DRM wars (Steam, Origin, Starforce, Battle.net, installation limits, etc...)

[Exophase]

This morning I wondered if it wouldn't be more efficient not to boycott games with DRM but to buy them and then request a refund because the DRM prevented you from playing it. A company won't really notice a DRM boycott unless the numbers are very high, but having many support tickets about DRM failure that ends up in "could not fix / client refunded" might get more attention.

I think that's reasonable, although in some cases you won't want to do that if the game has big problems and limitations that you know in advance are likely to affect you, like the Sim City fiasco.

I also think that the way some people are whitewashing all kinds of DRM as equally harmful/evil is counterproductive and hurts their cause. Some developers have gotten worse and worse in restricting what legitimate buyers can do with their stuff, while in other contexts it's something you won't normally notice. Or not that different from copy protection techniques that have been around for decades and generally didn't inspire widespread rage outside of hacker/pirate communities - at least until stuff like rootkits started appearing.

Take for example Google's LVL, which is DRM - your ability to run the game is tied to your account status. DraStic uses an LVL check against Google Play when it's installed, where the rationale is that it's part of the install process that involves getting the thing from Google Play to begin with. It doesn't check again after this, so it doesn't matter if you're online or not. If the LVL checking code is hacked out it triggers stuff in the emulator that degrades the experience.

For the most part, people who buy the app from Google Play have no idea that this is happening. Unfortunately it still goes wrong sometimes, and generally because of some issue on Google's side. Then we rightfully get people unhappy on e-mails - usually the problem goes away, but sometimes it doesn't and we give a refund. This sucks and I really don't like it, and Lordus and I have talked about removing the license check before. Ultimately, the impact has been very small (far under 1% of sales) and in all of this I can only remember being called out on DRM by one user who mistakenly thought we required always-online to work.

The thing with Android is that there are a billion websites out there that will automatically rip and crack everything that enters Google Play, copying the description verbatim. Some of them actually even look like normal app stores and let other developers upload and charge for stuff as well. A lot of people download stuff from these sites without even having the slightest idea what's supposed to be a pay app and what isn't (a ton of apps on Android are purely ad-supported or free-to-play or whatever with no restriction on distributing the base APK). These sites aren't going to advertise that you can buy the app if you want, they're going to want to look legitimate as possible to maximize their own ad revenue. We get tons of e-mails and forum posts from people who are using cracked versions. When we ask if they bought it from the Play store, they usually either don't respond, or say they didn't even realize it was a pay app and will buy it now. Only a very small number of people try to convince us they bought it when they didn't, because I think most people who realize they're pirating don't actually feel like they're owed tech support.

I don't feel like there's any point getting offended over or trying to shut down people who use cracked versions wantonly, where they clearly know they made that choice and probably would have chosen nothing over buying it. But that's not really how things work anymore. I seriously think if we didn't do anything here we wouldn't just lose money, we'd also get a lot more support requests from people using older versions because they don't realize it's been updated. Which can get pretty bad, especially when you get something like that October bug we had. And we'd probably see a lot of other people reselling it at a moderately lower price, people hacking ads into it, and a lot more people confused over what the legitimate version is.

 

[levi]

The only problem with that sort of boycott is that unless you bought the game directly from the publisher, the refund will come from the third party retailer, who may not have a system in place to report returns to the publisher, but instead strike it up as a second-hand sale.

 

[thatgui]

Strictly speaking they don't, but when you're complaining about games that you can't play because of DRM with no mention of all the games that you can it makes your argument seem one sided... like a vegetarian complaining that they can't eat anything because steak isn't vegetarian when the salad bar is RIGHT THERE!

"I want to play that game, but it has DRM" is like saying "I want to eat bacon but I won't eat meat". "Well, there's soy bacon" I might suggest, to which the response "that stuff is crap, I want real bacon" will get some disdained looks.

I'm having a hard time applying your analogy (do not wanna say its wrong, just that I don't get it):Wouldn't the situation be different:

I'm sitting in one of my favourite restaurants, searching for the soy bacon in the menu I used to eat with no luck. Asking the waiter why it isn't on the menu anymore I only get a short answer, that the management wanted a more profitable restaurant and serving real meat accomplishes that, but if I have a problem with that I can write a comment on a board the managment provided outside of the restaurant.

If I did understand you correctly I'm not allowed to write a complaint on that board. But what I could do is write that one can get a fine soy bacon in another restaurant. Or not, as this was maybe the only vegetarian restaurant available in the city.

Again, I see the problem of indirect negativity, and that the management does not necessarilly get a valuable feedback from that.

I also think that the way some people are whitewashing all kinds of DRM as equally harmful/evil is counterproductive and hurts their cause.

I don't know where you refering to specifically, and I don't quite get where it should hurt anyones cause as long as one stays reasonable and polite.

Some developers have gotten worse and worse in restricting what legitimate buyers can do with their stuff, while in other contexts it's something you won't normally notice.

