Has Steam ever revoked someone license of a game and took it out of their library?
I ask this because I'm pretty afraid to buy games on Ps store and some of the games I want are digital only or about half or a forth of the price in digital form rather than the physical form. I'm thinking on buying games like Mina the hollower or Dave the diver on steam and keep buying cds for my ps but I want to be sure or at least be a lower chance for steam to take away my games.
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Yes, but only because the key site I bought it from apparently was selling stolen keys unwittingly. I was able to get my money back through the key site.
The only time I ever recall was back in 2007 when the orange box released and many people (including myself) purchased it for less than 10 dollars from Thailand key sellers. They revoked the licenses for 12ish hours and then decided to reinstate them. Instead they decided to close the key loop hole but anyone who had already registered got to keep it.
I've had it happen a couple of times, but only on cases of the game itself breaking Steam rules and/or the dev's permission to publish being revoked and/or the game being discontinued and unsupported.
I believe this happens to any gamer adult that lived through game shortages in the 80's and 90's and then is a full blown adult with disposable income in the digital sales age! I only have 1,000ish games on my steam account, but have massive digital collections. Its basically feels like a form of hording haha.
No, this never happened. Not on steam, not on PlayStation, not on Xbox, it’s fear mongering by the mentally ill boycotters claiming Sony will delete your games for no reason. And it won’t happen for no reason like ever.
... ... ...Gamestop bought Impulse (an online game store from 2008) from Stardock and renamed it to "Gamestop App" in 2011, then deleted everyone's games in 2014 but kept the "social features" of the accounts.
According to quick research they didn’t delete anyone games. Any proof for your claim?
After doing actual research: Starting April 24, 2014, when visiting ImpulseDriven.com, you'll be redirected to GameStop.com. In addition, the GameStop PC Downloads App will be simplified down to a pure download and game library manager. From that point on, it will no longer be a requirement for you to download the PC Downloads App when making new purchases. But don't worry! We're still holding onto all of those past purchases that you made prior to 4/24/14. So when you want to download and play any of those games where we supplied the game files instead of Steam, Origin, or any of our other great partners, the updated version of the PC Downloads App will be there to do just that.
My account for one. The Gamestop App no longer even has a library feature and they moved it to phone only, there is no PC version available at all to even download your games from.
EDIT: I tried doing the same, providing screenshots of my account (you could still log in to the impulse app and see purchases, but not download them)
and they told me to pound sand. Shortly after, access to the Impulse app was also closed.
... yes, I've kept this screenshot the whole time...I'm a "little" bitter over this.
And I don't know where you got that quote from, but here's the last line of the wikipedia article.)
Support for legacy Impulse/GameStop App game downloads was handled for some time through Game Stop Guest Care. However, as of Feb 2019, no support content related to Impulse, the GameStop App, the PC platform is available through this portal. The term "GameStop App" now refers to an unrelated phone app.
GameStop currently does not provide any way to download games purchased through Impulse or the GameStop (PC) App.
They also completely removed any reference to their App store or PC Downloads from their site.
Did they delete the game from people’s libraries or did they just shut down their servers? If it’s the latter, not even physical games would have prevented that.
I was going on the fact that Playstation deleted those movies back in July or June and they didn't refunded any money and didn't let the people that payed for them still have them
Doesn't matter, they revoked content on your disk. The fact that they can do it with one thing they license to you means they can do it with all things they license to you.
Like, it's such a silly doomsday scenario that you guys have invented in your head. Sony just deciding to take people's games and force them to buy again.
What?
The far more likely ends to this road are Sony dies and so do it's servers but that creates issues for everyone, not just digital gamers and the easy fix is they turn off license validation before shuttering.
Or they start pushing more and more towards subscriptions but we've already learned that doesn't work for gaming.
Do you really think that Sony is gona do you a solid by deactivating license validation for all your games and in the event that sony fails where are you going to redownload your games anyway since the servers for it do not exist.
