On a related note, one of the technical details about the Mac App Store that I find interesting is the fact that once an application is downloaded to your machine, there's nothing Apple can do to revoke that copy. It sounds like steam manages the licenses of your games for you, whereas the Mac App Store bundles the receipt into each copy of the application that you download. Apple could in theory deny you access to future updates of an app, and you wouldn't be able to use that app bundle on a different machine, but they can't deny you access to an app once its been downloaded.
> I find interesting is the fact that once an application is downloaded to your machine, there's nothing Apple can do to revoke that copy.
I don't believe this is necessarily by design, It's the nature of allowing ANY application on the store. With steam, to distribute your game you must hook into the Steam API.
Both come with positives and negatives, as you have mentioned, but I don't believe either is 'correct'.
That's really how it should work. Once downloaded it's yours.
When my credit card expired last year I could not download any apps I had purchased from Apple until I updated it/paid for the ones in my most recent statement. They did not however DELETE/DISABLE the apps on my computer even the ones I still technically owed them money for.
I think Apple has the right idea in how digital downloads should work.
