No, I would want total assurance of ownership. No online streaming/rental service has ever appealed to me and it never will.
Netflix is okay, but I really just watch Frasier and sometimes Wings and that's about it, I rarely do anything else on there. No, they're not related to me because when you watch a show you pretty much get the experience the first time whereas I want to play games whenever I want, and I hate it when the internet is out/not working/really slow and I can't watch anything.
Probably never going to go back to Steam. Maybe some day, but I really, really don't see it happening.

Indeed, declaring itself to be what it is - a rental store - would be playing straight into the hands of publishers, who specifically want us renting their games at full price as opposed to us owning our games ("games as a service").

As it stands right now, Valve is doing something that in many territories is actually illegal - marketing what they see as a rental (stated as a 'subscription' in the SSA) as a purchase. Indeed, much of the storefront wording uses "buy", "purchase", "own", while most of the small print uses "license", "subscription".

Calling it a rental would at least be honest,. although not a significant improvement on an already dire solution.

As Leroux says, the optimum would be for Steam to adopt DRM-free as the mandatory standard, including enabling resale of retail versions. I would hope that GOG Galaxy might see wider adoption through it fixing all of Steam's inherent problems, but given that publisher interest in Steam is more or less solely based on the DRM and inability to resell boxed copies of games, I don't see it happening.

No , i am happy with what steam does already . i don't care if my purchases are rental , i don't care about the drm and all i want is the ability to download my purchases and play em when i want . Once i am done with the game backup it up and move on .
There are plenty of games for me to play on steam,gog and other places like psn etc don't have the time to worry about such things.

to the op: my answer is "not really"

Just don't try if you lose internet and have a power outage or something then you're screwed.

Uh, what?

Steam works offline. And if there is a power outage you wouldn't even be able to turn your PC on anyway.

Not if it's shut down incorrectly. I know, when I switched internet services. I lost power for a sec, came back and it would force me to login online, and I had no online, thus screwed.

It will be interesting to see as digital takes over, especially with movies and shows, if anyone goes to court to stop companies from calling it "buying" or "owning" when you purchase a DRM'd item dependent on a service. For example my cable company has a "own it today" section where you can pay to have something on-demand "forever." Obviously these terms are ridiculous though, since if you ever change cable providers, which is a common thing, you lose access. And of course if they ever shut down the service, or close altogether.

Steam's "own it" and "buy it" language is similarly suspect, but they're not really big enough to get such media and legal attention I don't think. As digital expands though... could get interesting.

In any case I purchase on Steam knowing the risks, but I plan on a) them being around a really long time, and b) PC gamers keeping the games working no matter what, like they always have.


Nah. Even if you lose internet randomly it will ask you to sign in offline, and the games will work as long as you launched them online on that system before. I've done it many, many times.

There were days, waaaaaaaaaay back when Steam started, where offline mode was that finicky and broken, but those days ended long ago.

I'm already in good terms with Steam, so no change. I also trust that with such a gigantic and worldwide customer base, Valve is definitely not coming and would never go and get away as a "rental service" should it ever close business, with countless angered buyers for their accounts losing their purchases. That's what make me confident in still liking it as it is, the top ape of computer gaming stores around for automatic updates and competitive prices, now with Steam trading cards a small business in itself to invest for levels and gain booster packs, later gaining some pocket money to spend.. so yeah, I'm a Steam fan, only downside to me, the lack of bonus OST for the games.

No, not really. I have been considering Steam as a rental service for ages. If they were to present themselve openty as renting game , I would even suspect that they would soon shift to a definite duration rental model,. Now customers having to paymonthly/yearly fees to maintain their subscriptions, that certainly would be a game changer for me ( although for the worse )

Interesting. the size of the user base and the number of games by account would, imho, make it very hard to put downloadable installers at the disposal od the customers. If Steam were ever to close business, It will likely be in such bad papers that giving this safety rope to all customers for a time long enough for it to be effective, will simply be financially unsustainable...