But it still there, and it can be noticable indeed - occasionally at least. Like having to restart your phone and realising that in order to play a certain game the game needs to connect to a activation server every time the phone is restarted, but unfortunatly you are currently in an area where no mobile network is available. Or you moved and are in a situation where you have no internet connection (except some mobile tethering) for months now, because a certain company is not able to find the cables they layed themselfs into the ground, and happy that you can download a game at work and just install it at home, while your neighbor is complaining about not beeing able to play the new game he bought in a sale as he can't activate nor download it.Or that crazy situation that someone created an engine for a game you played 10/15/20 years ago, and you are still able to just cram out the disc, install it, and copy the necessary file.

And there is the problem that every game is bound to your account, so if you loose that account (for whatever reasons) you loose all the games, or if the service you use decides that one game needs to be removed from their service (again for whatever reasons) you are not able to play it anymore. Or that these service are kind enough to don't let something horrible happen to you, like you living a region where you are not supposed to play a game you bought the steam-key for.

All these situations aren't likely to occur, and I did not experience the last three examples personally, but they can and did already. Why exactly should I embrace that ?

Take the recent cease of service from gamespy, its the perfect example:

Foremost, its an example that publishers arent the mustache twirling villains that are already thinking about which baby they steal its lollipop from, right after they have taken your "gamer freedom" away. But that they are companies driven by reasonable decisions. And as it was a reasonable decision to utilize the service of gamespy then, it is to use Steam now. But no one can say in which direction the market will steer, but they need to plot a course nevertheless. The problem is, the more these services get integrated the more things are falling apart if one of the services doesn't deliver anymore. No one can say what will happen in the next couple of years. Who had thought back then that gamespy would getting more and more obsolete only several years after it started off, or that Microsoft would be one of the biggest players in the gaming market, back then, when they announced the first xbox ?

But its also an example of people getting dependent on outside factors without even thinking about it twice as long at is convenient.

Or not that different from copy protection techniques that have been around for decades and generally didn't inspire widespread rage outside of hacker/pirate communities - at least until stuff like rootkits started appearing.

As I hinted at in the paragraph above the publisher has a lot more power now, so its actually more "invading" then it was back then. Especially as you have to install a client to use their services, which may profile you (which I am not very concerned of, beeing it Valve/EA/... directly or some govermental "service"), but also brings another complex system on your computer which may be a viable source for exploits.

 

[WizardStan]

I'm sitting in one of my favourite restaurants, searching for the soy bacon in the menu I used to eat with no luck.

There are a lot of games that didn't used to have DRM but then suddenly did?

Or not, as this was maybe the only vegetarian restaurant available in the city.

If the only vegetarian restaurant in the city stops serving vegetarian then I cannot possibly contest you complaining. Your options have been completely stripped away.What I have a problem with is walking into a steak house (ie, Steam) and complaining that you can't eat anything they serve when there is a vegetarian restaurant right next door: it may not be the classiest vegetarian restaurant (it's good, but maybe not great), but complaining about Steam's outback steakhouse isn't going to make it better, it'll just make people not want to listen to you. You want better vegetarian, upsell the vegetarian restaurant right next door, bring them more business. Or do some searching and find that there's an amazing restaurant 20 minutes out of town! It's great, but not many people have heard of it because of its location. Word of mouth, get them more business and maybe they'll be able to move into town. It has a soy bacon recipe that looks and tastes exactly like the real thing, but for some reason you're standing in the steakhouse complaining about the bacon that you cannot eat.

If I did understand you correctly I'm not allowed to write a complaint on that board

Sorry, I didn't mean to give that impression. If they've set up a board for complaints, then by all means use it, that is what it is for, you're giving complaints directly to the producers of the goods you want to consume and there can be nothing wrong with that.Instead what we're getting is people complaining about how evil meat is in a room where some are sitting with plates piled high with bacon thinking "yeah yeah, your priorities are different from mine, I've heard this rant a million times and don't care, I just want to eat my bacon". Screaming into the darkness about how you wish you could eat the bacon that everyone else is eating but can't because meat is murder will not win you friends. You want your favourite vegetarian restaurant to do more business? Tell me about it, detail all the delicious things I can eat, make me want to go there. Don't tell me that what I'm doing is wrong and expect me to just up and change. You might eventually be able to make me agree, with enough persuasion, that meat is bad, but if the only restaurant I know of is Steam's Outback Steakhouse and they make some mighty fine bacon you had better believe I'm going to keep going there for the bacon, I'm just going to feel a little more guilty about it.

I'm not saying you CAN'T complain, I'm just saying that if you do just complain don't expect to be taken seriously, and don't be surprised when others voice counter opinions.

 

[Exophase]

I don't know where you refering to specifically, and I don't quite get where it should hurt anyones cause as long as one stays reasonable and polite.

Tone has nothing to do with it. The point is that if you take a hard-line all-or-nothing stance people won't see any value in taking any kind of incremental steps or compromises part way towards what you want, and you'll be seen as unreasonable.

For most people, moving from always-online to online-once would be a huge improvement. Moving from a limited number of installs and/or installs tied to device to installs tied to account would be a huge improvement. But if you just say that you won't be happy with anything less than the ability to freely distribute the program and run it without any restrictions (which is basically what zero-DRM amounts to, at least for digital distribution where some kind of DRM is the only possible means of copy protection) it'll be hard to get companies to take you seriously.

