Remember when you bought that movie on Amazon Prime or that video game on Steam? Well, you might be surprised, but you do not own that. Maybe you are wondering how you missed that? It is probably the terms of service or agreements that you just scrolled down and clicked “agree” without reading.
Steam is one of the largest game distributors on PC. On Steam, you don’t own your games. They even tell you in the agreement “Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right to use the content and services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in applicable subscription terms). The license ends upon termination of (a) this agreement or (b) a subscription that includes this license. The content and services are licensed, not sold. Your License confers no title or ownership in the content and services.” They even clarify for a second time in their own section called ownership of content and services. In this section it says, “All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the content and services and any and all copies thereof, are owned by Valve and/or its affiliates licensors” (Valve 2024).
If you’re a gamer, this should be scary. But, even if you’re not, what about your Spotify playlists and your Amazon Prime movies? For example, if Amazon loses access to that movie, you will lose it too. If Spotify went under, all those playlists would be gone. This problem is also getting worse considering the popularity of streaming. In streaming, you are just renting the ability to watch a movie. Most streaming services are also upping their prices for no reason. Without proper laws, we could lose all digital history, and it would be gone forever. There is a need for legislation to make sure we do not lose all digital media that will be necessary for people in the future to learn about our history and what happened in the world.
So, what does owning a license mean when you buy a game or movie? It is like a driver’s license? You can keep driving your car as long as your license is not revoked or if the United States was no longer a country. Now the United States being taken over is not going to happen, but Amazon or Steam going under is possible. The FTC even put on their website an article explaining how digital ownership does not exist. When physical media was more popular, it was debatable about if you owned your media. So, for any game on a disk, you were less likely to lose access to it, but you did not own it. You owned a license to play it. So why was not anyone worrying then? Mostly because all the games or movies content was there on the disk. If your console or PC or TV worked, you could still play the game without internet or the need to be signed in to an account. There were still possibilities you could not play your game or watch your favorite movie, but now it is more worrying with it all online. The second those Steam servers or Amazon servers go offline, all your movie or games are gone.
Maybe you are asking how we fix this. Well, first making laws about digital ownership would be needed. Some ways to prevent this would probably be letting people download movies and games they buy and not needing a connection to the internet or to be logged in with that company’s app. Now with the Idea of Live Service games. If you have ever played a game that you must play with other people online, then those are called live service games. These games are even more likely to shut down once they are not popular. The main reason for this is the way they keep the servers up is by people buying outfits or currency in game to use on in game items. Some extremely popular games are Fortnite, Apex Legends and one of the more recent games Helldivers 2, are examples of live service games, which is because you can only play these games if the developers keep up the servers. The best fix for people to not lose everything they own in a live service game is making server hosting possible by not just the developer, but the player could save the loss of these games.
Now why would we care if these games or movies stay up? Right now, it does not seem like it, but they will be a part of history. Imagine if in 20 to 30 years children wanted to know what people were playing then and it was just gone. Here is one rule that may help you find out if you really own something. If you can sell it, you own it. If you cannot, then you do not own it. Many people have spent years and thousands of hours on games, and if they were to just shut down, it would be horrible. But if server hosting and a way to make sure that everything you own a license to permanent than it would make sure many games, movies and shows are still accessible years from now.
