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A “purchase” or “buy” option, especially when you get an invoice, should ALWAYS mean ownership of the product.
A “borrow” or “rent” option is one that you expect to have to return the product.
Google can’t have it both ways. They either sold people software or they rented it out. Since it was never advertised or marketed as the Google Play Rental Library, they should be forced to give people the products they paid for.
Between this (which happened to me on both Google play and Amazon) and audible audio books not being “mine” unless of course I log in to Amazon etc to get my DRM key, I am starting to reconsider how I obtain my stuff.
This whole techno serfdom thing ain’t for me.
I am starting to reconsider how I obtain my stuff.
This is a good thing. I don’t know why modern business models for these companies seem to be intentionally anti-consumer, but people will find other ways to get what they are looking for. And if that means spending money with a more ethical company, or simply pirating, they’ll find the path of least resistance.
I used to spend hundreds on the Google Play Store, buying apps and music all the time. Then they started playing stupid games, and I haven’t spent a dollar on the Play Store in years. My money goes to someone else.
At this point I’ve spent $12/mo for 4 years on Amazon music. That’s $576 dollars I could have spent on buying songs or CDs and that’s probably 576+ songs.
I regret that I’ve streamed all of these years. And let’s be honestly, I rarely branch out to far afield from my favorite songs and artists. Who have probably received less money from me than if I just bought their cd and ripped it like we did 15 years ago. I also have way more storage on my phone than I ever did 15 years ago. I could keep quite a bit of my music synced and enjoy it whenever I want without worrying about data limits or if I’m on WiFi.
Same goes with half the video streaming services. I watch a handful of shows and movies. I could have bought the ones I watch and never have to worry about “oh man, did they take x off of Netflix? What service is it on now? Ew Hulu, I have to watch ads with that even though I pay”.
The 0% interest is drying up so these companies are trying to claw as much revenue and profit out of their services as they can and I wonder how many people it’s just going to drive away from it completely?
I’ll stop watching prime video when they add ads.
I don’t mind paying for services. I mind feeling like I’m getting shafted and duped every time I turn around. Raising the prices, making the experience worse, removing content, removing features, and then having the nerve to increase the prices by 50% in some cases. Get bent!
I lucked out last year and ended up scoring something like 1000 DVDs for cheeeeaap. Like $100 or something. I ripped them all (minus any duplicates I already owned) and put them on my NAS. No more worrying about ads, data mining, or even internet/service outages ruining my evening.
I did the same for all my CDs, and while we still do purchase CDs, they are way overpriced.
But purchasing digital music and movies has become harder since Google Play Music went away. It’s almost too much effort to try to buy digital content these days, and it makes no sense. I want to pay for content, but making it impossible just doesn’t work for anyone.
Amazon played their first ad for us on Prime Movies today… during a kid show no less. Just disgusting where things have ended up.
My father in law has thousands of CDs he’s collected over the years that he’d probably let me have.
And I just found out my local library sells old DVDs and Blu-rays for $.50 each. I should go drop $50 and buy em out. There were some great movies in there and a few that I’ve always wanted to watch.
This thread just made me realize that I’ve hit my limit of bs with these services. Over lunch, I wrote a script to download yt videos and put them in my Plex library.
And I just found out my local library sells old DVDs and Blu-rays for $.50 each.
Holy crap, I need to see if our local library offers something like that. I used to go to their book sales, but never considered that they would be selling movies.
Yup, I’ve said it a million times, it needs to be made flatly illegal to use language that implies ownership if the company has any method of revoking your ownership of that product in the future. These threads always get the same libertarians that show up in discussions about non-functional slack fill saying “it’s not illegal, so what’s the problem?” The problem is that it isn’t illegal. Imagine if Toyota could come grab your car from your driveway, because even though you paid it off, subclause 74 of section G(2) says that the company retains the right to repossess property made by them at any time for any reason. You didn’t read a 200 page contract at the dealership when you bought the car, you just trusted that they wouldn’t fuck you. Toyota would get their ass reamed in court if they tried that, so why are Google and Microsoft and Sony and Steam allowed to do it?
As far as im concerned, the equivalent here, should be a raw downloadable file. Much like how music purchases work.
