Apart from steam
They don't, The cdkey can only be converted once but there's nothing to stop someone converting it to digital giving the cd to a friend who plays it in standalone mode
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Issues with game libraries and company support experience *spawn
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
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arandomguy
Veteran
It will when it's a disc game versus download.
Quite a few PC platforms have allowed physical to digital license transfers, it isn't just Steam, but there's some caveats as I'll mention more below.
Some PC platforms allowed license transfers between platforms as well (eg. see GoG). Does this mean some people got "free" games? Kind of but you'd basically just roll/view that as marketing costs. No different then say a platform giving away games to attract users or subsidizing hardware, or etc.
This was the earlier days when Valve was trying to establish Steam. But you also keep in mind back then Valve's biggest IP and revenue generator was Counter-Strike and the other other MP games/mod that grew from it's Half-life engine games. So while you could technically keep say the physical media for Counter-Strike your actual practical ability to play Counter-Strike the game (and other HL MP mods) sans Steam was rather limited.
Then as time moved on the physical media you'd be buying (for the games that you activate on Steam) wasn't really usable or just even very limited even for a SP game without logging onto Steam for verification and often distribution of day one patches.
Yes technically you could for example own then 2 licenses of say Half-life and play 2 SP campaigns simultaneously but at that point the business side of that was well accounted for.
Similarly for example when Blizzard switched to allowing Battlenet as a game distribution platform as well you could transfer your legacy titles as another example.
Those old codes inside the case? That's not really a transfer as the physical license remains on disk. In those cases you bought two licenses (or bought one, got one free), one physical on the disc and one digital printed on the code.
No-one willing to do that any more!Silent_Buddha
Legend
Those old codes inside the case? That's not really a transfer as the physical license remains on disk. In those cases you bought two licenses (or bought one, got one free), one physical on the disc and one digital printed on the code.
During that era (starting before Steam's launch), the CD-key was the license and served as the DRM as it was the only thing that determined whether you were legally allowed to use that product. The media that it came on was only for distribution of the code. The license was the CD-key.
So, by the time Steam launched most game developers and publishers had moved away from expensive physical media copy protection in favor of CD-keys and more easily and cheaply produced physical media. Valve at some point saw that as an opportunity to partner with some developers and publishers to offer CD-key redemption on Steam. That in turn eventually led to the physical media becoming just a physical installation medium for a Steam version of the game (games started to require Steam as they were now using Steam as DRM). Then a few years after that, with broadband becoming widely available, publishers and developers just opted out of expensive (relative to digital) physical media.
Regards,
SB
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arandomguy
Veteran
CD-keys back then were really only for the multiplayer component of games and was used for authentication with the games MP service. Account based MP was not there in the early days, and so the cd-key itself was basically used to authenticate every time and was basically transferable by itself (you could just trade/buy cdkeys for the MP component). It wasn't really a license in the same way we'd perceive modern game serials as. There was basically no tie-in with the actual physical media.
Single player games for the most part did not have unique CD-keys.
Physical disc based DRM that was offline only certainly was not gone by the time Steam debuted. Starforce and SafeDisc for example were both prominent physical media based DRM at the time for SP games.
CD-keys (or really game serials) came into place for single player games after DRM moved to online activation. This later also extended to them being used for distribution (platform/service registration) as well as digital distribution started to become popularized on the PC.
Single player games for the most part did not have unique CD-keys.
Physical disc based DRM that was offline only certainly was not gone by the time Steam debuted. Starforce and SafeDisc for example were both prominent physical media based DRM at the time for SP games.
CD-keys (or really game serials) came into place for single player games after DRM moved to online activation. This later also extended to them being used for distribution (platform/service registration) as well as digital distribution started to become popularized on the PC.
I don't understand the problem or parallel.
PS Store has a lot of bugs/weird behavior. Don't they want to sell CoD to me or something?
Or, I can buy it on PS Store in the web browser. Maybe it just doesn't work on PS5 so it is blocked there?
Ah,okay. Well, ask Sony's support...
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It's not listed on the PS5 digital store but it works and is obtained via other portals.
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