I have been an avid steam user for years, and as a PC gamer and enthusiast, this has been the One and only application that I have been 100% loyal to like all in… But they updated the terms of use and apparently now, stating that buying is not owning, you just have a license that can be revoked whenever the publisher decides to.
** Several things I have purchased on there have been taken away, and I am considering not using it at all anymore**. First and most egregious thing that has been taken away from me are DLC. I played Destiny 2 for a really long while and after purchasing several DLC, came back to the game to find that stuff that I had planned on finishing later was completely removed from the game but I wasn’t given a refund. I reached out to support and was told that they can totally do this. They can just steal from you, you buy something, they just take it away and remove it from the game entirely, and no refund. So live service on Steam is a hell no for me. There have been numerous other games though that have been taken away as well, one example being Total War battles colon kingdoms, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost recon phantoms.
Just makes me wonder, what’s the point of even using Steam anymore if they can just take whatever you purchase away from you and no refund at all? It’s basically theft. Like, imagine You purchase a PlayStation 5 game and they send the police into your home to retrieve it to make sure that you no longer have it anymore simply because they stop selling it. Absolutely insane how anyone can support this business model
Aside from live service games that are dependent on the devs’ servers, and anything that uses more intrusive DRM (note that while Steamworks DRM is a thing, quite a lot of games don’t use it anymore and ones that do are very easily cracked), they can’t actually take the bits off my computer.
DRM-free games are still considered a license too, at least as far as the law is concerned. Even physical games are. But I’m not worried about anything that can’t be enforced.