Valve Is Making All Their Games Free To Debian Developers

[Annabel]

booom

I'd rather be living in a world where Steam exists than a DRM-free world where it does not -- it's not worth it for a PC gamer with hundreds and hundreds of games.

wait.... what?

[mmstick]

I thought it's obvious. Inability to backup your games installers / packages means that if your account is closed (or the service closes down) you'll lose an ability to install (and in turn play) any of your games. Now imagine that without thinking, you bought hundreds of them there... Money lost. Here goes your "unobtrusive" DRM.



I'd argue that transparent DRM is even worse than one obviously standing in your way. It's like a hidden camera being more sinister than one which you can actually always see. It's because you feel too comfortable with it. While you shouldn't.

You do realize that Steam has an option to create backups of your games, right? They also have a statement that if they ever went out of business, they would flip the DRM-free switch on... I think you need to spend some time on Steam's FAQ.

[shmerl]

1. Can you install backups without Steam service and Steam client?
2. Why should you trust their promises or even expect Steam to be able to keep those promises in case their service will have problems (like closing down)? Promises don't substitute backups. And Steam is a company. Promises aren't part of your user agreement, so Steam can easily ignore that (even though it won't be decent). But my guess is, that even if the would like not to ignore such promises, they simply can be out of resources to keep their them. If they would go bust, providing backups would be the last thing on their mind.

[PyroDevil]

You do realize that Steam has an option to create backups of your games, right? They also have a statement that if they ever went out of business, they would flip the DRM-free switch on... I think you need to spend some time on Steam's FAQ.

Source?

[BlackStar]

Source?

The Steam FAQ.

[shmerl]

PyroDevil: They did make a promise to provide backups in case the service closes down. Rather informally though. It's not part of any TOS or user agreement. Surely it's not a substitute for backups or something you should rely on if you own an extensive collection of games which can disappear in an instance together with the service.

[Kivada]

I am yet to see a *single* person who would like Steam's DRM. You don't like it, either. You tolerate it. That's something else entirely.

Go ask on irc://irc.freenode.net/steamlug which is a very large group of Linux gamers, see what their opinion of Steam's DRM is. You will find it to be considered quite favorable.

[GreatEmerald]

I modded XCOM a bit, but it's a pain.

I thought XCOM didn't actually have UnrealScript source? And it doesn't seem like it supports mutators, interactions, gametypes or total conversions, either. That's extremely different from Unreal series games, where you can change anything conveniently.

It is when it's so transparent it mas as well not even be there and keeps my games up to date so I'm not doing it manually across dozens of sites.

The DRM doesn't keep your games up to date. It's a different service entirely, and there are several different updaters that allow doing that without any DRM.

I don't think you really understand what Steam's DRM is. I don't tolerate it but genuinely like it. There is no better DRM, and all content providers should drop their DRM and switch to using Steam's DRM only. The world would be a better place. It does what DRM is supposed to do -- prevents illegally copying games -- without enforcing harsh restrictions on the gamers (only requires that you copy your Steam folder from one PC to the next and log into your Steam account). There are no restrictions on how many times you can install your games, nor are there any restrictions that require you to be online all the time. If you were going some place that didn't have Internet, you would simply toggle Steam to offline mode. In the past, I was offline for six months but still played all of my games perfectly fine.

The only people who would dislike Steam are people that want to be able to conveniently copy games to their friends without having to pay a dime or bother with using a torrent site to get cracked games. In the event that Valve is ever to shutdown, they even have a statement that they would flip the DRM-free switch on -- not that they are going out of business any time soon.

The DRM does not limit users in any way, shape, for form, yet actually empowers the users with many useful features. If you add a non-Steam, DRM-free game to Steam, you cannot get access to any of the brilliant features such as achievements, hour tracking, a community hub, Steam cards, quickly creating UPnP-enabled servers/lobbies and broadcast that to a master server list, enables players to check in on what's happening in the server their friends are playing in while giving them a convenient 'join game' option so they don't have to ask them what server they are on, and an API for game developers to implement statistics tracking.

I'd rather be living in a world where Steam exists than a DRM-free world where it does not -- it's not worth it for a PC gamer with hundreds and hundreds of games.

So you like having to wait every time before launching every game? You like having the memory, processor, network overhead of the DRM? You like not being able to play your games when Steam's services go down? You like not being able to play any of your games when your internet unexpectedly goes down? Because that is what the DRM gives you. And nothing else.

Last I checked, it doesn't prevent illegal copying of games. They get cracked either way, and guess what, the pirates don't have to deal with the DRM at all. Also, last I checked, Valve did not guarantee that they would disable DRM if they went out of business ? their statement was "we may or may not provide it", which means that they could if they felt like it, but nobody has a right to ask that of them.

The features you mention have nothing to do with DRM. They could release all of those features separately from the DRM layer (and other services already do so, see things like Impulse Reactor). There is literally no reason to have those features paired with DRM.

The only people who really like DRM are the stock owners of the publishing companies, because they think they get more money out of it (which they don't, quite the opposite).

[shmerl]

Go ask on irc://irc.freenode.net/steamlug which is a very large group of Linux gamers, see what their opinion of Steam's DRM is. You will find it to be considered quite favorable.

On the other hand you can find a lot of Linux users who dislike Steam because of DRM (my guess is, their percentage is higher than Windows users). The point is, it's not "everyone" in either case.

[Kivada]

Steam is alright, if they would implement options to sell or gift games you currently own.

Buy your Steam keys via http://www.greenmangaming.com/ they will allow you to resell your keys if you like. They have sales often and to comparable levels as Valve's own 70+% off sales, sometimes even cheaper then Steam for the same game. They are also scraped by GOL so you can just look at their sales page for just the Linux games.