PC Gaming

According to the EULA, no. According to common sense, leave the steam password in your will and you're fine.

Buy from GOG, download and archive the installers yourself.

If i remember correctly, gog allows this

Just like the EU, California does a lot for global customer protection.

I still hate the future.

The only difference is the words they have to use. They aren't making this change by choice

drm is optional on steam, plenty of games are just binaries you can backup like any other. Not that it helps much with the games that do use it…

So if I download a pirate copy, I'm in the clear because I purchased a license.

Nope since the copy of the software was obtained with someone else's license. That said this would be hypothetically impossible to prove in court so 🤷

Circumventing DRM is questionable since I think it's illegal to distribute but not own. So let's say you have a CD installer for the Sims and download a crack exe to launch it without the CD. You are in the clear but the host for the download is not.

GOG or backing the game up yourself is the only way around this.

It's already legal to download backups in certain jurisdictions, for example in France.

Also, it's very undocumented but you can actually generate an offline installer for a copy of a game you own on steam. It will still require steam and to be logged in in offline mode with an account that has a licence, of course, but it is a thing you can do.

When you buy on GOG you really get the game, you can (without needing a launcher) download installers without any trouble and you can do whatever you want with them. Want to put a bunch into a pen drive and share with you friends? No problem. Want to install them on a device with no Internet connection? No problem. Want to back them up for whatever reason? No problem.

EDIT: People telling me its not legal, its not about being legal or not, its about having the power to decide to do whatever you want.

I’d rather own the games that I pay for than “rent” them in the first place.

But people will still pay up anyway.

When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time. A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10,20,30,50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high. But it is a great model and I think it represents a substantially better future for the industry.

I was reminded of this. They would if they could. I am glad i am not living in that timeline.

This isn't up to the stores. It's up to the gaming developers who own the right to license the games. I have been making this argument for years, and explaining digital (and physical) content licensing to people on the internet for years and almost always get downvoted because they don't like facts that interfere with their sense of righteousness.

I don't disagree that is scummy practice to randomly end a license and take something someone paid for out of their library or otherwise deny them access to it. but I cannot stress enough that this is the fault of both parties or the licensing agreement (the license seller and the entity that agrees to allow the license seller to sell licenses to the content). People will always blame Sony or Amazon or Apple. But never Universal, or Disney, or Paramount or whoever. It's both. They're both assholes in this scenario. One of them is limited by the law. The other one can offer that content by other means to people who have already purchased it once but won't because capitalism and greed.

It was always in the EULA. You signed the contract when you made the account.