But it still there, and it can be noticable indeed - occasionally at least. Like having to restart your phone and realising that in order to play a certain game the game needs to connect to a activation server every time the phone is restarted, but unfortunatly you are currently in an area where no mobile network is available. Or you moved and are in a situation where you have no internet connection (except some mobile tethering) for months now, because a certain company is not able to find the cables they layed themselfs into the ground, and happy that you can download a game at work and just install it at home, while your neighbor is complaining about not beeing able to play the new game he bought in a sale as he can't activate nor download it.

And yet neither of those happen if, like DraStic, the authentication is only done when the thing is installed (where you have to be online to install it). But thats still considered DRM. See what I mean about white-washing?

Or that crazy situation that someone created an engine for a game you played 10/15/20 years ago, and you are still able to just cram out the disc, install it, and copy the necessary file.

Okay, so if we're talking about a digital only distribution you want the ability to get install to be available forever? Because that has nothing to do with DRM you know.

In my cases, if Google Play goes down I'll make it available somewhere else, probably for free, w/o the authentication, if I think anyone still wants it.

And there is the problem that every game is bound to your account, so if you loose that account (for whatever reasons) you loose all the games, or if the service you use decides that one game needs to be removed from their service (again for whatever reasons) you are not able to play it anymore. Or that these service are kind enough to don't let something horrible happen to you, like you living a region where you are not supposed to play a game you bought the steam-key for.

True, but if the service provider kills your account for no good reason or refuses to migrate your stuff that's a separate specific issue. In our case, we've had people who bought it under a different account and want it on a new one for some reason, we tell them to buy it on the new account and we'll refund the old one.

All these situations aren't likely to occur, and I did not experience the last three examples personally, but they can and did already. Why exactly should I embrace that ?

Your point is basically "if this has any DRM then some bad situation will definitely happen", when all of these things can be addressed and become non-issues while still having DRM. They aren't really all fair generalizations.

As I hinted at in the paragraph above the publisher has a lot more power now, so its actually more "invading" then it was back then. Especially as you have to install a client to use their services, which may profile you (which I am not very concerned of, beeing it Valve/EA/... directly or some govermental "service"), but also brings another complex system on your computer which may be a viable source for exploits.

Yes, "may" profile you. There's a lot of guilty until proven innocent mentality behind this. The minimum case I was referring to was talking to the server to authenticate one time, you don't need some extra client software to do it. You need an account but you generally need something like that to buy stuff online anyway. The whole situation is not like using a physical copy, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with using a PC...

 

[WizardStan]

And there is the problem that every game is bound to your account, so if you loose that account (for whatever reasons) you loose all the games, or if the service you use decides that one game needs to be removed from their service (again for whatever reasons) you are not able to play it anymore

So GoG and Humble Bundle are out then as well.

 

[levi]

Only if you never downloaded the games.

 

[TrashyMG]

Only if you never downloaded the games.

Which reminds me, I have a ton of games to download...

 

[WizardStan]

Only if you never downloaded the games.

So it's ok that your games can be revoked (by accident or design) from the server so long as it is possible to keep a local copy?Then in this regard Steam is ok as well.

 

[Klumpen]

Only if you never downloaded the games.

So it's ok that your games can be revoked (by accident or design) from the server so long as it is possible to keep a local copy?
Then in this regard Steam is ok as well.

You can't play most of the Steam games anymore then.

It's possible to play everything from GoG in 20 years even when there would be no GoG anymore, as long as you got proper backups of your games (which GoG actually encourages).

What use is a ton of Steam downloads when you can't activate anything from it?

Only the DRM-free stuff would be playable then and that's only a fraction of Steams catalogue if I understood it right.

 

[WizardStan]

You can't play most of the Steam games anymore then.

Why not? Download the game, and keep a backup of it, just as you would for GoG. In the event that Valve goes tits up and you can't authenticate with the server or you get locked out for some reason, just restore the backup and play in offline mode.

 

[thatgui]

There are a lot of games that didn't used to have DRM but then suddenly did?

I must admit I have a hard time applying your analogy to DRM in games, but how would you translate the slow process from cd-keys/local copy protection to the forms of DRM we currently have into your analogy ?

If the only vegetarian restaurant in the city stops serving vegetarian then I cannot possibly contest you complaining. Your options have been completely stripped away.

What I have a problem with is walking into a steak house (ie, Steam) and complaining that you can't eat anything they serve when there is a vegetarian restaurant right next door: it may not be the classiest vegetarian restaurant (it's good, but maybe not great), but complaining about Steam's outback steakhouse isn't going to make it better, it'll just make people not want to listen to you. You want better vegetarian, upsell the vegetarian restaurant right next door, bring them more business. Or do some searching and find that there's an amazing restaurant 20 minutes out of town! It's great, but not many people have heard of it because of its location. Word of mouth, get them more business and maybe they'll be able to move into town. It has a soy bacon recipe that looks and tastes exactly like the real thing, but for some reason you're standing in the steakhouse complaining about the bacon that you cannot eat.

Again, thats a point where I have a problem with your analogy: The "environments" are different, I surely would not go into a steakhouse and start complaining about the consumption of meat, neither would I make an account in the Steam forums to complain about their DRM. But I would engange in discussions about a certain restaurant not serving meat anymore/or eating meat in general if I am with my friends, at a party, etc. Wouldn't you too?

