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Comment by pacemkr | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but draw a parallel to computer games. I find myself buying computer games less and less for this exact reason. If I get the game off a torrent, I will have a better experience. Every time I sit down to play a game I actually purchased, I feel cheated: "insert the disk, connect to the internet, and jump through this hoop please." How about the $60 I just payed? Not proof enough? Piracy is the publishers problem; they insist on making it mine.

In fact, I buy more and more Indie games for this reason, even though I don't play them that much. I just like the fact that some still have the balls to offer their work DRM free to ensure a good experience for the paying customer.

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This is true when you buy retail, but I find it hard to begrudge Steam. I can buy a game and have it ready to play within the hour. And when I go to the parents' house, I can install the games I bought onto their computer.

It's not without its issues, but at least Steam offers added value with its DRM; more than you can say for EA or Ubisoft.

I still play games I bought ten years ago. Can you definitively say that the same will be true for content you purchase using Steam? What about 20 years from now? The value of your purchase is now directly tied to the success of the company. In other words, their choice of using DRM is taking actual value away from you. Arguably, a pirate wont have these issues.

I never liked this argument. If you weigh up the disadvantage of the possibility of Steam going under in the future and your games being rendered unplayable with the advantages of instant updating, single social interface and ease of delivery that Steam provides I like to think that it's a good example of the consumer winning.

To me it's a bit like suggesting that you should just photocopy a book rather than buying it because if you buy it the pages may wear out one day.

That will be 10 or 20 years from now, Steam's convenience is today. If it really becomes an issue, some form of piracy will always be available to recover those games.

20 years ago games came on floppies and ran on DOS. If I want to play one today, the legality of my copy is really the least of the hurdles.

Not really. I still play Master of Orion on a regular basis, and it came out in 1991. Same with the original Civilization from 1990.

The reason I can still play these games is because I have a copy of them. That's the point in question here. Do I really have a copy of Portal 2? It's on my computer now, sure. But will I be able to fire it up and reminisce in 2031?

That was true for games that came out prior to mass dialup and then mass broadband. Since then I have an ever increasing stack of games (and other software) that are unplayable as companies decided that keeping the auth servers up was too expensive (or the company folded, the IPs were sold off and the auth servers brought down). Either way, that disc is pretty much a meaningless waste of space now. BTW, anyone want this awesome System Shock 2 coaster?

You realize we're saying the same thing, right?

The sheer mass of games that depend on steam and the number of companies involved do a lot to ensure that people will act to keep it up far more so than single-game servers.

Half-Life was released in 1998. I can still play it--using the product key from my original retail purchase!--via Steam.

Can I definitively say that this will hold for all my current Steam purchases? No, of course not. I can, however, say that Valve has demonstrated the ability to keep giving me access to my games over a period of more than a decade.

In contrast, I have many games on CD that I can't play any more, because they don't work on modern operating systems. Some of these I've repurchased through gog.com, just to get working versions. Some I've repurchased even though they still work, just to get versions that don't require five CDs to install.

Buying a game from Steam is a calculated risk. It comes with advantages: No need to fiddle with discs, automatic patch updates, and access to all my games from any networked computer. It comes with one big disadvantage: The potential of losing access to my games at some unspecified point in the future.

That's a pretty good tradeoff for me. Maybe it isn't for you, and that's okay. When I consider Valve's established track record, however, I believe that the odds of Steam providing my games for long enough are very good--where "long enough" is "until the game ceases to work on newer operating systems and/or becomes available for repurchase for trivial amounts of money".

And if they fail me, there's always piracy. After all, I'm hardly going to feel guilty or morally culpable for resorting to piracy to reacquire access to something that I already own.

I own over 200 games on Steam, from big name titles (Call of Duty) to small indie games and I have never had a problem with DRM.

I bought Portal 2, I got bored of it after the few hours of gameplay it has, and I wanted to let my girlfriend play it (who has just finished Portal 1). Can't do that without giving her my login.

That alone means Steam games are worth perhaps only 30% of retail price to me; but they are not priced like that in the UK. They're usually 10-30% more expensive than e.g. Amazon.

These are the biggest kinds of problems I have with DRM, when it's not something like Securom complaining that I'm running Process Explorer.

And what happens if Steam is offline? Do not reply "it has an offline mode" because you have to enable the offline mode while being online.

And what happens if the power is out in your apartment? Don't reply "my laptop has a battery", because you have to charge the battery when the power is online.

Seriously: what kind of uptime reliability do you demand from a game? The fact that it has an offline mode already puts it far ahead of most cloud-based services. If you don't like Steam for political reasons, that's fine, but this is a very weak line of argumentation.

It's a valid point that's bitten me in the past.

I'll often head off to a remote 3rd world beach for months at a time. I bring a laptop along, and usually stock up on a few games to pass the odd rainy afternoon in the hammock.

For this use case, something like Steam is just crippling. Even if you remember to put your games into "offline" mode before leaving home, it still insists on connecting to the server every month or so just to be sure. I'm in a place with generator power a couple hours a day and no internet. That's an edge case they didn't plan for, and it only hurts people who paid for the game.

Power being out, luckily, is something that can be dealt with by the individual consumer (call power company, go to a neighbor's house, etc). The point here is that if Steam goes offline (through glitch or bankruptcy or whatever reason), there is nothing at all the paying consumer can do, outside of hacking/pirating the game. This is a massive loss of functionality from games past.

And yes, Steam does give new features in return (online backup of your games, unified chat, etc), but there is no technical reason to have to trade the old features for new.

edit: removed possibly inflammatory comment

This is a massive loss of functionality from games past.

Really? Maybe it's my age showing, but most of my "games past" are on 5-14" floppies for DOS, or cassette tapes aimed at the Commodore 6502 architecture.

Portability over time has thus far proven to be largely a myth. If you think that the CD/DVDs you've purchased so far are "buy once, play forever", just you wait...

But in that case, again, it's entirely up to the paying customer. You could have kept your Commodore 6502 to play those games (just like I still have my NES and Sega Genesis) - it's up to you. The actions of the company (and the existence of the company) have nothing to do with whether you can play those games in 2011.

Is that actually true? I can quit and start Steam as often as I want while being offline. The firewall in my dorm is configured in such a way that I don't have access to Steam but I had never a problem starting Steam up in offline mode, even after restarts of my computer.

I think that I can't install new games but I certainly can play the ones I already have.

My internet connection is a little bit sketchy so I have had the problem of steam thinking it is connected to the internet but not connecting to my account. Then it asks for my password again and will not let me log in until I have internet access. But on the whole I don't have a major problem with steam's drm.

Between Steam and iTunes (and equiv for Android) there's not much disk inserting and stuff to be done anymore.

I will say some games are utter shite though with requiring internet - like C&C4 where the game is deliberately married to it and doesn't run without it.

Yeah, I'm not a big gamer but it seems very similar. The simple fact is, a percentage of people will break the law and steal these things, and many of those people take pride in doing it when it's more difficult to accomplish. Meanwhile, the honest people just want to buy the product and enjoy it, and we're constantly penalized, even though the efforts of these initiatives rarely make a big impact on theft.

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