The Glade 4.0

Reinstalled Mass Effect (1) on my new laptop. Thing was a damn ***** to get running, the DRM kept interfering with a game I had purchased and had a legitimate right to.

Went online and found a crack for Mass Effect. Started working without problem. Decided to keep the crack installed because I don't want to carry a dvd around with me anyway.

See, the hackers and pirates will ALWAYS beat you. Furthermore, they usually beat you before you've even released the game. (Assassin's Creed 2, with it's draconian DRM, had a crack available on release day.)

I had a Bioware lead developer in my WoW-guild. He firmly believed developers held all the cards, and that DRM was both effective and didn't inconvenience paying customers. Based on the increasingly difficult to deal with DRM on new titles, I have to believe he's representative of the industry as a whole. Why are they so naive? Why do they not understand that it is now easier for someone to go pirate the game than it is for them to get a legitimate copy to run on a PC? Perhaps there are none so blind as those who will not see?

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Two sides to this argument, both valid: customers who deserve hassle-free entertainment for items they legitimately paid for, and producers who deserve to ensure that they're paid for their hard work.



There's also a third side, those assholes who simply don't want to pay for things and rationalize the hell out of it in order to feel good about themselves, but they don't count.

The producers' argument would be valid if DRM in any way helped them get paid for their hard work.

My point is that it does not. Piracy is easier now than it ever was. Getting a legitimately paid for game to work without screwing over your system is not. It's now to the point that even after buying the game, people (like me) are using cracks to make them work.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is exactly why 75% of my game purchases lately (for PC anyway) have been through Steam. I don't have to worry about fooling with any discs, or getting the latest patches. All of that is done for me automatically. All of my "CD Keys" are stored with my Steam account, so I don't have to keep up with them. And I can play them from virtually any computer with an internet connection (only for the initial setup/patching). It's really very easy and hassle-free.

The DRM and copy protection schemes have really gotten out of hand lately. There are games that won't run/launch with a particular brand of CD/DVD writable drives. WTF is this an issue? There are legitimate reasons to own a DVD burner, besides piracy, morons. And others won't work if you have certain software installed on your PC, even if that software is installed for good reasons. Other schemes act more like some sort of malware or virus and cause all sorts of havoc and stability issues in your system.

STOP TREATING YOUR PAYING CUSTOMERS LIKE COMMON THIEVES!!!!! Pirated games are not coming from people buying your game and letting their friends burn a copy. All the copy-protection stuff does is piss of your paying customers. The vast majority of pirated games comes from downloading an illeagal copy off the internet. Usually days, sometimes even weeks, BEFORE THE GAME RELEASES IN STORES! This most likely means, that when the game goes gold, someone lifts a copy of the original and leaks it to the piracy groups so that they can start working on a crack. That is where they should try to crack down on this mess. Not by alienating and irritating your loyal, paying customers.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

That sort of makes you wonder whether the people responsible for leaking games to piracy groups are the same guys pushing so hard for DRM.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I'm with Caleria. At this point, if it isn't on Steam, odds are I won't buy it. (nor pirate for that matter - too much work heh)

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Yup, can't remember the last time I bought a PC game that wasn't on steam. It's been quite awhile.

I've had no problems with my steam purchases. Any ideas why more people don't go that route?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Does steam require a subscription?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

No, just a free account.

You don't get your game box though, right?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Nope, no game box. No CD's, or anything of that kind. You just download your games and play.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Then that is probably a big reason people don't like it. I, for one, would never pay money for a download-only system. I want the product in my hands at some point.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I hate hard copies. They're **** useless. All they do is take up room I don't have.

Fair enough, but Rori asked for potential reasons more people don't use Steam. There's one.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

This. Times a thousand.

I don't have room for all the boxes, booklets, CD-cases, and discs that come along with games. I just want the game, thank you very much. And as long as I have steam installed on a computer, I can download and play my game. Hell, I can even play my game on my PC, while my wife/kid/friend plays the same game on another machine, in Offline mode. From the same copy. No CD cracks or anything like that.

To hell with all the discs and "hard copies." I've got boxes full of that stuff right now, that I'm trying to find a place to keep it all. And what happens when you have the disc, but lose the box/booklet that has your CD-key on it. Good luck with that. Steam stores all of my CD-keys with my account, so I never have to worry with any of them.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Good point.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Right up until there's a horrific database crash and it's also found that the backups are corrupted.

Or right up until they turn off the servers for good.

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My favorite system is where I can buy a game box (and get the physical goodies with it or with the collector's edition -- sadly, standard edition goodies like a full-size instruction manual are getting absurdly rare) that lets me enter the key into Steam to activate it on my account, so it can use Steam's copy protection (being logged in) and so I can download from Steam in the event that I lose the key/disc.

This goes, to a lesser extent, for similar systems that don't use Steam; the ability to add game keys to your Battle.net account is an example. I'd prefer to keep stuff under Steam, though, rather than have dozens of publisher-specific accounts.

As for reasons people don't go through Steam more, there's also:

The developer is attached to a publisher who considers Valve a competitor cutting into their bottom line
The developer's distributor has deals with brick and mortar outlets, or another download-oriented distributor (like Direct2Drive) that has some degree of exclusivity clause preventing distribution via Steam
The publisher doesn't consider Steam to be adequate copy protection for some crazy reason

And, shuyung, while that's a possibility, it's one that is (for me, in particular) far less likely to happen than me losing physical media/keys. And Valve is on record stating its intent to, if it ever discontinues Steam, release a means to unlock the games' dependency on checking their servers. Granted, that's simply a statement of intent, with no real recourse for action after Valve goes out of business (by this point, the only really plausible reason for Steam to shut down). In any event, Steam's got a solid history and reputation by this point, and is a large, well-tended endeavor that appears to be well sustainable financially, so it's a much safer risk than, say, when it first rolled out.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Sure, I concede that the possibilities appear remote at this point in time.

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