Sorry, I didn't mean to give that impression. If they've set up a board for complaints, then by all means use it, that is what it is for, you're giving complaints directly to the producers of the goods you want to consume and there can be nothing wrong with that.

Instead what we're getting is people complaining about how evil meat is in a room where some are sitting with plates piled high with bacon thinking "yeah yeah, your priorities are different from mine, I've heard this rant a million times and don't care, I just want to eat my bacon". Screaming into the darkness about how you wish you could eat the bacon that everyone else is eating but can't because meat is murder will not win you friends. You want your favourite vegetarian restaurant to do more business? Tell me about it, detail all the delicious things I can eat, make me want to go there. Don't tell me that what I'm doing is wrong and expect me to just up and change. You might eventually be able to make me agree, with enough persuasion, that meat is bad, but if the only restaurant I know of is Steam's Outback Steakhouse and they make some mighty fine bacon you had better believe I'm going to keep going there for the bacon, I'm just going to feel a little more guilty about it.

But I guess most people in that room wouldn't care either if I would start talking about how tasty the soy bacon is in the vegetarian restaurant down the road. I would even go to such lengths and postualte that they would be equally annoyed if I do this repeatedly (even when varying the dishes).
I don't expect you to change at all, but I expect you to allow me to state my opinion, if you would start a conversion about how tasty the steak at Steams is and that you can't understand why not everybody wants to eat it, especially not those animal lovers - of course, this is bound to certain rules that apply to the special situation. If you would just say that the steak was delicious I would not comment to that further.

Tone has nothing to do with it. The point is that if you take a hard-line all-or-nothing stance people won't see any value in taking any kind of incremental steps or compromises part way towards what you want, and you'll be seen as unreasonable.

And yet neither of those happen if, like DraStic, the authentication is only done when the thing is installed (where you have to be online to install it). But thats still considered DRM. See what I mean about white-washing?

The problem here is that generalizing things is inherently something flawed, but (this may sound like, or even is a bad excuse) its necessary to boil things down to a scale in order to practically make an argument. Otherwise I would need to start making surveys on how some form of DRM is implemented in every single game out there (and the topic of this thread already sets the parameters for that). You brought forth your own way of handling things, which is very customer friendly, no doubt about it, and there are probably several thousand others using the same approach, but there probably is an equal amount out there that does not. And this as probably nothing to do with them beeing "bad" people, but just circumstances not making it possible. And particulary in the area of "private" publishing the probability is high that a few years down the road, most of them will be gone or otherwise occupied, so that support is comming to a halt.

And as you have the right to say that this is a "fair trade" and you don't see a big problem with it, I am free to say otherwise, or not ?

For most people, moving from always-online to online-once would be a huge improvement. Moving from a limited number of installs and/or installs tied to device to installs tied to account would be a huge improvement. But if you just say that you won't be happy with anything less than the ability to freely distribute the program and run it without any restrictions (which is basically what zero-DRM amounts to, at least for digital distribution where some kind of DRM is the only possible means of copy protection) it'll be hard to get companies to take you seriously.

But why should this transition happen at all, if no one complains ? Evolution is driven by obstacles, if there aren't any, there is no evolution. There must be a reason why a "all or nothing" approach like gog.com did it, was and is still successfull.

Okay, so if we're talking about a digital only distribution you want the ability to get install to be available forever? Because that has nothing to do with DRM you know.

Of course that has partially something to do with DRM, if I am not allowed to get a copy of a game that does not rely on an external service. With gog.com I am free to download as many copies as I want and (in reasonable bounderies, e.g no distribution) do what I want with it. I can just download and install it, and don't care any further, I can download and archive them on an hdd (which I personally do) or write them to a more permanent/durable storage solution. Is this possible with steam/origin/... or with the android market ?

In my cases, if Google Play goes down I'll make it available somewhere else, probably for free, w/o the authentication, if I think anyone still wants it.

Thats a fine attitude, and its probably a whitespread one, but especially if "business" gets bigger a lot more people/companies are involved usually rendering something like that unfeasable.

True, but if the service provider kills your account for no good reason or refuses to migrate your stuff that's a separate specific issue. In our case, we've had people who bought it under a different account and want it on a new one for some reason, we tell them to buy it on the new account and we'll refund the old one.

Again this is all nice, from your specific point of view and actions, but that is again something that can't be extrapolated on the whole market. Practical example is (again) Steam, there is no refund policy, and if they cancel your account, they probably aren't interested in keeping you as a customer (and the other way around if I would want to close my account there). With gog.com this is no problem as I can just use the games I bought and downloaded, should get problematic with games that rely on Steam services.

Your point is basically "if this has any DRM then some bad situation will definitely happen", when all of these things can be addressed and become non-issues while still having DRM. They aren't really all fair generalizations.

They will and already have, and I heavly doubt that "these things can become non-issues while still having DRM". If makeing it real isn't a problem, why do we have this discussion in the first place.

Yes, "may" profile you. There's a lot of guilty until proven innocent mentality behind this.

Thats why I put the "does not concern me much" part in.

