Technology

shrugs framing it this way feels like a finance industry tactic where business people attempt to seem intelligent and beyond the public’s capacity to understand by taking concepts and renaming them to finance concepts and then pretending their grift is different than every other con man’s grift in history.

Steam sells games, that is far as I need to zoom in, any farther and business bros are just wasting my time with their sandcastles made out of PowerPoints and economic spiritualism that is grounded in absolutely nothing other than absolving the person running the business for the harm they may enact in doing so.

Depends on what country you live in. Just because they call is that doesn't mean the law and courts will see it their way.

Relatedly, check out www.StopKillingGames.com. When you buy a game without an expiration date on the box it either is illegal or should be explicitly made illegal to destroy your copy of the game when the company shuts down their servers. Stop Killing Games is a campaign to stop this from happening, and it's actually getting some progress like being noticed and picked up by politicians. If you know Freeman's Mind, Civil Protection, or Ross's Game Dungeon, this campaign was started by Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) who made all of those.

Edit: quote from the FAQ in the website:

Q: Aren't games licensed, not sold to customers?

A: The short answer is this is a large legal grey area, depending on the country. In the United States, this is generally the case. In other countries, the law is not clear at all, since license agreements cannot override national laws. Those laws often consider videogames as goods, which have many consumer protections that apply to them. So despite what the license agreement may say, in some countries you are indeed sold your copy of the game license. Some terms still apply, however. For example, you are typically only sold your individual copy of the game license for personal use, not the intellectual property rights to the videogame itself.