Anything other than that simply isn’t “buying”
I recall purchasing Photoshop for Android, before it became Lightroom for Android.
It was as close to the desktop Photoshop as you could get, and it wasn’t cheap.
Google (or adobe) took it out of the play store, effectively cutting customers off and preventing them from installing it on new devices.
Fortunately, I was rooted at the time and backed up the APK, which allowed me to use it for years longer and on newer devices. But the experience really had be second guessing whether I should keep “buying” apps on the play store.
There are quite a few other instances where games and apps I purchased simply disappeared. Such an unethical business model.
You don’t need root to extract apks.
True, but as I recall it was more than just the APK that I needed to backup/restore to get it to work.
It was so many years ago, so I really don’t remember the details, but the point was without a backup, I’d have lost access to the app I paid for.
removed by mod
I’m gonna guess that it involves something in the Terms and Agreement that no one actually reads.
Because you signed (digitally) an agreement that lets them do that.
Pirate everything.
Additionally, we can try to change the laws so we do actually own a copy.
But we never owned a copy of any software or movie ever. We always had a license to watch or use the copy we purchased.
Why does that matter to my point?
“But we’ve always been enslaved. We’ve never had rights as individuals in the first place.” Is not an argument against change.
Also, don’t use Google. Wherever possible.
Don’t buy games on Steam or Valve Corporation, they make you sign the User Agreement that legally waves your rights and ownership of games.
Actually, Steam is usually one of the best places when it comes to refunds. The process is simple, and they’re willing to make exceptions to the rules. And the company is run by one of the few CEOs in the gaming industry who seem to actually understand gaming.
AU lawsuit against Valve proves Valve didn’t want to refund their customers. Valve is guilty of this violation of Australia law. Many people who used Steam before 2010 tell people they were never given refunds oran option for refunds.
Valve is not good guys, they fought the Australia government to the very top to not pay or offer refunds. They are greedy.
And a large portion of the steam community will be super sad if Gaben retires or passes away. We can only hope it continues to be run as well as it has been over the past 15 years.
They literally had to be sued by multiple jurisdictions to even offer refunds. The cult of Valve needs to die.
Read by almost no one, it is interesting because in many countries contracts are considered invalid if one of the parties is not properly informed and still accepts, affirmative consent is legally crucial.
Everyone knows that EULAs violate it systematically, tens or hundreds of millions a day, but it doesn’t seem to be a matter of interest.Whenever I see a checkbox or something that just says “Check here to confirm you accept our privacy policy” I think it’s funny because all I am legally agreeing to are the words actually in front of me. Sure, I agree with the standalone words “our privacy policy”. I’m not sure what that does for you, but i guess “our privacy policy” is an acceptable string of words.
My last order in a questionable shop had a ‘return policy’ pop up, i had to screenshot. It was empty.
Imagine how hard it would be to buy stuff or use free services if you actually had to read and understand the contracts every time.
Ok, I’ll just quickly check on Google maps what’s south of Mongolia. Oh, I need to read all that before seeing the map? Well, maybe later. Don’t really have the time for that right now.
If that’s what life was like, laziness would win nearly every time and companies would have hardly any users or customers. Eventually some companies would probably make super short contracts in order to lower the threshold.
I can already see it: “We’ll do whatever we want without accepting any responsibility and we’ll spy on you to monetize it. Click here to accept.”
It’s a complicated issue, maybe with summaries, requiring affirmative consent only for certain actions, or splitting them up? I don’t know, it all seems messy. But I hope it leaves behind the expectation that we lie by agreeing to sell your firstborn’s soul after reading for hours in legalese.
LOL, that was a brilliant summary about what these contracts usually boil down to. However, they should probably include these things too: “You’re not allowed to do anything cool. If anything goes wrong, it’s always your fault.”
These brutally honest super short contracts could be fun to read.
You mean buying isn’t owning?
Well then…Piracy isn’t st…I mean Piracy is wrong an immoral!
Piracy is always justified. I don’t do it because I’m afraid of consequences and my fear of fucking up is greater than my desire to watch TV, but if you’re confident in your abilities, do it. Fuck Netflix, they wouldn’t use your money to make shows you like anyway.