The minimum case I was referring to was talking to the server to authenticate one time, you don't need some extra client software to do it.

Are you speaking of creating the server yourself, or are you still talking about utilizing services provided by others e.g. "Play store" ? The "Play store" is still a client you need to install, and if you create a server yourself, (as mentioned earlier) its not very probable that this server will still be alive in a few years.

You need an account but you generally need something like that to buy stuff online anyway.

No you don't I already bought on more then one occasion games without the need of an account. And the problem with the account is not the account itself, but that the games are tied to it.

The whole situation is not like using a physical copy, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with using a PC...

I don't quite get what you are hinting at, could you explain further ?

Why not? Download the game, and keep a backup of it, just as you would for GoG. In the event that Valve goes tits up and you can't authenticate with the server or you get locked out for some reason, just restore the backup and play in offline mode.

Please explain further or give a referenz => hard to believe, as this would have pushed most crackers that are specialized on cracking Game-DRM out of business

 

[WizardStan]

I must admit I have a hard time applying your analogy to DRM in games, but how would you translate the slow process from cd-keys/local copy protection to the forms of DRM we currently have into your analogy ?

The number of steakhouses is rising faster than the number of vegetarian restaurants, and at those steakhouses the menu selection is changing until basically everything, including the salad, contains animal product in some way, because market research has shown that most people, even most that are fundamentally against eating meat (though obviously not as extremely vigilant about it as others) are ok with a little fish sauce in their salad. The analogy breaks down when I try to figure out WHY the restaurant feels the need to put fish sauce in the salad... it keeps away thieves, somehow. Magic fish sauce, keeps you from skipping out on the cheque. Except for sea faring folk who have built up an immunity to the fish sauce and can guzzle it down and just walk out the door. Get it? Sea faring? Thieves? Pirates, I'm talking about pirates.So yeah, standard practice now at most steakhouses is to add this magic fish sauce to pretty much everything. A single drop, literally not enough to change the flavour at all, is all it would take, but some places are so paranoid that they slather the dish in the stuff, sometimes to detrimental effect.

But I would engange in discussions about a certain restaurant not serving meat anymore/or eating meat in general if I am with my friends, at a party, etc. Wouldn't you too?

If I knew all my friends were vegetarian as well and we all enjoyed a good rant, sure, we're all in for a good rant every once in a while.But that isn't the case here. This forum is full of people with different priorities and expectations of their games. Are you surprised that, when called out on the "evils of drmmeat", there are some people that would post their opinions disagreeing with that? Actually, I seem to recall that that literally did happen a few months back, someone asking why anyone would eat meat and was generally met with some equal parts "yeah, look at all this bad stuff" and "none of this bothers me because I have different priorities than you".

But I guess most people in that room wouldn't care either if I would start talking about how tasty the soy bacon is in the vegetarian restaurant down the road. I would even go to such lengths and postualte that they would be equally annoyed if I do this repeatedly (even when varying the dishes).

The fact that people post links to games (both old and upcoming) they like all the time and are usually rewarded with fruitful discussion about that game and appreciation for sharing it proves your hypothesis false.

but I expect you to allow me to state my opinion

No one said you couldn't state your opinion, I just said (in different words) that sometimes posting those opinions is counter-productive to the cause. If you're allowed to state your opinion, then I'm allowed to state my opinion that your opinion sucks and give reasons why. You can't have a general forum with free speech AND impunity from criticism.

if you would start a conversion about how tasty the steak at Steams is and that you can't understand why not everybody wants to eat it, especially not those animal lovers - of course, this is bound to certain rules that apply to the special situation. If you would just say that the steak was delicious I would not comment to that further.

Yes, that's exactly the tangential point I'm trying to make, if I understand you correctly. If you say "I don't understand why people do X" in a general forum you need to expect "people who do X" to explain and possibly defend themselves.If I said "hey, this place serves great steak" and you tell me "I'm vegetarian and don't eat meat" I might respond "oh sorry, what about this place that serves an awesome tofu pad thai?". Or if you suggested the place to get an awesome tofu pad thai I would be completely behind that. If you instead respond with "I'm vegetarian and think there's something wrong with you for wanting to eat meat" we're either going to get into an argument about the morality of eating meat and completely miss lunch, or I'm just going to walk away wondering who you are and what you're doing in my house.

Again, reiterating my original point, there are literally tens of thousands of games being released every year entirely DRM free with communities devoted to helping weed around the particularly good ones, so when I hear someone complain about the games they cannot play it makes it seem as if they are completely disregarding the work that has gone into bringing out all these DRM games.

Again, on the analogy, it's the vegetarian standing in the street complaining that he's starving, how he wishes he could go into Steam Steakhouse and get something to eat, he has all this money he would gladly spend, but he can't because even the salad has a tiny drop of fish sauce and he refuses to accept even that little bit of meat product, so he'll just hunker down in the street and whine and I'm like DUDE, the vegetarian restaurant is RIGHT. THERE. Go in, give them your money, they serve an amazing tofu pad thai! Try the soy bacon! It's not quite as good as the real thing but makes a pretty good BLT. "But I don't want amazing pad thai or SBLT, I want that pasta that everyone is saying is so good, but since I can't have that because of the magic fish sauce they add I'll just sit here in the street and complain about how starved I am".

