Steam Removes Game 'Order Of War: Challenge' From User Libraries | Hacker News Reader

Steam Removes Game 'Order Of War: Challenge' From User Libraries

forbes.com

109 pointsmjn118 comments

Another disaster about to happen is Games for Windows Live, a online DRM scheme, used by many games, but in particular GTA IV, which doesn't have much on online features except for the DRM check. It has been announted that GFWL is going to shutdown July 1st. Many developers/publishers have indicated that they are going to remove/replace it, but Rockstar not only hasn't mentioned anything in that sense, it has recently updated the fine print on the steam store for GTA IV adding new clauses:

    Access to special features may require internet connection, may not be available to all users, and may, upon 30 days’ notice, be terminated, modified, or offered under different terms.
    Unauthorized copying, reverse engineering, transmission, public performance, rental, pay for play, or circumvention of copy protection is strictly prohibited
    Partner Requirements: Please check the terms of service of this site before purchasing this software. rockstargames.com/eula

So while Rockstar is washing their hands if their offline, single player, triple-A game stops working in six months, and also prohibiting circumvention of this 'protection', GTA IV is happily being sold by Steam, even today being promoted in their store front page as a daily deal of their winter sale.

I wouldn't be too worried about this. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City both utilized GFWL, and Rocksteady (the developer) simply released a patch that removed the GFWL software. They play just as great as ever.

EDIT: Just kidding. I did not read your comment close enough, clearly. Here's to hoping that Rockstar is as stand-up as Rocksteady, at least.

Thankfully the community still has an active group of modders so even if Rockstar doesn't fix it, we should eventually get a patch.

I think if they're going to argue that routine gameplay is a special feature, they're going to be on a loser when the courts and/or trading standards people get hold of them. At least in the UK, that term seems to be clearly unfair and therefore unlikely to stand up if customers start demanding compensation.

There is a broader issue here than just gaming, too. Many high-end applications now have obnoxious DRM/copy protection schemes that require varying levels of Internet connectivity to work.

I have asked a reseller about how this operates if the original developer of the $X,000/seat software my business relies on goes under, and they basically laughed my question off, saying that would never happen. I have also, in an entirely different context, had some knowledge of legal actions involving that same developer, and I don't share the reseller's faith in their guaranteed longevity.

There have been occasional court cases on these matters, and at least in Europe the courts mostly seem to have taken the view that if it looks like a purchase (for example, if there was a reasonable expectation that once money changed hands the new holder of the software would be able to use it indefinitely) then it must be respected as such.

Still, I wonder at what point primary legislation is going to become necessary. Copyright reform has been vigorously opposed by Big Media and mostly successfully so far, but when you start hitting large numbers of customers in the wallet and they can't just pirate their way out of it and get away with it any more, sooner or later I suspect something has to give.

In enterprise (and academic) settings a traditional approach has been to let the client run the license server. That's how Matlab works, for example: a network-licensed copy won't start up unless it can "phone home", but typically it phones home to the license server run by the client, on the client's network, not to centralized DRM servers run by the vendor. I know for consumer software things are slowly moving towards centralized-DRM as the norm, but I thought for enterprise applications this kind of self-hosted license server was still the norm. Maybe not?

I know for consumer software things are slowly moving towards centralized-DRM as the norm, but I thought for enterprise applications this kind of self-hosted license server was still the norm. Maybe not?

It seems to depend on the application/software developer. Just about everything serious I've worked with in recent years defaults to needing some sort of phone-home activation in the first instance. Some certainly have alternative options, usually at a significant but not off-the-chart price premium, to have a floating licence server on your own network so you can have up to N machines running at once but it doesn't have to be the same N all the time. And of course various brands are trying to push some popular software suites towards a full-on subscription model anyway: Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite come to mind.

Unfortunately, my businesses currently fall into an awkward middle ground, shared by many start-ups and probably freelancers/contractors/small agencies as well, where you're not really into volume licensing or floating licence server territory, but you still rely on heavyweight professional software to get things done. Basically, we have none of the protections of a consumer because we're operating as a business, but we also lack the natural bargaining power and the in-house legal department a larger business would have.

Sadly, despite recommendations even from a formal review within the legal profession, neither our previous government nor the current one seem keen on fixing this. That leaves many of us in a permanent position of vulnerability to these kinds of Internet-based DRM schemes, where the failure of a key software supplier could quite literally bring down our entire company overnight, even though we have already completely paid for all the software we need. And yes, as a business owner, that does scare the $#!% out of me.

Theoretically, the bitcoin ledger could be used as a decentralized phone-home.

Or say any other type of crypto-ledger that is not participating in the currently fadish pump-n-dump bitcoin schemes. And I post this comment knowing I will suffer the down-vote rage of bitcoiners.

