Steampeasants vs. GOG masterrace.

[archangel979]

 

 

 

Steam has a nasty policy from this year to stop people buying from cheaper regions. If you even move from one region to another Steam will disallow access to all your games. Even if you are on a business trip you will lose the access to your games until you get back.

 

This might not be true if you already got a game installed on the computer and use Offline mode.

Is there a list of these games? Or does it affect all regional versions? I'm a little worried now, I might be leaving the country soon and I'd hate to see my RHCP games not working. I have only one or two because I avoid region-locked purchases if I can, but still. I don't know what Valve is expecting, but that's just supporting rampant piracy.

 

All games bought in one regions are not accessible in other regions. I think the rule might not apply for games bought before 2015, but I am not 100% sure. I was researching how to gift myself a cheaper game from another region and found this info and people complaining that moved permanently from Russia to USA.

(I know, I know, but my country has same prices as Germany while our buying power is 1/3 of germany... **** steam!)

 

I know gifting outside the cheaper region was disabled. I actually think it's fair - and no reasonable person buys new games on Steam anyway, so it doesn't matter much. Though it gets quite interesting when my game is region-locked, but still sold on Steam for the full price because my country pays in euro, not rubels...

 

Anyhow, it's absurd if they lock us out from playing legally bought games when we leave our region. How is this even legal? Was it ever reported to a consumer protection body?

 

Don't know, but I don't think in EU it is. Hopefully someone gets angry enough to report them.

[Raven Darkholme]

I think I made up my mind and will stay GoG for PoE, even though I use Steam for other games.

[Volourn]

"That's not true. You do not own copies you bought on STEAM. Read the rules."

 

Those 'rules' would likely fail in court. LMAO

[BruceVC]

 

"That's not true. You do not own copies you bought on STEAM. Read the rules."

 

Those 'rules' would likely fail in court. LMAO

 

How exactly and on what basis?

 

Volo is right Sharp_one ...you need to accept this as the truth. Even if you don't believe Volo I am vouching for him and you know I'm never wrong 

[Raven Darkholme]

 

 

"That's not true. You do not own copies you bought on STEAM. Read the rules."

 

Those 'rules' would likely fail in court. LMAO

 

How exactly and on what basis?

 

Volo is right Sharp_one ...you need to accept this as the truth. Even if you don't believe Volo I am vouching for him and you know I'm never wrong 

 

Ofc it wouldn't hold. I can't tell you about any country, but here in Germany if you bought smth you bought it, except if you bougt it on loan.

Since you don't loan a video game There is no way steam could bend these rules in a country whith actual laws.

[BruceVC]

 

 

 

"That's not true. You do not own copies you bought on STEAM. Read the rules."

 

Those 'rules' would likely fail in court. LMAO

 

How exactly and on what basis?

 

Volo is right Sharp_one ...you need to accept this as the truth. Even if you don't believe Volo I am vouching for him and you know I'm never wrong 

 

Ofc it wouldn't hold. I can't tell you about any country, but here in Germany if you bought smth you bought it, except if you bougt it on loan.

Since you don't loan a video game There is no way steam could bend these rules in a country whith actual laws.

 

Damn you Germans and your shrewd business minds   You right of course and this is why Germany is such a economic powerhouse 

Sharp one is Polish....he would have believed it 

[Tomice]

One important thing to consider:

Patches for the steam version of POE were usually available a few days earlier than than for GOG. The first few weeks after release were really annoying for GOG users, having to wait a few extra days each time a patch came out (beta patches on steam even increase this gap).

 

Apart from that, I really prefer to support GOG and their owner, CD Project Red (Witcher!). Helping them become a true competitor to Steam and Origin will keep those big players from establishing overly restrictive DRM policies and other annoyances. CDPR are believably fighting against this, they started as a semi-legal importing company for games back in the day when games weren't officially sold in eastern Europe.

 

Not that I ever had an issue with steam, quite the contrary.

[archangel979]

 

 

 

"That's not true. You do not own copies you bought on STEAM. Read the rules."

 

Those 'rules' would likely fail in court. LMAO

 

How exactly and on what basis?

 

Volo is right Sharp_one ...you need to accept this as the truth. Even if you don't believe Volo I am vouching for him and you know I'm never wrong 

 

Ofc it wouldn't hold. I can't tell you about any country, but here in Germany if you bought smth you bought it, except if you bougt it on loan.

Since you don't loan a video game There is no way steam could bend these rules in a country whith actual laws.

