Valve's Steam To Set A Precendence?

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 12:44 pm

I stopped this cool blog article the other day. I thought this would be a great time to share it with everyone seeing as the Half-Life 2 Demo is burning up the Net right now. The blog is by Jupiter Analyst Ian Fogg. He takes a look at the possible ramifications of Steam finally hitting it's stride. Along with this article is a cool forum debate about the subject on the Broadband Reports forums. What I want to know is what you guys think of this and if Epic should consider doing something like Steam in the future?

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 1:23 pm

I hope not. HL2 was certainly worth the hassle but I may avoid some titles that may adopt this model and not put out as high quality games.

Ultimate Fanboy Joined: 18 May 2003 Posts: 508

Spend all day waiting at line at your local games dealer to be one of the first to grab a copy of the latest and greatest title, only to bring it home and not be able to play it because the STEAM equivalent has problems? I think not.

It's not an answer to piracy. It's a hassle to the people who bought the game. I would think twice before buying something using this system.

Novice Spammer Joined: 03 Dec 2003 Posts: 75

Hell, all anti-piracy measures end up being nothing more than an inconvience to the law-abiding consumer.

I have a friend who got ahold of a pirated HL2Full days after it was released Confused

UO Noob Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Posts: 6 Location: Minn, USA

I have not had even a 1% positive experience with Steam - and I had once thought it a cool idea. IF I had known how bad Steam really was before buying HL2, I absolutely would not have bought it. That's how bad it's been. And out of principle I will never buy another Steam-based game ever again - no matter HOW good it is*. MAYBE if they'd have let us play the single-player game offline, maybe I would buy another. But Steam is draconian.

*Seriously - there's so many games out there nowadays, who needs to put up with this kind of thing?

Guest

Should Epic (or anyone else) invent their own version of Steam ?

For the love of god : NO!

(1) the last thing I want is each publisher inventing their own incompatible closed source version of Digital Restriction Management ...
That's both asking for problems and a needless waste of resources.

(2) DRM-solutions should never ever be in the hands of a single corporate entity
It makes it far too easy to add artificial degradation of software ...
ie : *they* will have the power to determine when you should upgrade, regardless of the fact whether you'd want to.
Valve has already shown what that can do to people that want to buy their game.
I certainly wouldn't be suprised if they'd used it to further their own goals ....

(3) MS (and a few others) have been working on something similar for ages (initially known as 'Palladium' later as "'trusted' computing"), which would offer an all in one solution.

(4) DRM leads to Palladium/Trusted computing leads to the end of open-source and independent developed software ...
It's the beginning of the end.

People will find ways to break such systems anyway.
The ones that will suffer are the regular consumers that need to deal with all the bugs caused by such systems.

I think that this is also one of the real reasons piracy/warez has become so big an industry.
It's not a matter of people getting tired of paying a lot of money for short games.

It is IMHO also a matter of people getting tired of having to deal with useless consumer-unfriendly features such as these, which leads them to the no-cd cracks first and the full games copy-'protection' free games second ...