Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else. videogameseurope.eu/…/video-games-europe-welcomes…
Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
You’re conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).
I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.
However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
While there was a game that had online authentication before Steam, Steam popularized it to make it industry standard.
Copy protection is very different than online authentication that restricts your ownership rights.
Absolutely untrue! You were denied the right to copy the software. If you bought a CD, you absolutely had the right to resell it.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Under many licenses no, you did not. Resale was certainly in the realm of things that license agreements could and often did prohibit. I was probably too blanket in my statement earlier, it was certainly not ubiquitous, but in many cases physically selling the CD did not transfer the license and the purchaser would have been in violation of the terms by using it.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Many means a significant percentage of the total. That makes your statement false. License transfer restrictions were only in the realm of million dollar corporate sales. All physical game floppies and cds could were legally resold.
Used game stores legally existed.
Image