If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not really.
EDIT: On re-reading it, there may be huge holes in it. Like if they just “clearly tell you” how little you’re getting when you buy it, they can still say “buy” and “purchase”.
They can still delete your account and cut you off from your games.
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.
In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.
PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.
Boo hoo, someone say too many slurs on the forums?
Eh… I was just showing that you don’t actually own your games as access to them can be taken from you, that’s all.