What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
Lik Sang was awesome back in the day for procuring accessories like classic XBOX controller to USB adapters that weren't dodgy duct tape jobs. Hard to believe they were forced out of business by Sony two decades ago.
They had all kinds of weird stuff which the big makers didn't want to exist - adapters to use Xbox controllers on Playstation and every permutation you could think of.
All the big console manufacturers sued them. Said it was about modchips (and maybe it really was). Sony bore the most guilt.
The gaming industry is a little less wonderful these past 20 years.
Indeed. I find myself going back to older games anymore. Aside from maybe looking forward to GTA 6, I can't say I'm terribly interested in many modern titles. It's becoming more soulless.
I maybe should have phrased that better since I do understand their announcement around disks and removing the movies is a reason why they are the current target.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
> Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct.
Don't move the goalposts.
The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.
Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.
You can't back up your encrypted bits on one machine and use them on another without constant permission from Sony though. Other hardware doesn't have the keys to decrypt them (actually this is it's own issue: it's obviously a very monopolistic, anticompetitive move that you can't run a PS5 game on a commodity PC because of their encryption). As far as I know, Valve's "DRM" just calls into a dll that asks Steam whether you own it, and you can just give it your own implementation of the Steam API dll that says you do. Or many titles on Steam don't have any DRM at all.
There are reasons to criticize Valve (gambling, microtransactions, "achievements"), but they seem to be too busy making money to want to do DRM.
You can’t back up your games on one PC and use them on another without constant permission from Value either. It’s the same and that is all I’m trying to point out. DRM is a red herring, the real problem is the phone home always online bullshit.
Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.
Let's put the actual numbers in front of people: 1,924 out of 43,179 games, or 4.4%, as of today (according to PCGamingWiki) are DRM free.
The vast majority check whether you've purchased the game at runtime. If you stick to only indie games and the one off AA or AAA with no license check on Steam then sure thou-art-holier.
I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while the platform supports DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.
At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed
And it takes about 2 seconds to find the removal tools on github. So you can treat Steam's DRM as basically non-existent. This is unlike consoles, which require kernel exploits or hardware modifications to bypass.
So we agree that Valve, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate platforms that support DRM. Wonderful!
I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD
In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.
To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.
> nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA
Correct, that right is innate.
> your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software
It does. Not even morally, but legally. Sony litigated this and lost, but bankrupted the emulator developer in the process. Emulators and compatible hardware and software have been consistently ruled legal. It is only the bypassing of copy protection that is not.
And if you're not interested in the feasibility of asserting your rights by removing the DRM, then naturally you'll never understand why people consider Valve and Sony materially different.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.
I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.
Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.
How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?
Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.
How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.
I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?
We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.
People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.
Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.
Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.
I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.
Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.
In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.
Sony can add a signature to a list and your game stops launching even if it's a physical disk is the point. We should fight back legally and prevent publishers from trampling on the rights of individuals to use bits they paid money to presumptively own. If I buy a digital asset nobody should be able to take that away from me. You can stop selling it but it shouldn't be allowed to be disabled in the field. Seems like something our society could agree on and legislate 100%.
The problem is that ownership is itself a legal fiction, so it's kind of necessarily legalese. It's interchangeable with "legitimate control" in common parlance. IE if I break into your house and throw you out of it, I don't suddenly own your house. Even though I'm in possession of it, the control I have of it isn't legitimate. Ownership is the guarantee that your possession and control of something can be defended by our society's conflict resolution mechanisms, in this case that's the legal system.
While socially we might disagree with the law on the validity of licensure in this context, that changes the domain a bit. I do have ultimate control over the games I've purchased on Steam, regardless of the law's opinion, even though they're technically licensed. I back up every game I buy, away from where Steam could be able to know to delete it or even discover it. If my legal license is revoked, I still have control over the bytes. With a steam emulator I can still access most of them (and the remainder can be fixed by setting an LLM about cracking them) but this isn't legitimate in the eyes of the law. Practically speaking it doesn't matter in the slightest what the law thinks on this matter.
Now let's consider that the rhetoric here generally includes Steam's arrangement as a perpetrator of "you will own nothing". But given the above, that's a hard circle to square. In your proposed notion of ownership, ostensibly I own everything I bought on Steam. With a little bit of technical literacy (and the money for storage, which is easier said than done these days) it can be true of anybody. It's only in the eyes of the law that I don't actually own anything, and the DMCA probably has plenty to say about it.
So do we use the legal definition, or is it merely the possession of the software and means of access that constitute ownership? It's exactly this edge case which is why I insist on this pedantry. Otherwise the violation of ownership at the hands of Sony begins and ends with the fact that it's not an open platform with software freedom. I'm very amenable to making that be our standard here, of course, I think at minimum the freedom to do as you please with a personal computer is an ethical and moral directive.
Perhaps what we as a society need is that what you actually buy is a "license to download". Upon being in possession of the bytes, you own them. For as long as you maintain the integrity of those bytes, they're yours. Of course, redistributing them to other parties would constitute an IP violation, but that's not a problem to concern a storefront. If your license is revoked, what you are actually losing is the ability to download.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago and people can't get over how much they love everything about Valve. Sony follows 20 years later (in a world where internet is faster than installing from BluRay and games are outgrowing three layer discs) and people lose their mind.
There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.
Physical PC games weren't great in the 2000s. Online activated serial keys, optical disc based DRM that caused problems during both the 9x>NT and XP>Vista transitions, the only thing that made PC gaming tolerable for me was gamecopyworld. Valve (eventually) offered something better than that.
PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.
People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.
I disagree with the assertion that Valve is responsible for the death of physical game copies.
