Steam tells subscribers they’re buying a license, not a game – Hypertext

• Some users have noticed an alert on Steam notifying customers that they do not own the game they’re buying.
• The change reportedly appears at checkout.
• Steam has added the notice ahead of a California law change for digital marketplaces next year.

If you head to Steam to purchase a game, you may notice an alert when you head to checkout confirming that the game you are about to buy is not owned by you. Instead, you are licensing access to the game, not buying it outright.

The notification is one you will start to see on more digital marketplaces moving forward, as a California bill signed into law (AB2426) by Governor Gavin Newsom last month will force marketplaces to be more transparent over content ownership from next year.

As such, Steam appears to be getting ahead of the law being officially enforced in 2025.

“This bill would, subject to specified exceptions, additionally prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental, unless the seller receives at the time of each transaction an affirmative acknowledgment from the purchaser, or the seller provides to the consumer before executing each transaction a clear and conspicuous statement, as specified,” the bill outlined before being signed into law.

As for what Steam users will see, Engadget spotted the alert at checkout, with it stating that, “A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.”

“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 or its affiliates’ licensors. All rights are reserved, except as expressly stated herein,” added an updated subscriber agreement.

For now, it appears as if this law is limited to the State of California, and the US in general, so it remains to be seen if similar alerts will appear in the Steam Store in other parts of the globe.

It should also be pointed out that this law will not apply to permanent offline downloads made by users, and only applies to digital versions of videogames, music, movies, TV series, ebooks, or audiobooks purchased from an online store.

It is therefore confirmed now. In the digital era, you don’t own anything, you’re only licensing it.