's alright sweetheart, you can say it, there’s no longer a megacorporation to shadow ban or lecture you
I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about! I would never pirate anything!
You should never use mullvad with quantum secure encryption or proton VPN with port forwarding off or qbitorrent to pirate anything! That would be horrible to steal from a corporate executive’s enormous income!
Very shortsighted article calling repeatedly the GDPR a “crazy” law.
And on another note, why is it not backwards compatible with older apps?
I’ve got games and a bathroom speaker I can’t access because I got a new phone. Are we just expecting devs to sit there updating their apps forever to meet new stupid requirements?
Fuck the whole Android ecosystem. It’s completely broken from top to bottom.
That’s a problem with any software. If you keep updating the OS eventually some programs are going to stop working. This is true for any OS: Linux, Unix, MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, etc. Eventually something the program relies on no longer exists or works in a way the program can’t handle.
I don’t see any good solutions. Options I see:
- Keep an old device to have older versions of Android, or whatever, so the software you need will still work. Sucks to have to find the specific device for whatever your trying to do. Also, don’t know how easy they’d be to replace/fix if they broke.
- OSes no longer remove any functionality, only add-on to. This causes bloat and performance problems at the least. Not to mention would be incredibly hard to maintain on any long term scale.
- Have some way to emulate old devices/OSes so you can run instances that work with your software. IDK how well this would work with multiple instances. Probably can’t do this on your phone so you’d need a different dedicated device. Not to mention I’m not sure how many different instances you can emulate at once before you start having problems.
Everything seems to have drawbacks. That’s one advantage of devices having dedicated hardware, and software that doesn’t rely on outside hardware/services. Updates won’t kill it and they can’t take it away from you. Though, they still don’t have to support the hardware forever so it gets harder and harder to fix as time goes on, if it’s even user fixable to begin with.
Fucking Tasker isn’t allowed to turn off my Bluetooth anymore because of Android’s new bullshit. I hate Android with as much passion as I used to love it. When my current phone bites the dust, I’m migrating to Apple.
lmao yes apple, which all equate with freedom
the direction you want to go is linux, not to an even more fascist company
This is far from an android only problem.
It’s more of a software as a service problem combined with a cloud controlled hardware problem.
Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I’m really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.
At least we have forums archiving the games themselves.
Seriously, I can’t run a 32 bit game on a 64 bit processor? How is that even a problem on newer phones?
They removed the 32-bit libraries from the system so they don’t have to be loaded, to save RAM.
They probably removed certain libraries that are used by 32 bit programs
Yep I found out myself pretty quickly. With a simple App which was maybe 10K lines of code I started targeting Android 10 and so far every new major version caused some issue with the code as Google constantly messes around with files, permissions, …
I can’t imagine what a task it is to maintain a game.
I just wish Google would release some kind of 32-bit Android 4.4 sandboxed compatibility layer for old games. Android 4.4 was the standard Android version for a super long time for a zillion devices, and I’d bet 99% of the dead .APK games out there would run on that version.
Give me a tool with a crapload of slow, clumsy emulation wrappers covered in tedious config options and a launcher any time I want to run an app through this compatibility layer and let me play Amazing Alex again.
edit: it occurs to me I basically want an Android emulator for Android. Or like, a psuedo-emulator that’s not really an emulator like WINE/Proton.
and let me play Amazing Alex again.
Why not just buy a top notch 4.4 phone off eBay? Looks like you can get a Galaxy Note 4 for about 40$
Ahh, you know, it’s about the convenience of not having to juggle another device. I still have an old Galaxy Tab kicking around the house that plays all that stuff pretty well, but it’s not the same as being able to pull it out of my pocket on the bus.
Ya know, I actually had the idea a while back to run an android emulator on one of my servers and then setup remote access to it with some software that hopefully had an android client app.
The idea being I would use the android remote client on my actual phone to use a “phone in the cloud”, ofc my original intentions for it wouldn’t have been affected too terribly by things like latency, but for games it may or may not work all that well (I never really got past the sketch out phase lol)
Why not try emulating it locally on your phone instead of a remote server, to eliminate the latency? Was it not possible at the time you got the idea?