First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.
Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.
And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.
Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.
- Sony has a track record of removing purchased media en masse, while Valve does not.
- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.
- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.
- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.
> Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago
Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.
The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".
Valve doesn't randomly remove stuff I've payed for from my library. Even when the ability to purchase something goes away, people who already bought it keep access to it.
They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS).
Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
Valve pivoting away from MacOS is a consequence of choices Apple has made for their platform, many of which made it a more hostile place for Steam to exist. This is baked into the long standing Apple model of software distribution, where API and architectural changes inevitably obsolete software with Apple usually providing only a limited time window for cross compatibility.
You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.
CS:GO is still accessible via the beta feature. Not sure if you can still play it on MacOS. I agree that that's the wrong way to do it, but at least you still have access to it in theory.
Valve was a plucky underdog against the established publishers and, while dominant today, still has reasonable competition, sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.
Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
It would be slightly more accurate to say "volkswagen has a monopoly on volkswagen cars... and all accessories and replacement parts"
But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.
So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.
Not really. I can plug a generic usb cable into my Playstation and it charges my aftermarket controller just fine. I can even use aftermarket screws or put the console in an aftermarket enclosure.
Except for the software ecosystem which is the main driver of revenue for consoles and exists largely to support the sale and distribution of products from third parties, all of which is centrally controlled by the platform holder.
Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.
Sony doesn't DRM the power that you use to run the Playstation either. But to try and meet the comparison: there are different manufacturers of fuel just like there are different publishers of games and while Volkswagen can't force you to not put standard fuel in your car they can certainly void your warranty if you don't use premium (and fuel is still tested and regulated for industry compliance).
I'm getting a tad lost, though. The point of the sub-thread is that Sony does not have a monopoly over the video game industry. They get to choose which games are allowed on their platform and under what terms. Consoles and Cars both have proprietary components and open interfaces. A console and car have different purposes. And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.
It's easy to get lost in arguments where analogies are used. They're almost always terrible and are the death of nuance and detail. Fuck car analogies, a car isn't a video game console.
Sony host a massive, massive marketplace. That's where their monopoly lies, they have end to end control over distribution of not only their games, but anyone else who chooses to publish on the platform, in addition to control over how those games are played and on what hardware.
This hands them an enourmous amount of power over the third parties that make up the majority of software sales on their store. The way they've constructed their ecosystem and services also greatly disincentivises it's users from switching. Games aren't cross-compatible, so buying in for another console means they have to either keep their console (which they could otherwise have sold) or give up their library. Even keeping both means having to choose for one online service over another. These kinds of decisions might not matter to someone over a certain socioeconomic status, but it still matters to many.
I don't think that a market of it's size should legally be allowed to exist. It's exploitative by default and I would be supportive of the EU recognizing Sony as a "Gate Keeper" under the Digital Markets Act and taking appropriate regulatory action.
If as a society we want to create an information age bill of rights and (1) protect hardware ownership and right to root (without exploits), (2) require platform marketplace neutrality, and (3) require digital intellectual property be distributed under lifetime irrevocable and transferable licenses, then I’d happily sign my name, and not least because you’re solving the problem at the core.
> And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.
Until you actually buy one.
Obviously there are levels of wealth where this is all irrelevant, either because buying every console is a relatively minor expense or because you can't afford any console whatsoever, but for the people in the middle where you can more or less afford a console, once you buy into one, you're now kinda stuck with it.
Volkswagen cars aren't a platform that fosters a billion dollar marketplace of third party sellers that contribute the bulk of value delivered by the product.
Apples and oranges. If you goal is to simply play games, well then there's plenty of hardware out there for you to use. If you want to play Sony exclusives then you have to use their hardware. If I want to get from point A to point B then I can use any vehicle. If I want to get from point A to point B in a Volkswagen then I have to buy a one.
A BMW and a Volkswagen are two kinds of apples. Both get you from A to B, which was the entire goal. A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything. If you can't tell these apart, perhaps you should go back to elementary school.
> A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything.
Are they not two kinds of games?
I'm arguing that your comparison isn't the right one.
A BMW and a Volkswagen are two types of apples. They both let you drive form A to B.
A Playstation and a Nintendo Switch are two types of oranges. They both provide entertainment in the form of video games.
How you drive (and how enjoyable your drive is) from A to B, or which games you play, are specific characteristics of the hardware you chose to use to accomplish the task. Neither of those are two types of anything, as it were.
steam also sells drm free binaries. the steam drm is optional and the publisher or Dev can choose to go without it
of course it's better that gog requires you go without it for the customer, but I'm not sure it helps in terms of legal rights. If gog shuts down you'll need to have your games backed up and downloaded to still own them and you won't have any license to a new download or etc
I honestly keep forgetting GoG exists but fair, maybe saying there is no choice is a bit much but if you want to play a given game it may not be available there meaning your choice is to not play it or deal with this.
I think it's because they're a huge player in the space and the PS5 appears to be the dominant player in the console space this generation. This affects so many people in their faces right now, where as the switch to "buying" movies on an online platform was more gradual as it was a new platform offering and not one that had had ownership from day one (arguably since 1994 with the PS1).
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
Sony announced they're not going to print more physical discs for games. So far no one else in the big three has confirmed they're doing this, so obviously the controversy goes to them
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
I think the difference here is that sony is in the middle of taking down their ps3 store, and while they say you'll be able to download the games for the "foreseeable future" I don't think many folks have a great deal of confidence in this being true for for that long.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
Nintendo is the only one still selling video games that you own practically speaking, ie you own the cartridge and it has the game on it or at least has the key. Unless I'm out of the loop on that.
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
Where were the boycots then.