disks in their consoles. The disks actually serve as a license, and owning a physical disk for a game doesn’t guarantee that it will be perpetually available.

We’ve seen a recent example of that with the original The Crew game from Ubisoft, which was taken offline for good earlier this year after the company shut down its servers. Ubisoft went even further and removed the game from the gaming libraries of people who had purchased it.

Steam’s new notice about game licenses in shopping carts could be in reaction to a new California law that will push digital storefronts to explicitely mention that they’re only selling only for some of the products they’re offering. This new law will apply to digital games, books, movies, and music, but other digital products with a permanent offline download option won’t be impacted. Digital platforms that fail to disclose to their customers that they’re just getting a license for the content they’re purchasing could be fined for false advertising.