I thought about it, but the pros didn’t outweigh the cons for me. The biggest con being limited resources on a phone and a remote server would have relatively endless resources, and my use case could handle a little latency so the biggest pro wasn’t so big
There exists stuff like this.
Virtualxposed. Sandvxposed.
The most popular one I heard about vmos, https://www.vmos.com/
But that one was android 8 (I think?) closed source, and probably spyware inside and outside the thing.
Also, new changes by google may break these emulator type apps:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SamsungDex/comments/16r1tg8/phantom_process_killer_solution_in_android_14/
It’s purchasing ≠ owning, then piracy ≠ stealing
Ok but this isn’t purchasing outright it is basically leasing. It says so in the tos. The issue here is ppl don’t read tos or they don’t care and pay anyway. Ppl like that have zero right to complain.
Lol everyone of you idiots are proving my point and making tons of idiotic assumptions like I’m anti piracy. Y’all need some logic lessons.
OK but piracy isn’t stealing it is basically a harmless free copy. The issue here is corporations want to have their cake and eat it too, but to prohibit us all from either having or eating any cake ever. Corpos like that have zero right to my consideration or care.
Hey look it’s the libertarian I was talking about in my other comment
Yeah, okay, except the iTunes and Facebook TOSes are longer than King Lear. Eventually a judge nullified a TOS on the basis that no-one ever reads those anyway.
Thanks to odious TOSes, the average American commits three felonies a day, violations of the CFAA for which some whistle-blowers and journalists are serving sentences similar to [assassin] Scott Roeder (for the murder of Dr. George Tiller). The rest of us are not serving such sentences but for one officer or official who wants us to disappear.
In the meantime journalists continue to get charged with such violations, usually when their investigating something embarrassing to current administrations. The EFF has repeatedly raised a stink about this, but hasn’t yet been able to change the law.
If your kid is under 13 and has social media accounts on specifically kid-friendly platforms (that, themselves teem with predators, salesfolk and law enforcement) then your kid is committing major federal crimes. On the light side, they totally have haxxor cred.
You 👏 should ,👏 expect 👏 this 👏 it 👏isn’t👏the👏first👏time
I recall a while back someone did a study that there are not enough hours in the day for an average person to actually read all the TOS documents they’re expected to agree to. The idea that people can or should be responsible for knowing what’s in a TOS is a legal fiction.
Maybe we should get a GPT started to make short and understandable TOS.
I never said or implied what you assume I’m implying.
Get some literacy.
Amazing how you can talk so coherently with that corporate dick taking up so much space in your mouth.
How dare the average person not have the time or attention span to read a 28 page document in legalese that explains what exactly they’re doing
It’s not like purposefully dense and overlong TOS is a known strategy to hide bullshit that later gets thrown out in court or anything
That person probably also think people who get shot are stupid for not moving out of the bullet’s path. “It is not so hard, it moves in a straight line you idiots”.
“Daniel Shaver should have just listened to philip brailsford’s commands”
Obviously, Brailsford was found not guilty by an infallible jury after all.
So you don’t have time for that? Spend two hours reading stipulations for a service that you might use for a decade or longer? That you might spend thousands of your currency on? What happened to the world. So fast. So furious.
The button to install a paid app literally says BUY. If that doesn’t mean purchase I don’t what else it could mean.
I can buy a vacation doesn’t mean I own the place I’m going.
It’s literally just a convention, a design choice. It doesn’t really mean anything.
From Wiktionary:
buy (third-person singular simple present “buys,” present participle “buying,” simple past “bought,” past participle “bought” or (archaic, rare, dialectal) “boughten”)
(transitive, ditransitive) To obtain (something) in exchange for money or goods.
“I’m going to buy my father something nice for his birthday.”
When I search the Play Store for Geometry Dash, and click the lil button that says “$1.99,” I get this page. It sure as shit looks like what I’m about to buy is Geometry Dash, the video game. When I click “Buy,” I’m not at all expecting to “buy” a temporary, permanently revokable license to play the game for now. I’m expecting to own the 1s and 0s that are downloaded to my device. Hiding legalese in the T&C that nobody clicks saying “actually buy means lease” is legal, and it should not be legal, because it’s misleading as hell. They should not be allowed to redefine widely understood words in T&C in a way that misleads consumers into paying for something they didn’t expect to be paying for.
