I'm not sure about Steam, but there are plenty of horror stories on the internet about "bought X on Y platform and then Y revoked account". The majority of users may never experience this, but the fact is that when you use a service like this you're at the mercy of the service provider, even for basic things like maintaining access to your account.
What I'd like to see is some sort of movement towards "if it looks like a purchase, then it is a purchase". That is, if I pay a one-time up-front free for access to something (even with DRM), we should pass legislation to make it behave like a purchase and limit the shenanigans that providers can pull. (Granted this is a very ill-formed idea and there are lots of details to work out in order to implement it.)
For any other reasons most banks/credit card companies put limits between 30 days and a year I believe.
The worst part about this is that it often happens when consumers exercise their legitimate rights to e.g. chargebacks. And yes, Steam does it too: if you chargeback a Steam purchase, even a fraudulent one where the CC company sides with you after the investigation, usually this will result in your account getting locked and held hostage until you undo the chargeback and eat the cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility_LLC_v._Concepc... (binding arbitration overrides state law)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/business/supreme-court-up... (binding arbitration overrides workers' rights)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/supreme-court-backs-... (binding aribtration applies even in cases of fraud and deceptive advertising)
Unfortunately they have been successfully tested often in many legal systems.
Actually no you can't (at least if you're in the US), because the Steam user agreement mandates binding arbitration: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#11, where, for all practical purposes, the consumer always loses.
> Nothing gives me the right to just break my part of the contract and take my money back.
The whole point of chargebacks is that they're supposed to give you that right, if the CC company decides that the vendor wronged you. Valve's behavior here is an unethical and unilateral end-run around this process.
The real problem is that a Steam "purchase" are fundamentally an undefined-term rental. When you "buy" a gsame, you are buying nothing, and then Steam might let you access a game if they wants you to.
Admittedly, I don't know that much about the contracts between CC providers and merchants, but in the big picture of things, CC providers are the giants and Valve is the little guy, so I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't have a lot of leverage in those negotiations. Otherwise, presumably the CC provider would be unable to initiate the chargeback in the first place. The fact that the chargeback itself is successful (Valve's retaliation notwithstanding) is evidence that the contract between CC provider and Valve allows chargebacks.
In this particular case, what this probably means is that CC providers need to include a "no retaliation" clause in their contracts for customers who issue legitimate chargebacks. That's assuming CC providers care, and maybe they don't, but point is they have the power to fix this and if it becomes a problem for their customers presumably they will.
But I don't think any of this solves the broader issue though. In general I don't think you can depend on having a powerful authority like a CC provider side with you like this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urS8GmwmeWQ
[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8qwvz5/how-cherry...
That kind of what they are doing. You can still play pretty much anything that doesn't run on VAC-secured servers. There are consequences on the steam community as well, though. The most significant are probably your profile being branded and restrictions on item trade/using the market.
It's kind of like saying "imagine being arrested for being naked in public omg I do that all the time ... at home". It's different degrees of freedom.
There is also GOG, which sells DRM-free games. I just keep backups of my games on my NAS.
Not entirely, since there's still some dependency on their client to put the game in 'offline mode', which requires phoning home to Valve.
A better example would be gog.com, which gives you the game binary/installer to download and no requirements for phoning home or any other shenanigans for being able to install/play it.
Nothing clarifies the difference between purchase and rental when you try booting Steam up on a laptop for a 12 hour bus ride across Mexico and you can't play a single game.
You just have this "meh, hasn't affected me" mindset.
I do agree with your point that this is a bad thing in the first place.
Or that somebody phishes your login data or that your account is banned for some reason or that the drm servers for a game you bought are now offline (you still have the installer, but can't use it anymore)... . I also like steam, but it is still very much "all eggs in one basket" and while some of the games on there are drm-free many aren't. gog.com is better in that regard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/3fsms1/psa_how_the_s...
Which makes sense: For the involved businesses there are enormous upsides to this kind of deal: Instead of giving your product out of hand, you enter a long-term relationship with the consumer, you get the money and remain in full control over the product, you can define in unprecedented detail how your customers are permitted to use the product, you can use that control as leverage in contracts with other businesses, etc, etc.
Consumers usually don't mind because, indeed, it feels like you own the product. Until stuff like the OP happens and they realize it was a lie.
Sometimes games like this are removed from the Steam store, like World in Conflict, and can be made to work with some tweaking. But for a decent number of people that can be a problem, and there's no guarantee that will always be possible.
To be fair this is dependent on the specific DRM type, if the game receives any kind of fan/official updates to solve the issue, and there's not exactly an easy way out for Valve. Plus games that have to phone in to a central server to work are going to be more of an issue anyway so by comparison Steamworks DRM is doing pretty well.
Really? How? It still needs the steam client to run, yea?
The only risk in comparison to a physical copy is that Valve fundamentally changes or goes bankrupt. Both seem unlikely. This makes any purchase on Steam basically as safe as a physical purchase, resulting in Steam basically replacing physical game purchases on the PC.