At the end of September, the governor of California approved a new consumer protection law with his signature. According to the regulation, which will not actually come into effect until next year, stores that sell digital products must indicate that customers do not buy the products available in them, but only license them.
This has never been announced by stores selling digital products in the last 20 years, although there is a crucial difference between purchasing in the classical sense and licensing: in the case of the latter, the purchased products do not become the property of the customer company, and they can access them only under certain circumstances.
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For this reason, for example, publishers can withdraw previously purchased products from customers, as Ubisoft recently demonstrated in the case of The Crew. In addition, if a player's relative dies, his digital games cannot be inherited, and his accounts in digital stores become legally orphaned forever.
As a result of the law, digital games store Steam has now added a new box to its worldwide shopping cart page, indicating that only licensing is actually made upon purchase. Of course, this has little practical importance, since PC games switched exclusively to digital distribution a long time ago.
Players have no choice but to license products digitally.
The only interesting exception is GOG, as games purchased there can also be downloaded in the form of completely offline installation packages without copy protection. For this reason, it is possible to archive licensed games individually to ensure long-term preservation and access.
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