TOS documents are designed not to be read.
Nice try, Google
Some people don’t get how you can separate understanding the logic of something and not supporting it at the same time.
Don’t worry, that is normal. Im getting laughed at left and right for having my own root-server with all my services running on it, all FOSS.
Most of them were born with google already existing, it is part of nature. They haven’t seen a giant go down yet.
I don’t believe piracy is treated as stealing from a legal sense, already.
That’s true. If I steal 20 copies of some avengers movie from Walmart and give them away on the street, I’ll pay a couple thousand dollars in fines, tops. If I’m caught seeding an avengers movie to one person downloading from me in Serbia, I’ll be fined more money than most people make in their entire lives
Piracy is never stealing, since you are not removing anything from anyone. This does not include actual piracy, the one with ships and rum.
Partially agree, because if purchasing == owning (which it should), then piracy is still != stealing
They all do this. I’ve had games or dlc vanish off my PlayStation account. When I called to complain, since they lost the records of my purchases, they won’t return them. I lost the receipts so long ago. I still have save files that require the DLCs
Nintendo just turned off whole stores instead.
I normally don’t advocate for piracy if you can afford games, but if company doesn’t even allow you to buy them, then what other option is there? It’s like they want people to pirate their games.
I normally advocate for piracy. In cases like these, where some corpo comes in and STEALS from their customers (because let’s stop pretending this is anything else) I advocate for the other type of piracy, with sabers, cannons, rape, theft, pillaging and making some of these assholes walk a plank.
This is rage inducing.
Imagine if your car dealer was allowed to confiscate your car on a dubious claim such as “it doesn’t meet the latest emissions standards,” but not even telling you that.
Google needs to be fined twice the value of the apps that it stole from it’s paying customers.
“Tesla has a new feature that will disable your seat controls if you keep messing with them”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911072/tesla-seat-controls-disable-lock-out-brose
This is so stupid. Why would a company put this much effort to lock down the seat controls, as if they didn’t already exist without limits on every other car? Not even with a toggle? These companies are really trying to destroy the “cars = freedom” association.
They get disabled for 5 minutes, probably to give the motors time to cool down.
If the motors need to cool down, they need to rethink their motors.
Motors get hot and it’s quite reasonable to not include tons of cooling just so that you can adjust your seat for hours on end.
That said the implementation is still stupid as time isn’t the right measure to judge motor temperature, motor temperature is. Thermocouples cost fractions of a cent, the motors probably already include one or two as they already have smarts (being hooked up to the CAN bus and not straight voltage). Which would also take care of differing environmental temperatures as obviously the motors are worse at shedding heat when it’s scorching hot in the car.
You don’t add cooling, you size the motors to have enough thermal mass and mount them to metal chassis.
Potatoe Potatoh. Point is you size the overall system for quick adjustments, not continuous use. If you can get by with less weight and cost then you do as continuous use does not even begin to appear in the requirements sheet.
Rethink a motor designed to be used for 5 mins initially then occasionally in future? It’s fine for the design purpose. It’s even fine for the mode where it operates every time you get in the car (where it waits in fully back position, and moves forward when you operate a control)
Why should they think it to let it be used as a fidget toy?
Phew, that makes a lot more sense. I thought it permanently locked them
So revolutionary
One of the most important parts of purchasing a car is the title being signed over and that transfer being registered with the state. You never own the title to an app.
As a hobbist App developer I can tell its probably at least to some extent due to the ongoing “cost” to keep the Apps hosted and working.
Every year when a new Android beta comes out you have to go through your App, check if everything still works only to then discover something broke and now you gotta figure out how to fix it.
With a small App I hosted starting at Android 10 every major update so far caused me some trouble. Now with Android 14 this is the last version I’ll support for the simple fact that I don’t have the time to keep up with it.
And mind you this was a rather simple small App, I can’t imagine what a headache it is to maintain a game.