Please explain further or give a referenz => hard to believe, as this would have pushed most crackers that are specialized on cracking Game-DRM out of business

You install steam, enter your account information, put it into offline mode, log out, copy the old steam directory back over, start it back up, and you've got access to all your games. With some registry work you don't even need to log in once, just go straight into offlien mode. Don't know why crackers haven't abused this. Maybe cracking is more than just about enabling piracy. Some people have complained about offline mode not working after extended periods of time but I can't comment on these people's problem as others (self included) have run offline mode for months at a time just fine. Maybe most of the games that people are interested in pirating have additional DRM beyond what Steam provides and therefore don't work in offline mode, in which case your beef should be with the publisher, not Steam.

 

[ElPoco]

I once had my internet access down for about a week. I couldn't start Steam in offline mode without being online first. There were still a few games I could play by running directly the executable, but many couldn't be started.

But I seem to recall that it was before there was a change in the way offline mode works. I don't know if it would be better now.

 

[elwing]

honestly I would be quite aggravated if they only added DRM, but in fact, it's been years since I paid more than 10$ for any game. they didn't JUST added DRM, the whole market changed. before you paid your game 50$ new or 20$ on sale your games but you owned them, now you pay them for less than 10$ but you do not really own them... as long as the DRM is not to intrusive I can accept that for the vastly reduced price... (ok aaa title are still in the 40$ but after just a few months you can get them for 15$ or less using any random, but quite frequent, 75% reduction...)

(edit: the two most expensive game I bought lately was tombraider for 6$ some month ago and SiN for 9.99 on GoG...)

 

[Exophase]

thatgui, there's a lot to respond to in your post.. I can't really get to all of it, at least not right now, but I think maybe I should clarify..

If what you're saying is that you need to start just a "DRM conversation" that covers it generically like that to have a topic to start with I get that. What I'm talking about is that I don't really get the mentality to boycott all software that uses any form of DRM, no matter how unlikely it is to be obstructive, or how cheap (or free) the software is. I guess I don't really go for hard-line ideologies in general. I think when criticizing actual software I do think more productive to look at them on an individual basis than just saying you're going to immediately boycott anyone that uses it (when even the definition of what does and doesn't qualify can get hazy)

Context matters a lot too, and I think this is really evident in the case of GOG. They're praised for going DRM-free, but is it really fair to say that their market and product are equivalent to everyone else's and a good example of why no one should have any kind of limits on redistribution? These games were mostly out for years, meaning they're either already being pirated, were being pirated, or no one ever cared enough to pirate them. GOG does renew interest for some games, but the point remains - whether or not GOG tries to limit your ability to play the games you're probably still going to be able to get them in the original form w/o DRM or with DRM hacked. The market has a special and fairly unique appeal to people who don't want to or don't know how to pirate these games, and the risk of getting a knock-off GOG instantly posting everything they release, and fooling the general public into thinking it's legitimate, is low (and on the off chance it did happen would be in low enough frequency to be dealt with)

Plus there's some real overhead in taking old games and adding some kind of extra DRM infrastructure to it, as well as making the servers and all that. And it could get thorny doing that while using GPL tools like DOSBox in your distributions. No one wants to deal with that stuff. If I were doing what they were doing there's no way I'd consider DRM either. I also probably wouldn't turn it into a big selling point - in that regard I'm not sure how much of that is GOG's marketing and how much of it is word of mouth.

 

[levi]

Pirating these days is much different to what it used to be. For one, it's now illegal. For the other, with closed source hacks got from random dodgy torrents, the hack could be worse than the DRM. Back in the day, I used to get my stuff from friends or crack stuff myself so I could install it to HDD. Of course, on machines without internet access, there are hard limits to the worst stuff software can do.

 

[thatgui]

Are you surprised that, when called out on the "evils of drmmeat", there are some people that would post their opinions disagreeing with that?

Why should I be surprised, especially in this community, with members sometimes discussing negligible details over countless pages (and me sometimes happily joining in) ?

No one said you couldn't state your opinion, I just said (in different words) that sometimes posting those opinions is counter-productive to the cause. If you're allowed to state your opinion, then I'm allowed to state my opinion that your opinion sucks and give reasons why. You can't have a general forum with free speech AND impunity from criticism.

Of course its up to personal perception, but "This argument really pisses me off." does not quite fit in that picture, but that is probably just me. Otherwise - did I tell anyone to not post their opinion ?

The fact that people post links to games (both old and upcoming) they like all the time and are usually rewarded with fruitful discussion about that game and appreciation for sharing it proves your hypothesis false.

These fruitfull discussions usually are not made in the context of the DRM properties of a certain game. If I would start making DRM-free suggestions in every thread that is made about a certain game (that utilizes some form of DRM), I would surely get at least "annoyed looks" from people reading that thread, probably thinking something in the line of "nice game B, but what exactly has this to do with this thread". After a couple of these posts I would probably just be ignored by people or even get messages of mods asking me not to constantly make "out of the context" posts.

Yes, that's exactly the tangential point I'm trying to make, if I understand you correctly. If you say "I don't understand why people do X" in a general forum you need to expect "people who do X" to explain and possibly defend themselves.

