Valve's Gabe Newell on DRM | Hacker News Reader

Valve's Gabe Newell on DRM

escapistmagazine.com

21 pointskenshi8 comments

One of the not so obvious problems with Steam (which I love and use regularly) is that all your eggs are in one basket. If, for whatever reason, Steam decides they're going to cut you off then you'll lose access to all of your games.

A real world example of this is a friend who purchased a Steam game which did not work on his computer (unrelatedly due to overzealous DRM). Steam would not refund his purchase so he threatened to file a credit card chargeback and they replied that their policy in the event of a chargeback is to disable all of the users games immediately. Because he had >$300 tied up in Steam he wasn't about to lose it all over a $60 charge.

> Steam would not refund his purchase so he threatened to file a credit card chargeback and they replied that their policy in the event of a chargeback is to disable all of the users games immediately.

How is that not extortion? Valve can obviously disable individual games, so it's not like people could use chargebacks to get free games. It seems like you should at least be allowed some time to make sure the game actually works on your system.

Steam is, after all, a type of DRM (albeit a much less restrictive one than others)

For Valve games, Steam is a type of DRM but it's been fairly consistently so in a literal, rather than some Machiavellian sense. Steam will put the Valve games you have purchased on your new PC. Steam handed out transferable licenses to Valve games for Valve games you already owned when the Orange Box bundle came out. Mac Steam will put Valve games you own PC licenses for on your Mac. If that's what DRM means, more DRM, please.

Steam has fairly easy-to-break DRM, but apparently their strategy is to offer such a good service that people don't want to bother with piracy. It's like the exact opposite of putting non-skippable FBI warnings on DVDs.

From the sounds of it Steam sounds like a fair DRM system. I don't have anything against the principle of DRM itself - as long as it's implemented in a way that is fair to both consumers and content providers.

Most DRM "solutions" are laughably unfair on the customers.

Another good example of DRM - if you can call it that - is the Pragmatic Programmers ebooks. They just include the customer's name in the PDF file and then dont impose any restrictions on the file itself.

What he neglects to mention is many of the games on Steam include DRM of their own, from Securom to Starforce.

Actually the pattern has been that as games are released on steam, the old drm is removed. For instance the Splinter Cell games on steam don't include Starforce.

And here is a video of Gabe's talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XEXLhGir3s

He starts talking about "Entertainment as a service" around the 3 minute 20 mark.

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