 

Actually no. WHen you use Steam you had to click to Accept their rules and policy. In there is say they can do this and you accepted it. In there it is explain that you don't really own it and under what situations they can take the game away from you or prevent you from using it. And you accepted it. If you didn't read it, that is not Valve fault.

 

Now by German law you that policy might be invalid but someone needs to sue Valve and that would be big news. Since nobody did yet I guess it is by German law. I would guess Valve also has access to lawyers that can read the law before selling the games on the market.

[wanderon]

I suspect that no matter where you live it would depend on whether or not you agreed to a policy that would allow such behavior in the documents you had to agree to in order to purchase (that no one reads). Once again the real problem is simply too many loophole mongering lawyers...

[AndreaColombo]

That they could get such a huge market share with such asinine, uselessly restrictive policies is truly a credit to modern men's careless attitude toward everything.

 

I would never pay any price for a game I would still not own. It's like throwing money away for nothing but the illusion of having something.

[BruceVC]

 

 

 

 

"That's not true. You do not own copies you bought on STEAM. Read the rules."

 

Those 'rules' would likely fail in court. LMAO

 

How exactly and on what basis?

 

Volo is right Sharp_one ...you need to accept this as the truth. Even if you don't believe Volo I am vouching for him and you know I'm never wrong 

 

Ofc it wouldn't hold. I can't tell you about any country, but here in Germany if you bought smth you bought it, except if you bougt it on loan.

Since you don't loan a video game There is no way steam could bend these rules in a country whith actual laws.

 

Actually no. WHen you use Steam you had to click to Accept their rules and policy. In there is say they can do this and you accepted it. In there it is explain that you don't really own it and under what situations they can take the game away from you or prevent you from using it. And you accepted it. If you didn't read it, that is not Valve fault.

 

Now by German law you that policy might be invalid but someone needs to sue Valve and that would be big news. Since nobody did yet I guess it is by German law. I would guess Valve also has access to lawyers that can read the law before selling the games on the market.

 

I'll tell you guys something interesting, they are an economic powerhouse for a reason...the Germans really understand work ethos 

 

I work with software and we sell two types of this software, cloud based and onsite 

 

Now the way all cloud solutions work globally is they have data centers around the world that replicate the data for redundancy like gmail and Office365

 

And the data centers are normally housed in the USA, Europe, Australia and Japan. Most of the large German customers, like BMW, dont want a cloud solution because of the replication to the USA

 

And its not that they don't like the USA its because they dont want to risk a possible future where the USA authorities would somehow be able to access there personal data and patents so they keep everything onsite and it costs much more but it works for us as I'm  a consultant and we don't make any services revenue from a cloud sale as obviously there is nothing to really configure in the cloud as the customer can do it 

 

So the Germans help keep people busy at huge customers

[Raven Darkholme]

As to agreeing something and later finding out its against the law:

In Germany it doesn't matter if you agreed to something, that doesn't make you responsible to uphold an agrrement against the law.

My personal experience in this is if you rent a flat or in my case a house and your landlord has shady periods of notice if you want to move out, even if you signed his self printed contact you can totally ignore those.

In my case my landlord had a ridicolous timespan of 1/1/2 years for me to notify him before I moved out. I went on the internet, read the law, saw it was 3 months and even though I knew before that I was moving I only notified him 3 months before. He didn't even argue, even tho he was a total d***head and tried to argue because of literally everything else.

 

As to actual lawsuits like Sharp_One mentioned:

German laws are very confusing, because you have basically got a law for everything.

As long as an accuser has a ****ty lawyer who doesn't know what law the defendant actually violated you have lost your case, so it can take years until somebody actually comes up with the right thing.

Edited August 22, 2015 by Raven Darkholme

[AndreaColombo]

STEAM has a very simple service, they rent the license to use the game. They don't sell you your own copy they license you the usage of it. Like a car leasing company and not a car dealer.

 

Except a car dealer would never charge the full price of the car for a rental...

[Raven Darkholme]

I don't think a rental means the same to you as to me.

If I rent something I pay a small regular fee.

Like AndreaColombo said you pay the full price at Steam and unless theres a sale, the same price as for other dealers who sell the same product.

[Longknife]

I use Steam because I always used Steam and I have access to my entire library on it. If GOG had come first and I had my entire library on that it would be the place to go for me. Honestly I don't have problems with Steam? People keep telling me Steam is buggy and stuff, but I have never run into an issue.

 

 

People just like to hate on the mainstream stuff and give the impression that they know some alternative program that's fully superior but people are too dumb to realize it. Hell, Apple ran an entire ad campaign geared at such people.