You say that like businesses in eras past haven’t had any overhead.
Overhead is a part of the profit equation. If you can’t make it work, you’re not profitable, and you lose.
It isn’t just about businesses. There used to be a lot more free apps on the Play Store, but keeping up with constantly-changing requirements makes that impractical. You can’t just put something up and leave it. You have to work on frequently or it gets dropped. You also have to keep up with their demands to limit certain features and to provide new information or it gets dropped.
I used to have a handful of free apps up on Play. Now they are all gone because I just don’t have the time to rewrite them every few months.
Try releasing them as apks to bypass Google’s insane rules.
I have already done that. My apps.aslanrefuge.org site has downloadable APKs for everything. It also has the code, for anyone who wants to tinker with it.
I just wish there was a better way. I need to look into F-Droid and other options.
The website doesn’t load unfortunately.
Sorry about that! I fixed it in the message above. I typoed the actual link, but the visible version was correct so I didn’t notice.
The correct address is: https://apps.aslanrefuge.org
It doesn’t help when the overhead is dictated by a massive corporation that isn’t your friend…
Sure, you don’t have to support it with updates indefinitely, but I think the possibility should exist to delist it so new people can’t buy it but people who bought it before would still be able to download it (with no guarantee it will work).
Agree, thats fair.
You’re talking about a different situation though. I have old apps that are no longer supported so I can’t install them on newer devices. However, I can still install them on old devices with a supported OS version (or trick the Play Store into installing on a new OS and deal with bugs).
What about this: Can we stop pushing for big OS updates every year? This just makes it harder on developers, and the apps are the reason people use the OS in the first place.
And these companies think piracy is unjustified. No, it’s just holding out an umbrella in the rain.
Piracy is ALWAYS justified! These companies are dead set on robbing me blind. Well guess what: if I never spent a nickel, there’s nothing to rob me of! To the high seas!
Usually distribution rights or breach of contract
Is it just me, or does something not add up here? I find it incredibly hard to believe that hundreds of titles, some of which required payment, were so easily removed without notifying users. Google may somehow have the right to withhold purchased content from users, but that doesn’t change the fact the company is taking our purchases from our accounts without even telling us. On the aforementioned Reddit post, we can get some insight from one of the affected developers via a comment from NoodlecakeStudios that states: “Google Play has been on a rampage lately. They’ve removed a lot of our games too. Unfortunately for some of those games, they use really old engines or tech that can’t be easily updated to 64bit (which is a new requirement), so they won’t be coming back.” So much for apps staying accessible in our libraries. Even if the reasoning is less malicious, such as new (albeit unrealistic) tech requirements for older apps, or crazy laws like GDPR seeing removals in countries it does not apply, the real sting is that Google is not notifying its users (or even its devs) when an app is pulled and no longer available. Although Google has undoubtedly covered itself with conditions that we agree to when we use the Play Store, every user deserves to know when apps are pulled from their account.
So breach of contract (64 bit requirement)
Imagine if Microsoft said you can’t run 32bit software on your 64bit Windows anymore.
Like Apple did?
Only that the contract was unilaterally changed after being perfectly valid for the longest time.
“Breach of contract” is a bit of a stretch as they could simply claim any excuse is a “breach of contract” by adding in new things at any point.
Yes, that’s how it works
So Google has no “app store” it’s a “rental lot” filled with a ton of malicious bullshit anyway.
Is there an easy and effective way out of their evil environment?
I bought a Pixel 8 Pro and installed GrapheneOS. No account signed in to the OS or Google play. You can run it completely Google free or run Google services in a sandbox mode with normal controllable permissions (alot of stuff uses Google services for push notifications and some other stuff.)
Use FOSS (Free Open Source Software) where possible, you can get a cheap domain name and cheap email hosting to move away from gmail.
You could go a step further, pick up a raspberry pi, and start self hosting some things to move away from Google apps.
It’s all pretty relatively simple these days, but you have to be open to learning at least a little bit (mostly the last part, gOS is basically one click install and some email hosts are about the same - but still.)
TLDR: Moving away from services you pay for with your data will require paying with your money or time, but it’s worth it.
