From the article: "Valve’s defence hinged on the argument that Steam sells game licenses – subscriptions – to games, not the games themselves. The court, however, doesn’t see game purchases on Steam as subscriptions, since the owner has access to them indefinitely, and isn’t required to pay recurring payments in order to maintain access."
Guess what the loophole's gonna be?
Steam will cost you 1 euro a month to maintain access, BUT WAIT, we've got this awesome "temporary introductory" deal where for every Euro you spend on anything in our store, anything at all, you get one free month of subscription! Yes, buy one brand new AAA game and you get 5 or 6 years of free subscription! Wowzers! What a stonking great deal for the consumer! Such an incredible deal that has been so successful that we're running it indefinitely, despite the fact it's totally temporary.
But if you do somehow manage to run out of months, you will indeed lose access. That part has to be real. And there will be a real "just buy subscription access" option, though nobody will ever use it because why just give Valve 12 Euro when you can buy a game with it instead?
I'm fairly confident in common law traditions, that would be too blatant and they couldn't literally do that. They'd sidle up in that direction, though, as close as they thought they could get. I don't know about how France's Civil Law tradition would take that, but, still, same principle; head in that direction as close as you think you can get. "As close as you can get" may in fact be quite far, but I think this is still the general direction you're going to see.
> Valve’s defence hinged on the argument that Steam sells game licenses – subscriptions – to games, not the games themselves.
IANAL but buying a license seems different to me than buying a subscription, and if you ask most Steam users they will tell you that they do the former not the latter. (In fact I have never seen the word subscription on their store, though I guess it is somewhere in their EULA).
If they go that way they may have to change their wording and that will also change the perception that people have of the platform: if I'm subscribing to a service the price I'm willing to pay to access (not buy) the games will probably much lower.
It may be better for them to just keep people thinking that the own the games forever (even though we know in practice this is probably not be true).
I'm wondering if instead they could just set themselves as the middleman for the used game market, since they already have all the infrastructure needed. In this way at least both steam and the publisher could get a cut.
I agree, the court's argument doesn't make much sense. It can only result in various work arounds, for example making everything subscription based which most customers don't really want.
Another work around could be selling per computer license -you will have to pay for using it on every new computer. It's not something anyone wants.
Guess what the loophole's gonna be?
Steam will cost you 1 euro a month to maintain access, BUT WAIT, we've got this awesome "temporary introductory" deal where for every Euro you spend on anything in our store, anything at all, you get one free month of subscription! Yes, buy one brand new AAA game and you get 5 or 6 years of free subscription! Wowzers! What a stonking great deal for the consumer! Such an incredible deal that has been so successful that we're running it indefinitely, despite the fact it's totally temporary.
But if you do somehow manage to run out of months, you will indeed lose access. That part has to be real. And there will be a real "just buy subscription access" option, though nobody will ever use it because why just give Valve 12 Euro when you can buy a game with it instead?
I'm fairly confident in common law traditions, that would be too blatant and they couldn't literally do that. They'd sidle up in that direction, though, as close as they thought they could get. I don't know about how France's Civil Law tradition would take that, but, still, same principle; head in that direction as close as you think you can get. "As close as you can get" may in fact be quite far, but I think this is still the general direction you're going to see.