*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *
What would it take to get a “Steam but TV/movies instead of games”? I feel like if I could see reviews of movies and I could buy them and download them and have them forever and buy them on sale and all that good stuff, it wouldn’t be so bad.
How come none of the streaming services have gone for this model? Steam is swimming in money, surely this method could work?
I mean I hate to say it but if steam closed up shop tomorrow your games are gone too. You buy a license, not a copy, from steam
Yes that is true - although many games on Steam can play offline so because I download the game, I own it in that fashion. They can’t take that away.
But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.
Yeah GOG is a better ownership model. Steam is not ownership
This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.
They’ve said they have a contingency plan in case that happens. They haven’t said what it is, but my guess is some kind of “you have 60 days to download your games without steamworks DRM”.
Yeah I don’t trust the good will of corporations, even the ones I personally like
@SorteKanin @thirdBreakfast I guess Amazon and iTunes would be the closest thing, but rights expire for TV shows and movies far more often than they do for games. It’s insane that there are shows from 10 years ago that aren’t legally accessible or are straight-up lost media because the rights expired.
Any idea why there is this discrepancy between TV and games?
Other comments are wrong, its complicated residual structures on tv/movies.
Exactly. The licensing and sublicensing structures in TV and film are way more complicated than in video games. They also intentionally license for relatively short durations for tax reasons and other corporate considerations that have nothing to do with the end viewer or consumer.
Money. It’s much better if you can sell the same thing over and over again.
Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.
Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.
The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.
But… do you pay subscription for Steam that they can just jack up any time they want and there isn’t anything you can do about it other than straight up quit and lose all your stuff?
No. That’s why.