Valve Distinguishes Information for Players: You Buy a License, Not a Game
Valve listened to the California “recommendation” and now reports that “a purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam”.
From now on, Steam informs during the purchase of a game that the customer is only acquiring a license. As noted by Human-Equivalent-154 on Reddit, when you go to your shopping cart after adding any title to it, the following message appears: "purchasing a digital product grants you a license to this product on Steam."
Of course, this doesn't change anything in the actual state of affairs. Even in times when digital distribution of software barely existed, the buyer only purchased a license for their copy of the game. The Steam regulations have also been explaining this for years.
However, the information in the cart seems to be something completely new. Apparently, Valve followed the order of the Governor of California, who, with a new law, forced digital stores to inform buyers that they are purchasing only a license, not the game or other software itself.
All of this seems to be a result of the "Stop killing video games" campaign, which quickly gained notoriety after Ubisoft announced the shutdown of The Crew servers (which happened half a year ago). Unfortunately, the initiative is currently not gaining quickly enough for it to be realistically considered by the European Commission. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of time, and since our last message 3 days ago, over 1.5 thousand votes have been added.
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