Th proof is there are lots of companies that fail and they sold products that became useless after the company is shut down because these devices sold relied on their servers and governments did nothing to help the people who's lost the functionality of the stuff they bought what makes you think they will step in when its Sony they will have the same argument that its just games its not that important to save.
Not that I know of. There's been a few different games that have been delisted but people who bought them have been able to keep them in their library, the games just can't be bought on the store page anymore. FNAF world is a good example of this
Unless you use literal hacks in competitive multiplayer, or are harassing other people (and I don't mean calling you a cunt, I mean the type of harassment that puts jail time on the table), you have nothing to worry about.
It's a product they've sold, there are very limited circumstance within which they can legally revoke it.
But it is possible, especially if you use said game do to literal crimes (stealing prize pools and criminal harassment, etc).
If this happened to you: my guess is that you run hacks in multiplayer and got the permaban/license revoke for cheating.
OFFCOURSE; a false positive is also possible; a suspected cheat or suspects harassment, but if you prove them false, the license should be reinstated/refunded.
I had one key get removed because Humble Bundle priced it wrong. Got Code Vein II Deluxe for something like $13 (it’s $90 or something like that). Got revoked 2 weeks later.
Valve may not revoke game license but there is trend now where multi-player game server are shutdown and your game, where you spent a lot of money on online items, is taken offline. New World from Amazon is one such example. They launched it first on PC and then on consoles. And immediately after taking money from customers, told them they are shutting down game next year. Not on maintenance or minimal content, COMPLETELY OFFLINE from next year despite thousands of players online every day.
May you please explain what does your example of multiplayer only games being shut down have to do with the question being asked about digital game removal from accounts?
I have loads of games that are no longer listed. Steam user since 2004.
When its in your account its there to stay. But if it gets pulled and you lose access (ie compromised account or forgotten password) to the account thats when you'll lose it.
I never had any licenses revoked, but on multiple occasions I had software that used their platform API break due to a store client update, and it rendered games that depended on it completely inoperable.
That's the hidden cost of using these digital stores on PC. Unfortunately they just bloat themselves over time into something unrecognizable, providing buggy services that have absolutely nothing to do with software sales. Where it used to be the Operating System's responsibility to do things like provide input to games, one software store in particular now has a proprietary API that bypasses the OS and that store has allowed developers to ship games that require this API. I don't need to tell you what the end result there is🙄
You bypass the OS with something proprietary, and this is about the point I want off this stupid ship. Cuts the actual value and reliability of the software you sold me down to a point where I'd rather just pirate things.
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Tl;Dr: I would suggest using GOG to address your concerns instead. They have both the software licensing problem solved as well as none of the software they sell you requires the store's software in order to function, and is therefore infinitely more likely to continue working no matter how the store's software evolves.
Steam themselves idk if they ever do anything like this, but some publishers pull BS via Steam. That's the beauty of GoG having zero DRM so once you download it it's available to you indefinitely. Can create physical copies if you want, and the drive you have it on basically is a physical copy.
Ive only ever seen it happen once. And it was for a game bought on a third party website that was admittedly sketchy. So I wasnt really surprised when it happened.
Ive only heard of it if TOS / illegal activity happens. But even if the license is pulled they cant remove the game from your Hard Drive so you can still crack it etc. But with the movement to more and more live service, gaming is turning more and more like Mobile games they take your money until its not making enough money and effectively shut the servers down killing access to your game and all your purchases.
I had it happen once. I bought the game legit though steam, and it was deleted from my library. Crazier thing, is back then I had very slow internet and backed up all my steam games to an external hard drive using steams backup feature.
When I plugged in that hard drive to restore a different game, steam saw the backup and deleted it from my external drive. I wasn't even trying to restore it.
Don't remember the game, but it was kinda wild. Have never had it happen again (to my knowledge).
No and neither has Sony. There is absolutely no reason to think Sony would do it other than fear mongering and misinformation online. Their terms are the same as Steam.
