They’re streaming in the 3d world detail, but the rendering engine is installed locally.
Playing on xCloud will just stream in the visuals that are rendered remotely, so a lot less bandwidth, but then you have the lag, and need a subscription.
Legally, it’s still a license, it’s just effectively impossible to revoke.
Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).
American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.
A digital “purchase” is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can’t be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.
Tencent and Guillemot combined are considering a buyout of other shareholders. Most of that is Guillemot, with Tencent increasing their share very slightly from 9.2% to 10%.
They do point out that they will be monitoring how it’s used, and could adjust things later.
Sounds like corporate-speak for “if people abuse this, we’ll lock it down harder.”
Even if people are using it to share with actual family around the country, they may get caught up in future updates that remove that feature. Also note that any publisher can opt out of the sharing. If EA or Ubi or some other big company doesn’t like the lack of limits, they may be able to force Valve’s hand in changing the policy.
The idea is wonderful, but there are a ton sof ways this could end up worse than the old system.
It’s always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you’ve got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.