Preface: I don’t work for Valve (as much as I would like to) and I am not a lawyer. This post is not legal advice – it’s just regular advice from someone who has interacted with Steam’s legal agreements as both a gamer and a game developer.
I’ve seen a lot of people (both on social media and mostly on the Steam forums) be worried about paragraphs in the Steam Subscriber Agreement like this:
You consent to such automatic updating. You understand that this Agreement (including applicable Subscription Terms) does not entitle you to future updates (unless to the extent required by applicable law), new versions or other enhancements of the Content and Services associated with a particular Subscription, although Valve may choose to provide such updates, etc. in its sole discretion.
Does that say Valve can just refuse to let me update my Steam client or games? Well, kind of.
In situations like this, it’s important to look at the past actions of the company you’re signing the contract with and to think about why they might have said something like this at all.
The SSA (Steam Subscriber Agreement) is a contract that primarily exists to protect Valve and make sure they can keep running Steam. One of the primary reasons it exists is to stop expensive frivolous lawsuits from being used as a denial of service attack against Steam.
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need legal agreements and everyone would just behave. But in that case, there would be no agreement for Valve to deliver updates either, just the understanding that Valve would try to do what is the right thing to do. Which is the thing that actually determines whether Valve will send you an update.
A recent example is Steam on Windows 7. An update to an in-development version of the Steam client’s CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) made it incompatible with Windows 7. That update will not be delivered to users on Windows 7, nor will any future client update, because doing so would cause them to no longer be able to access any of their games.
Valve has historically always made rational decisions about when to send updates to its customers. That’s the question you should be asking when you see a clause like this in a contract: it’s not a question of whether you can trust any company with those rules – you’re signing a contract with one specific company. The rules intentionally give Valve a lot of wiggle room because it allows them to make decisions about things that weren’t known when the contract was agreed to.
Similarly, I’ve seen a lot of fear caused by the claim that Valve can delete your access to games at any time. In this case, the question to ask is whether any business acting rationally would do that. Valve makes money when people buy games. Would you buy games from a service that stole games from you? Would you buy games from a service that was documented as stealing games from someone else?
No, of course not. So why might there be a clause in the contract that says Valve is not required to deliver your games to you? Well, a couple of reasons.
First of all, here’s probably the simplest and most common reason for a game to be taken away on Steam: Let’s say you ask for a refund for a game purchase you made but regretted. As part of giving you that refund, Valve has to take away your copy of the game, or it’s just them giving you free money. That makes sense – after you refund a game, you no longer have access to it.
How about if your internet service provider (such as the wifi on a train or at a university dorm) blocks Steam’s download servers? They’re not going to be able to deliver your games to you even though you still own the license.
What if Steam is simply down? Every Tuesday, Steam goes down for routine maintenance. This usually lasts less than half an hour and only affects some subset of Steam’s services, but occasionally you won’t be able to download a game for a several minute period during a week. Again, you still own the license and can still grab a fresh copy of the game’s files once the service is back up.
What if your hard drive is full, or your antivirus software is messing with Steam’s ability to download game files, or any number of other things specific to your computer are preventing Valve from delivering games to you? Well, that’s not a problem Valve has the resources or access to fix. But legally, it still means that Valve hasn’t delivered the game to you, even though the reason for that is completely within your control and not theirs.
The contract you sign is not the only thing taken into account when both parties make decisions. When you decide you want to play Kerbal Space Program, you don’t open up the contract and check what it has to say about whether you should play Kerbal Space Program right now – you just make that decision using your own reasoning. A contract can only ever restrict the actions that are allowed to be taken – that’s what they’re for. Just because it would be legally possible for Valve to do something in a literal reading of the SSA doesn’t mean it would be a good idea for them to do that, or that they would even consider doing it.