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Comment by eslaught | Hacker News Reader

But Steam is a DRM platform, so that's not entirely relevant. They do try really hard to provide value and convenience to the customer, but they haven't stepped back from the DRM position.

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But the DRM is not what's protecting themselves from piracy; it's the quality and convenience of the service. Every Steam game is trivially cracked within hours of release, regardless of the DRM, yet most people still choose to buy the game on Steam.

There's the fact that if you're caught playing pirated games on Steam they can easily close your account and you lose all the games you paid for.

What does "caught playing pirated games on Steam" even mean? Cracked versions of Steam games typically have the Steam portion stripped out, so one would not play them "on Steam" at all.

For example, http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/13/garrys-mod-lures-pirates-to-...

True; they still do a minimum to keep people honest, but all those methods, to my knowledge, are already defeated if you look around. Their stick is making piracy annoying to do, along with the carrot of a long reputation of good games.

Partly because the benefits of Steam (infinite, fast, direct downloads; achievements and leaderboards; cloud game saves; fast patch download; occasional purchase perks such as TF2 hats) far outweigh the negatives (purchases tied to account name; only one account "online" at a time; occasionally weird/buggy "offline" support)

I actually consider everything tired to my account name a plus, as I can log in anywhere and get it. No secondary market, however, is the downside associated with that.

And offline is way better than it used to be. Is it still problematic?

I was a lifelong pirater of games, rarely bought any (though ironically Paradox games were bought, I loved them so much), and Steam turned that around. I don't buy AAA games at full price, which is ridiculously high here in Australia, but Steam has regular sales with significant discounts. I'm not a poor student anymore, plus Steam is much more convenient than pirating. I'll pay a few dollars to avoid spending time finding a torrent, then reading the comments to see if it's good or not, then waiting for the seeders, etc.

Counter-Strike is actually one of those instances where DRM adds value to a product for paying customers. Counter-Strike is a very popular target for cheaters using client hacks like like aimbots and transparent wall hacks, and one of the ways to avoid those players is by hiding behind a pay wall. Every time a cheater is caught and banned, the only way for them to get back in is by paying $10 to re-buy the game. Adding DRM to the client ensures that this pay wall remains intact, meaning that cheaters can ruin my multiplayer experience constantly only if they are willing to inject a fair amount of cash into the system (and very few are).

Old battlenet (before SC2) could disable CD keys in multiplayer, and was a level of DRM I'm ok with. People hack, and having a mechanism to ban them made sense. It doesn't have to come with all of the "single account tied to your purchase" or "3 hardware changes" that we're starting to see.

I'm pretty much OK with CD-keys, and I tolerate Steam because it hasn't had serious problems yet, but anything else I tend to distrust.

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