I dont agree that steam always has been 100 % honest and not been lying to custommers
they have claimed that you wont loose acess to your games on several occassions but i have experienced loosing acess to the games a couple of times already.
They also didnt use terms such as lifetime rentals or permission/licence to use a game at first
Both are in my eyes two signs of not beeing 100 % honest

A license is a right to use a property or intellectual property that belongs to somebody else. When you read "this software is licensed, not sold" in a software EULA, whether it's for an OS like Windows 10, a game, or an application, "this software" refers to the software Intellectual Property and not the copy of that intellectual property that you've purchased via a software license. Software licenses and the instances of a software's intellectual property that they represent are indeed and obviously sold. Both of the following phrases are simultaneously true: This software (IP) is licensed, not sold; This software (instance / license) is sold, not licensed or leased.


All the mass-produced items you've bought, including your clothing, your vehicles, your TV, your computer hardware, are licensed instances of the intellectual property (IP) for those things. When you purchase any of those things, you aren't purchasing the intellectual property (IP) and so you don't become entitled to mass-produce, to control marketing, to receive profits from exploiting the brands of any of those things, and you don't gain any ownership of the patents for the patented technology in those things. But you are purchasing a one-off copy of the IP of those things, and upon the point of sale of the instances of those IPs there is a transfer of ownership over those instances and you become the sole owner of that instance of that IP. This is exactly the same with software as it is with physical goods - you own your non-reproduceable instance and have full property rights over it.


In law, there are Goods and there are Services, and every thing you pay for is classified into one of these two categories. A service is a temporal and transient action (like a car wash, meal delivery, movie streaming) that may or may not deliver a good. A good, by definition, is an item and piece of property that undergoes a transfer of ownership upon its point of sale, from the seller to the buyer, granting the buyer full property rights over that purchased item, and removing all rights from the seller over the item which they sold. As of February 2020, there are 88 countries signatory to the Nice Agreement treaty. The Nice Agreement (called such because it was signed in Nice, France, in 1957), is a multinational treaty that contains the International Classification of Goods and Services (also known as the Nice Classification), and that treaty assigns the classification of goods and services for its signatory countries under the jurisdiction and authority of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The World Intellectual Property Organization classifies all software as Class 9 goods. An elaborate look at what goods are under law is in this post.


There are perpetual software licenses and there are subscription software licenses. A perpetual license is non-exhaustive, meaning that the right it grants is eternal, forever-lasting, and never expires. A subscription license is a duration-limited right to access a software or service. All the most common software including games, OSes, and programs are perpetual licenses. Some games that are sold via perpetual licenses, like MMOs, require an additional service subscription to use the base software with a publisher's own servers, with the software not being functional on its own due to the servers handling the game world's AI and other systems. Steam itself is a subscription service, but the games sold through Steam are perpetual licensed software and goods. The Steam service is used to purchase and deliver goods.


A perpetual license is a good and a product, and whenever a perpetual license is sold it undergoes transfer of ownership upon the point of sale. Whoever owns a perpetual license owns the instance of software it grants a right to use the intellectual property (IP) of. After the transfer of ownership of a perpetual licensed software, the seller of the license no longer holds any rightful say over anything regarding that non-reproduceable instance of software represented by its perpetual license. This legal fact is not always honoured by perpetual license software sellers (for example, Microsoft with Windows 10 automatic updates and data-harvesting) and it can take lawsuits to force software companies to comply with their legal and moral obligations and to respect the property of others and not violate that property, including software, system, and data property.


EULAs are not laws but are subject to laws. And corporations do not possess law-making powers. Many EULAs are not written by legal experts but by people who just see the formats of previous EULAs and make assumptions from seeing those about what the nature of an EULA is, and then just copy and paste the terms they like the sound of from other EULAs. And many EULAs even from large companies like Microsoft (for example, the Windows 10 EULA) contain made-up and non legally-enforceable stuff in them. Considering that it is even unreasonable to expect people to read EULAs, there is a question of how could an EULA-based argument pass the "reasonable person" or "the man on the Clapham omnibus" legal tests. An EULA can often be nothing more than an extremely long-winded and self-aggrandizing equivalent of printing a © symbol, with the parts of it that reach beyond the meaning of a © symbol being invalid.


EULAs are also used as a tool of manipulation to psychologically ward off potential challenges and to provoke the type of customer behaviour a publisher wishes there to be, by claiming, or, by phrasing things (without outright saying them) in a way that suggests publisher rights and powers beyond what actually exist. There are countless examples of this, but one very familiar one is "this software is licensed, not sold", which plays on the semantics of "software".


An EULA and a Terms of Service (ToS) are not the same thing. An EULA purports to apply to a good you've purchased and own, to impose conditions on how you use your own property, and so is invalid. A Terms of Service applies to a service, owned by someone else, that you use via a subscription license or a free account, and so a ToS can be valid. Someone else isn't entitled to set terms for your usage of your own property, which is what an EULA tries to do. But they are entitled to set the terms over your usage of their own property, which is what a ToS aims to do. However, a ToS can still be invalid depending on what terms it claims. And if a ToS tries to add in conditions about your usage of your own property, such as software you've purchased or perhaps modification of your hardware, then at least that part of it is invalid. Just as how some perpetual-license software might include a component that requires a subscription-license for its typical usage (as with some MMOs), a software good that you own might have an online component to which a ToS applies for the sake of accessing 3rd-party servers, with those 3rd-party servers not being a part of your ownership of the base game software you purchased.


Ownership over a thing is what establishes one's decision-making authority over the thing. To sell something is to relinquish it as one's property and to relinquish all of one's decision-making authority over that thing and to transfer decision-making authority over that thing to the person who bought the thing. Anything sold via a perpetual (meaning non-exhausting, eternal, lasting-forever) license is a product that becomes the sole possession of whoever purchases it, and upon its purchase all property rights including all decision-making authority transfer from the seller to the purchaser. And then the seller no longer has any rightful say over anything regarding that non-reproduceable instance of software represented by its perpetual license.