A subscription rental model (or a F2P streaming model with microtransactions ofc) is definitely a no.
I do not want to see video game industry going to follow the cable TV business model or VOD model.
Because I still consider video games as products, and I believe that if we still try to consider video games as services, we are stuck with unfinished business, low quality standards, uncomplete experience...

Well, in the end, I don't care if Steam goes that way (it already follows that path), I don't see myself one of their customers in the future and I am not one now. If the whole industry goes that way too, I believe it is a huge mistake, but I do not care so much, there is so many games already released, and to be honest, there isn't so much creativity for years to believe that not buying nor trying majority of games, which will be released in the future, will be a true miss. Sure, if I stop buying and playing new games, I will miss few great ones. But does it worth to accept rental business model? I don't think so.

I am already skipping every Steam released games because of online activation DRM on install.
I am already skipping every MMOs, every social games, every phone games, every new console games.
And there enough games to complete for a whole life of 100% gaming and more.

Skipping every rental business model games will be very easy.
If the video games industry crashes with that model, I may be rude, but I don't care, I have already done my 'duty' as I backed a lot in crowdfunding, so much more than so called fans who are wealthy enough to back but just want to wait for a -90% sale.
I am not responsible for what will happen, and I don't want to be a part of that business model.

Patriotism fTw!

As Velvet already mentioned, this changed a long time ago. Yeah, it used to be exactly like you described. You had to switch to offline mode while online for it to work properly, but now it doesn't work like this anymore. If you launch Steam without an active internet connection it will ask you if you want to start in offline mode.

A couple points, if I may:

First, the size and financial stability of Steam are immaterial as far as the support of a particular product - or any subset, or even all products, for that matter. Far bigger, well-established, wealthier companies have discontinued activation for their digital content. Walmart, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo spring immediately to mind, electing to simply discontinue allowing product authorizations, for whatever business reasons they chose, leaving their customers with worthless products that they cannot use. Amazon went so far as to remotely delete content from their customer's Kindles.

Therefore, concerns about what might happen if Steam went out of business only serve as one of many likely outcomes: As the above examples demonstrate, your odds of your games being deactivated/not-reactivated in the future, are pretty much comparable if Steam stays in business and is perfectly healthy.



It's a little hard to wrap my head around the idea that many people consider their purchases "rentals". Yeah, you might not have paid that much for it but, well, money is money and a purchase made is still a purchase. Moreover, as others have touched on, it's a willful and deliberate misrepresentation to advertise a product as a "purchase" when it is in fact a "rental" or similar.

Apart from having an aversion to throwing my money away (or having outsiders effectively disable that which I have bought and paid for), another legal concern is that DRM is fairly unique in that it is essentially a form of legalized burglary or theft. If I buy, say, a book, no EULA allows the publisher to break into my house and take it back. Universally, that's a serious crime, a felony. Why digital content providers seem to think they have the right to effectively do the same thing is beyond me. (And, no, no book seller or publisher that I am aware of has ever stipulated that I give them a key to my house and blanket permission to enter and seize property at any time.) Nobody has the legal right to break into my house and seize any of my other property for that matter.

Getting back to the OP's question, as far as I'm concerned, Steam is a damaged brand that will be and deserves to be always associated with restrictive DRM. It really doesn't matter what business model they might claim.

As for the question about Netflix, well, I rented DVDs at one time. The penalty if I don't return them is that I have to pay full price for a replacement, and a generally inflated price at that. But failure to return one doesn't give Netflix the right to stop it from working or to break into my house to retrieve it; I'd just pay $25 for a DVD that probably sells for $5 at Best Buy.

Not for me personally, no. I already view it that way. I know that I don't have control like I do with DRM-free, like a packaged GOG installer. It might. Most people don't read EULA's. If they put "RENTALS" in conspicuous places, and made it quite obvious that you're buying a rental, it might have some effect.

With the DRM today though, it doesn't have to be a Steam game for you to lose that control. Pretty much anything that requires an online check or dependent software that's user account related does the same thing.

It's gotta be DRM-free or something like a disc check for you to maintain that control, and physical media is dwindling. That's assuming that you're not using cracks to circumvent the DRM, or of course you're not pirating it.