Okay so I guess I'm done trying to be a smart ass in here.

Shit. That's the only thing I've ever been good at. :P

How is it the same concept?

Terms like "buying" and "ownership" in these type of discussions are being used to refer to control and possession, in a colloquial sense.

It's not. Without DRM, the user has control over the product, regardless of what the technical agreement is. With DRM, the user has no control over the product, due to both the technical agreement and the practical reality.

His point was that the Licensing agreements here aren't any different than on Steam. If you back up your Steam copies you're just as legal as your GOG copies

Well, I am not meaning to speak for TinyE either, but from context (or lack thereof), I didn't think licenses were what were specifically being discussed until Crosmando brought it up.

I have been in a lot of these discussions and it seems to me the criticism that Scheme games are effectively a long-term rental is not based on the EULA mumbo-jumbo.

Rather, the criticism is that due to the DRM, the user doesn't have control over the game. Hypothetically, if Scheme ever went out of business, the user would lose access to their games entirely because of that.

Hence, long-term rental.

Indeed. This whole argument has been done to death before:-

1. GOG's own EULA, section 17.3 : "If GOG ever goes out of business, you bought it, you own it, it's yours to keep", whilst Section 1.1 states the agreement is between you and the games directly and not a "one-level-removed subscriber agreement" where the product you're "subscribing" to is a compulsory 'service client' for which games played through are mere secondary "entitlements" and that if you disagree with any future EULA "subscriber" changes required to re-install a compulsory Steam client in 2-3 years time on a new PC and click "no", you'll be locked out of everything with no other alternative legal option to download or play.

2. Plenty of legal jurisdictions correctly call out junk EULA's as being non-legal gibberish. The EU High Court once said (paraphrased) "Just because you call something a license doesn't mean it is one if the sole reason for calling it that for selling ordinary consumer goods as one-off purchases with no ongoing agreement, is to attempt to continue to exert control over the product post-purchase in breach of normal First Sale Doctrine / Principle of Exhaustion based national copyright laws". It is the first thing that gets thrown out of court every time. "All digital products are rented" is not true. Plenty of other examples, eg, unprotected .mp3's on a local MP3 player are not remotely in the same class as requiring Spotify or Steam server's to remain active forever to grant "permission" to play.

3. Most people know full well the "ownership" many are talking about for DRM-Free games is more about the practicals of owning a "static" product offline that isn't:-
- A. Filled with one or more remote kill-switches (DRM)
- B. Dependant on 3rd party online services remaining active forever
- C. At threat of being negatively retro-actively altered in the future (eg, soundtracks or other content forcibly deleted or censored from the only permitted cloud version), or
- D. EULA's in older offline installers remain static by nature and are immune to any unwanted / negative future store level / client EULA changes that would retroactively affect re-downloads of all games on a store with a compulsory client.

4. Steam may not be a "proper" rental like Netflix or Spotify, but the bottom line is - games are essentially bought through a client 'subscription' agreement with a "$0 rental fee" and if that 'subscription' ever got cancelled, you'd 'own' the games about as much as you'd own Netflix movies after you cancelled your Netflix account. That you could get a measly 6% of Steam's titles (this list) to run without the client hardly makes the store in general "ownership based" in anywhere near the same way as buying games directly.

5. Distribution "licensing" does not = ownership "licensing". Eg, the user cannot rip music / cutscenes from say Deus Ex and put it into an "asset-flipped" title of their own to sell (because the IP / content is licensed), but you still own an individual DRM-Free offline installer / retail disc of Deus Ex in itself purely to play it. Just like it's not illegal for owners of NOLF discs to continue to play the game despite long being "out of license" for distribution. Or own a book without having author rights.

Whatever "theoretical legalese" people want to pretend that "and that means DRM-Free ownership is no different to Steam" are irrelevant when they ignore every practical down to earth reason why people specifically buy DRM-Free games in the first place (the "ownership benefits" that are precisely what makes the difference in offline functionality / preservation security vs the 'feel of an open-ended rental' of anything that forces a DRM'd client for +94% of content in actual practise).

DRM removal charge.