If I said "hey, this place serves great steak" and you tell me "I'm vegetarian and don't eat meat" I might respond "oh sorry, what about this place that serves an awesome tofu pad thai?". Or if you suggested the place to get an awesome tofu pad thai I would be completely behind that. If you instead respond with "I'm vegetarian and think there's something wrong with you for wanting to eat meat" we're either going to get into an argument about the morality of eating meat and completely miss lunch, or I'm just going to walk away wondering who you are and what you're doing in my house.

Its all depending on the context: If you are at a party and see a group of people, that talk about how they are coming along in beeing a vegetarian, but sometimes regret that they can't eat some of their (former) favourite dishes anymore, would you step into that group and say something like "that really pisses me off" ?

Again, reiterating my original point, there are literally tens of thousands of games being released every year entirely DRM free with communities devoted to helping weed around the particularly good ones, so when I hear someone complain about the games they cannot play it makes it seem as if they are completely disregarding the work that has gone into bringing out all these DRM games.

Thats a view on things that I really can't share, and looks somewhat similiar to my "all or nothing" DRM-Stance, but feels more "global": With me deciding to not eat meat anymore, I'm currently disregarding millions of cooks worldwide that try to serve their customers a delicions, meat containing, meal ?

Again, on the analogy, it's the vegetarian standing in the street complaining that he's starving, how he wishes he could go into Steam Steakhouse and get something to eat, he has all this money he would gladly spend, but he can't because even the salad has a tiny drop of fish sauce and he refuses to accept even that little bit of meat product, so he'll just hunker down in the street and whine and I'm like DUDE, the vegetarian restaurant is RIGHT. THERE. Go in, give them your money, they serve an amazing tofu pad thai! Try the soy bacon! It's not quite as good as the real thing but makes a pretty good BLT. "But I don't want amazing pad thai or SBLT, I want that pasta that everyone is saying is so good, but since I can't have that because of the magic fish sauce they add I'll just sit here in the street and complain about how starved I am".

I don't think that this really fits: The vegetarian in your example is usually well fed, but sometimes, when he is walking down the alley where his (used to be) favourite restaurant is, hes inhaling aroma from the meals he used to eat there, and starts salivating a little.

You install steam, enter your account information, put it into offline mode, log out, copy the old steam directory back over, start it back up, and you've got access to all your games. With some registry work you don't even need to log in once, just go straight into offlien mode. Don't know why crackers haven't abused this. Maybe cracking is more than just about enabling piracy. Some people have complained about offline mode not working after extended periods of time but I can't comment on these people's problem as others (self included) have run offline mode for months at a time just fine. Maybe most of the games that people are interested in pirating have additional DRM beyond what Steam provides and therefore don't work in offline mode, in which case your beef should be with the publisher, not Steam.

The problem is that you are still in need of your account, at least as soon as you reinstall your operating system (due to Windows beeing "kaputt" or new hardware etc.). Does not sound like the "download and do what you want/legally can" approach I experience with buying stuff on gog.com and alike.

If what you're saying is that you need to start just a "DRM conversation" that covers it generically like that to have a topic to start with I get that. What I'm talking about is that I don't really get the mentality to boycott all software that uses any form of DRM, no matter how unlikely it is to be obstructive, or how cheap (or free) the software is. I guess I don't really go for hard-line ideologies in general. I think when criticizing actual software I do think more productive to look at them on an individual basis than just saying you're going to immediately boycott anyone that uses it (when even the definition of what does and doesn't qualify can get hazy)

I can't argue with any logic against that, but maybe I can create an inside on where my "hard-line" position comes from:The problem I personally see is that the gaming market is more or less on a stall, with Steam beeing the number one contender and others trying to chew off some of that market. But in a market that is in that situation and with the biggest and smallest contenders beeing on opposite sides of the "DRM" spectrum, as soon as you start supporting something other than the model you prefer, you practically making the situation for the contender, you value the most, worse.

But I don't deem myself a hardliner (but then again, which hardliner does?), I have no grudge against nor am I angry at people that play/create/etc. games with some form of DRM.

Context matters a lot too, and I think this is really evident in the case of GOG. They're praised for going DRM-free, but is it really fair to say that their market and product are equivalent to everyone else's and a good example of why no one should have any kind of limits on redistribution? These games were mostly out for years, meaning they're either already being pirated, were being pirated, or no one ever cared enough to pirate them. GOG does renew interest for some games, but the point remains - whether or not GOG tries to limit your ability to play the games you're probably still going to be able to get them in the original form w/o DRM or with DRM hacked. The market has a special and fairly unique appeal to people who don't want to or don't know how to pirate these games, and the risk of getting a knock-off GOG instantly posting everything they release, and fooling the general public into thinking it's legitimate, is low (and on the off chance it did happen would be in low enough frequency to be dealt with)

Doesn't this work the other way round too ? With a big part of their catalogue already been pirated to the death, and a lot of people thinking that a game gets "abandonware" as soon as nobody is selling it in a bigger scale anymore, wouldn't they went bancrupt in the first few weeks ? It seems there are a lot of people out there that actually care about wether they aquired their games legally or not. At least for me its hard to believe that all these people are not able to pirate games.I know of at least one, and there is a reason I only use a small fraction of the emulators available for the Pandora, or that I had to pay some douch 10 bucks, to rip my (few) DS games and the NDS Bios, so I could play them on the Pandora.

