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Comment by baka367 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Gabe here. I basically stopped pirating games once I could add something that I like to my collection during steam sale for a nice discount instead of waiting for days for whatever service to ship it.

I can also return it if I end up not lilinkg it, not like with a physical copy.

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Yes, but price is definitely a part of the service. This one is easy for me: Disney jacks prices by 80%, people decide not to pay for it.

Price is part of it, and paying customers should never have a worse experience than those getting something for free. With DRM, activation severs that can be shut down, exclusivity deals, and fragmentation of marketplaces… paying customers often get a worse experience.

I wish Valve used their weight to cut down on the DRM, online activation and micro-transaction bullshit.

Steam's DRM is optional (edit: by this I mean it's a checkbox that the devs can tick if they want Steam DRM for their game) and extremely lightweight to be fair, and it's been cracked for 2 decades at this point as well.

MTX and Always-Online BS is also down to the individual games, nothing Steam can do about it realistically.

Not many mention it, but it was valve who invented loot boxes and keys (TF2) and season passes (DotA2) they have item market place.

They had original steam drm that people railed against at the begining.

Valve and Gabe are not the second coming people make them to be. They are the least shitty maybe, but man... the bar is really low at this stage.

I'd just like a DRM filter on steam. You can filter out free to play and DLC so they never appear on the store page. It would be great if you could also filter out DRM (even by type if they're feeling motivated).

Then i'd bet if they gave the publisher statistics on how many people never see their game because it contains denuvo or a 3rd party launcher you'd see meanigful change, and if not then at least the store is nicer for the steam customers who care about it.

This is nitpicking, but:

Disney plus doesn't allow casting to my pc to my tv with desktop mirroring. This is DRM crap. I was using that to watch the same movie my children were watching while I was doing some work and I couldn't.

Many others didn't. Steam games are widely pirated.

This is true. I think I stopped pirating games - as soon as I could afford Steam games. Only rarely pirate games to "try" them out - then buy it on Steam. It also helps that they've gotten easy to run on Linux.

This is true, but a pirated game may still lead to a sale eventually, so they're not exclusive categories.

(Even better, there are games that I wouldn't buy on Steam, had I not have prior experience with them.)

imo it's still true bc of drm and vanishing content. Take AC 2. I'm not sure but afaik they turned off their servers or are about to do so and as result the pirated game will give you all the content, compared to og deluxe version that will not be able to get the content from the server. Games are pirated anyways regardless of drm, but drm will affect fps and the content can be vanished once servers are turned off, so you basically still get an inferior service compared to pirates, maybe less inferior compared to the past, but still inferior.

They’re widely pirated by people who can’t afford them.

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