PC Gaming

I'm waiting for something like this since forever. I hope other states and countries will follow. This is huge.

It's not only steam, but also Amazon, Apple, you name it.

Buy means buy, not "rent until we decide to render your product useless"!

Can’t wait to see what marketing BS replaces it.

My money is on Experience!

Or Activate!

Or Join!

Or Unlock!

You know something with an exclamation mark.

Wait so if a game doesn’t not need online connection it can say buy?

That is such a huuuge advantage to indie devs that can let you own things.

To be honest, it sounds like it would affect ALL digital products, not just those requiring an active online connection. Or at the very least even those with Steam DRM for verification.

I wonder if even without this law, one could claim false advertising against any subscription service that looks like a bit to own service.

The EULA is a wall of text that means nothing to most people, just like the TOS. The CLA (California License Agreement) or whatever this will be called with be no different, unless they specifically demand a very short and to the point.

*"You are buying a game licence that can legally be revoked without providing a refund.

Ubisoft can revoke the game license at any time for any reason.

Ubisoft guarantees access to the license for 0 days."*

I have no expectation that it will be that clear and concise.

Edit: Looks like they have chosen not to discuss the language of the "clear expansion" at all. Likely because whoever wrote the law didn't know the subject they're regulating.

From the article:

The official phrasing in the bill’s summary reads, it will “prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand.”

Alternatively, storefronts can clearly explain that you’re buying a license and that your purchase isn’t a permanent transaction, meaning the license can be revoked at any time by the issuer. The most important part of the bill states that passing it will be “ensuring that consumers have a full understanding of exactly what they have bought.”

It'll probably be a wall of text like maybe a big fat paragraph and a little vague line at the bottom, or somehow manage to be short but still vague enough to not discourage sales while just barely straddling the line of being acceptable to the Californians who might one day end up bothering to look at how this ends up going, if they don't forget to.

Honestly, that really does track with how shit works in here.

"The orphan crushing machine may contain components known to the state of California to cause cancer"

And we're done! Fixed all the problems!

To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’

I think the idea is, that the minimally invasive regulation only has to fix the information imbalance between producer and consumer. Then, once the consumer has all the information, they can make an informed racional market actor descision. That's supposed to price shitty rip offs out of the market eventually.

... yeah I don't believe it works either.

At the same time, both need to be done, your solution doesn't solve the fact that it's only a license you're purchasing and you depend on a third party service to download the game in most cases.

"Get"

Finally my years of learning to play Tongo pay off!

Full Consortium 😎

Fits well. Everything is a subscription nowadays.

"Rent"

Then they would need to pay everything back they ever earned if the company ever goes bankrupt. I imagine a bankrupt company doesn't have much to pay back.

I think (see: hope) this is a stop-gap solution. It's at least better than the current implication of buying something and being able to keep it despite these companies knowing full well that the game will be gone in a much more permanent way the moment they flick the switch on the servers.

To paraphrase Ross Scott, it may be a bare minimum but it's at least nice to have it in writing just how fucked we consumers are.

Your counterexample, "purchase a subscription", actually undercuts the point you're trying to make. The goal is honesty here. If you are renting or subscribing, you want to know that up front, in big text, using the simplest possible word. That word is "RENT".

The issue about the lease business model being bad for society and consumers is also important, but it's complicated and different from basic truth in advertising.