And there are the newer titles that are available through gog for some months now, though most of them are indie, they are often released the same day as on other plattforms. And even a sparse amount of "newer" AAA titles finds its way on to gog (like "Risen 2"), nowadays.

Plus there's some real overhead in taking old games and adding some kind of extra DRM infrastructure to it, as well as making the servers and all that. And it could get thorny doing that while using GPL tools like DOSBox in your distributions. No one wants to deal with that stuff. If I were doing what they were doing there's no way I'd consider DRM either. I also probably wouldn't turn it into a big selling point - in that regard I'm not sure how much of that is GOG's marketing and how much of it is word of mouth.

Well, it does not look like that hard, to implement at least some kind of copy protection that the average user can't overcome easily, look at how it is done with Megadrive or Amiga compilations - or least not has hard as negotiating with big publishers about DRM free releases. So I guess their main reason for not taking that route was to differentiate them from the rest of the market enough. And if you don't alter the source code of the GPL tools you use, you are on the safe side (I guess ?).But as said before I have no interest in "gloryfying" gog.com to some kind of saviour. As Steam they are a company that saw an opportunity to establish a businessmodel that was/looked unique back then. They're main goal and responsibility is to make money, but wether this all stems from a "pure heart" or not is no interest of mine.

 

[_jr_]

You can't play most of the Steam games anymore then.

Why not? Download the game, and keep a backup of it, just as you would for GoG. In the event that Valve goes tits up and you can't authenticate with the server or you get locked out for some reason, just restore the backup and play in offline mode.

Would be nice if that were actually the case, but it is only true as long as you keep the exact same hardware/software around. The two steam games I have bought in retail by accident were running in offline mode in wine, but after a wine version change they wanted to be online again. I understand why and that is - not coincidentally - exactly why steam is crap and significantly worse than other platforms.


In theory I could probably modify wine to keep the games thinking they were still running on the exact same system, and someone probably has already done that, but that doesn't make steam any less crappy. It would already be much better (thouh I'd still hate the ToS) if I could download an installation archive from my account using either a browser of my choice or - optionally - the steam client and authenticate the installation (which really just needs the transfer of a couple dozen bits) using email, the phone (could be an answering machine), or - optionally - online. (All of these do exist, are not new, and are reasonably easy to implement.)


My complaining currently consists of telling humble bundle I don't like steam (and obviously they got enough such complaints that they improved their presentation to easily identify steam only games/bundles), not buying steam only humble bundles, and allocating 0$ for the steam only games in mixed bundles. (I did some 1$ charity only buys of steam only bundles, but because I never use these steam keys anyway I stopped doing that). But it is obvious that steam is not going away from humble with steam bundles often outselling drm free indie bundles by a factor of 10. I was shortly contemplating how much it would hurt humble doing lots of 0.01$ charity only buys (it seemingly did hurt when they were giving out steam keys below 1$), but I'm not at war.


Still it is important to make it known that steam has several flaws and some of these (both in the ToS and the client) could be fixed with little effort. I prefer DRM free (actually libre), but I'm with exo that not all DRM is created equal. There are real differences and they have to be made known and visible enough to the customer to allow the market to do its magic.

 

[sswam]

Of course we would all prefer open source or DRM free games.  I wish I could apt-get install my games!
However, most game developers and producers prefer that it's not trivial to pirate their games!  and I can understand that.

In principle, I would like to avoid DRM, but in the case of Steam I think there are enough advantages that it outweighs the drawbacks.

Positives of Steam:

• Valve is extremely supportive of gaming on Linux
• can download and install a game at any time on any computer: good download speeds, no need to backup games or take care of discs
• it automatically updates the games
• cross platform windows/mac/linux - buy once play on any platform
• runs well in wine, most windows games I've tried "just work" in steam on wine
• unified "games library", can add other games (although the steam client UI is not that good)
• Steam has some quality control, most games that get on to Steam are not awful
• community features such as reviews, forums, chat, achievements, etc
• Valve has started to release some open-source software
• For many games, can buy DRM-free version and get a steam key thrown in, e.g. on the Humble Store.
• It's easy to gift spare games from bundles

In my opinion Steam's advantages are so great that they almost don't need DRM. People would choose to use Steam anyway.

I trust Valve because they seem to be a good company with good reputation, and it's in their interests to keep their customers happy.

Steam is so successful, I think it's highly unlikely that the company would fail or the service would shut down.
If Steam did shut down, I would feel fully justified to pirate DRM-free or cracked versions of the games I had already bought.

Negatives of Steam (that bother me):

• the "library" in the steam client does not support filtering by "tags" (but I think they are working on it)
• it's not very easy to "export" info about your games library or the steam database to a CSV file
• the steam client itself can be a little slow to start, and asks for passwords a little too often
• it's tricky to share the game library between two or more users on a Linux system
• they're too good at marketing, so I buy too many games!

But overall Steam is a winner for me.

There are some bigger lists than mine here:  http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/what-is-steam-drm