This is the move, I’m still getting up to speed with Linux on my desktop before I get grapheneos on my cell. It’s damn intimidating.
Hell yeah. You’ll get there! Trust me, it’s WAYYYYYYY more user friendly than it used to be 😂
Fdroid, free and open source alternative to the play store. I’ve been using it for months, and while it’s barebones and probably too minimal for most people, I rather like it myself.
It’s the same as Steam, you sign the contract called “ User Agreement” that has a section on how you don’t own the games. It’s legal and nothing you can do about it. User Agreement also forbids you from suing Valve Corporation, so anyone who wants to own games from SteM legally cannot.
not all games on steam have steam drm, thats an option that devs decide to use or not. Valve gives it as an option, blame the dev if they choose to use it.
Valve’s games also include DRM, Valve will still be blamed. Valve doesn’t care about their games, TF2 community comes into mind when they sent Cease and Desist. No, do not defend them for it because you also would agree with Nintendo’s stance on this issue.
Valve will never be the good guys, only remember as the bad guys.
you didnt use valve as the sole dev however, changing your entire argument. you blamed steam as an entire platform when the actual answer is that its dev specific, hell theres a fucking wiki that tells you which games on steam dont have DRM. you blanketed an entire platform with a statement that isnt even fully true. im not even saying valve is the good guy, this shit isn’t black and white, im just here not trying to pedal actual lies
All Valves games are DRM, you can not download the games without Steam Client. No, using the alternative method because the User Agreement doesn’t allow it. Valve never allows games to be installed without permission by them.
That’s the very definition of DRM, a company saying they don’t allow you to install games without consent.
t’s the same as Steam, you sign the contract called “ User Agreement” that has a section on how you don’t own the games
this is what you said,
Steam is a platform, that host various games, some with DRM, some without DRM
Valve is a dev, their games have DRM. Just because Valves games have drm, doesnt make that all games on steam have DRM. You painted an entire platform as DRM when it isn’t. it’s one thing to say that Valve theirselves puts drm in their games, its a completely different statement to blanket all of steam to be drm, when thats a completely false statement.
For example, go get someones steam copy of witcher 3, youll quickly find out that it itself has no drm, despite coming from steam, and not the GOG version.
Again, the very definition of DRM is Valve approval of:
-
Your account
-
Your money
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The requirements laid out in the Steam User agreement
You do not own the game, you don’t own the Steam Client, you don’t own the account and buying doesn’t offer refunds for real money. THE WHOLE THING IS VALVE CORPORATE LEGAL TERF. You can never get Steam exclusive games outside of Steam.
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You decided to use as an example the only company known to not overstep in this regard. Steam has historically refunded in full the cost of games that have been withdrawn. It’s likely the agreements for these are part of the requirements of publishers rather than the platform itself, as well as the reasons to withdraw them.
That’s absolutely correct, they’re also excellent when it comes to lending games to other people. OTOH Valve is fighting its way through the whole European appeal chain to prevent having to allow customers to resell their games. They’re going to lose, it’s just a matter of time.
Steam didn’t refund any of the cost of the games their DRM rendered inoperable on my Windows 7 PC. They happily took my money 1 week before dropping support.
That’s on you. They extended support to that legacy os far beyond it being end of life.
It’s on them. I don’t want “support” I wanted them to disable their DRM before they abandoned Windows 7.
If you’re hanging onto windows 7 because your computer isn’t suitable for later versions, I suggest you move to Linux so as to be on a modern reasonably secure operating system. Windows 7 machines are becoming too likely to be part of a bot farm
You can run steam on Linux
I actually have an alternate boot that runs Linux. I have Windows 7 PC precisely to be able to run most amount of games, including older games.
Whatever I sign doesn’t make it any less illegal to falsely advertise your services.
If I hire a pool cleaner and they shit in my pool it isn’t my fault that ‘I didn’t read the pool-shitting clause buried in fine print on the 138th page of the agreement’. Shitting in pools is the antithesis of a pool cleaning service.
Advertisers and marketers they know this, stop helping them.
I wouldn’t hire a pool cleaner that produced a hundred page contract, unless they were happy to start the cleaning a month or three before I signed