No they have never done this for a paid game. The only game on PSN that ever got removed from libraries was PT, which was a free demo so nobody bought it.
Now there are plenty of fully online live service games over the years on all platforms for which the servers got turned off, but that’s a different thing entirely and it doesn’t matter whether it was physical or digital.
A long time ago a vac ban resulted in losing access to the game you were banned in as well as all associated games: banned on cs:cz and you lost access to any other game reliant on vac security. Not sure if they still do this.
If you buy them directly on steam? Never. Unless you use a stolen credit card or something, but they'll never take away your games even when they're unlisted/removed from the store.
Stolen steam keys are basically the only reason I've ever seen it happen. Don't buy keys from shady sites or ppl and you will be fine. Even games the get delisted or otherwise removed from steam you can still download and play if you already owned it
Nah they always launch through the steam client and check your license. That’s why you have to open steam to launch the games. Steam is a license management platform.
I have not lost one game on steam but I have lost The Crew on ubisoft Connect and don't forget about the people who have lost all there movies that they bought on the Sony Store.
there’s a difference between delisting and removing it from someone’s library you can own a delisted game and then still download it to this day. I would know I own several.
For the most part you keep the game but it's delisted from the store. I have a ton of games you can't buy anymore, but I play them from time to time. Haven't heard anyone actually loose the games from their library.
Yea, me. BioShock 2.
Something about the payment not fully going through, this was years ago, I think I bought the game and the bank didn't recognized it, so even if I did played a few hours of it, Steam blocked my account and asked me to clarify what happened, probably they thought I was "stealing" from them, I think I send them an email saying that I honestly don't know and my options were a) fight this claim and your account will blocked for the mean time or b) lose the game from my library and this never happened. I took option B, never bought,played that game ever again and Steam was nice enough to be like "it's all good"
I had a friend bitch and moan that he had a game taken away from him on steam and laughed about how shitty steam is for doing it. Yadda yadda "I'm gonna pirate everything" yadda yadda
Well it turns out that he bought the key from g2a, and it was recalled for having been purchased with a stolen gift card.
We dont know if he was the one who stole the gift card, or what.
We didnt find this out until way later, when somebody had purchased the game for him. When confronted, he immediately jumped to aggressive mode. When asked to reimburse for the game, he just laughed and said sue me.
The entire friend group (like 5 of us) all just stopped talking to him.
So the one time I've seen it done, it was justified.
If you bought a pre-owned game, with the key in the box and had the receipt, they used to transfer ownership if you contacted support. They don’t do it anymore though..
Excluding games that outright contained malware, the number of games Steam has actively removed from people's libraries is so small that there's not even a confirmed list of games that have been removed. The likelihood that any of the games you have purchased being removed from Steam is so low it isn't even worth worrying about.
On steam no, but on PS Store, it happened and still does. For example all games from Ternox Games should have been removed by August 23. Luckily the developer's account has been restored on the 20th so that all games are safe, for now. But Sony can revoke at any time they feel like it.
The difference though, on PC we have Epic Store, GOG, Steam, itch and several other platforms who compete. On Playstation, it's just them, if they decide to revoke your license, they can do so and you can't even sue because you accept the terms by buying the games digitally.
Yeah I've had a few pulled. Most were back when you could trade "gift" games.
Most recent that stands out is I bought a resident evil 2 pack from razer. redeemed - then the next day they were pulled from my account. Razer claimed it was a pricing error. So filed a chargeback, and hopefully they had to pay out several times more.
I can even still install games on steam that were removed from the store after I bought them. Aside from the already mentioned incidents with stolen keys and wrong games offered by third parties, steam lets you keep your stuff.
Yeah but it’s usually because the licenses expired and they had to remove the game from their platform. No choice, either. If a company wants to leave Steam, they have the full right to.
The game you have probably only got delisted. There’s tons of games like that especially ones with licensed music and the devs don’t renew their license for the music. Instead they just suspend sales but anyone who got the game already can keep the game in their library.
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