The only possible reasonable response to this well-meaning comment is to point out that you spell it "faddish".

That's why enterprise customers demand source code escrow clauses, for protection against that same scenario.

In theory, if the reseller adopts a 'that will never happen' attitude, then they should be happy to commit to giving you a full refund if the developer does go out of business. After all, if they think it won't happen, what have they got to fear about it?

In practice, good luck getting any guarantee, promise or actual refund!

We actually took legal advice on this at one point, and the bottom line was that we could well have a claim against the reseller (as they were the other party in the actual sale contract) if something unfortunate happened, but that's only worth anything if the reseller themselves is still around. Our major concern here is that software we've paid for that might otherwise be useful indefinitely could be rendered useless because some external system ceased to be available.

This being the case, relying on the ability to sue anyone and get meaningful compensation after the fact seems unwise. Clearly some sort of legal obligation for those selling the software to make arrangements in advance to unlock everything if they go under would be a much more useful guarantee for customers. It would suffice to have a version of the software sold that is identical except for removing all copy protection logic, and require that this be provided to a third party escrow service to be released automatically in the even that the software developer or their agent/successor is no longer providing the necessary services to support that copy protection system.

One does not usually go out of business with enough cash reserves to refund your customers. That being said, they should offer some sort of self-hosted open-source promise: if we go out of business, we will release the code for our former customers to maintain.

I think the grandfather comment implied that the reseller (not the bankrupted editor) should refund the client ;)

Copyright reform has been vigorously opposed by Big Media and mostly successfully so far

Actually no. Big Media is very much in favour of copyright reform (such as extending the period of copyright) if it benefits them. They are very opposed to copyright reform that benefits the customer/little guy.

That's not "reform", that's "keep everything the same except the numbers".

But reducing copyright term to (say) 20 years would be "just changing a number", but I'd regard it as a reform.

Apparently GabeN commented on the forum a couple of years back that they would remove the DRM if Valve goes under & that they tested the patching already. I can't seem to find a good source for that though.

They are only able to remove the DRM on their own games (which is what he was surely talking about). The article is about a game that is not made by Valve but merely distributed via Valve's distribution channel.

No I meant removing the DRM that is Steam. i.e. They'd effectively need to enable a permanent offline mode.

Also: http://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg

For many games on Steam, Steamworks is the only DRM. Valve is technically (though probably not legally, unless there a provision for this in whatever contract they offer) capable of disabling this DRM.

"Still, I wonder at what point primary legislation is going to become necessary."

Could end up with a market based solution, once the MBAs know that paying more than three digits for business critical single source software that could disappear at any time is insane, which the techies already know, the market for extremely highly priced software will simply dry up and blow away in the breeze. This seems like a fairly inevitable outcome, which should be considered by devs and businesspeople thinking about entering that market space today. There's a "use by" date on that business model and once its time is up, its gone.

This applies to software as a service, too.

More than likely any .gov changes would be purchased by businesses currently in the dying legacy business model to support their obsolete business model, not to help out the general public. Think about it... when was the last time .gov did anything of any significance to help the general public, anyway?

yeah, ask the guy in 2007 if Lehman Brothers would go bankrupt next year, he would think you escaped mental clinic.

The article claims incorrectly that the game had 18 single-player missions. The FAQ linked from the article is for the game "Order of War". "Order of War: Challenge" is a completely separate, multi-player-only game that had its servers shut down and was removed from Steam. The original "Order of War" is still available (http://store.steampowered.com/app/34600/).

In addition, the "Challenge" add-on was given free to those who bought the original game.

This is a complete non-issue as far as Steam is concerned (the complaint about publishers shutting down multi-player servers is certainly valid). There is nothing that you could do with the game even if you still had it in your Steam library.

The issue at hand is that Steam removed something from the users library. Usually people consider anything on his computer to be his property, no matter at what cost it was purchased. While I don't know whether that was as claimed the first instance of content removal or whether under the terms of service any content is only leased it is certainly a wake up call. It is especially concerning if you bought your games for a very similar price as at a store.

So, in short, the issue is that Steam apparently has the right to remove content from their clients' libraries.

If you were Valve, what would you do? Without the servers, the game is completely useless, and they probably recognized that fact. Being that this is the first time in 9+ years that they have done this, and only in this particular circumstance where--beyond their control--a game is rendered disabled, I believe there is not much reason to fear them removing your games at random.

I'm confused, does the change remove the game's listing from Steam when not installed, remove only the listing if it is installed, or silently uninstall it if it is installed?

The first is reasonable, the second is iffy and would more likely be a technical limitation than a explicit choice on Valve's part, the third scenario is the problematic one.

I don't know this game, but if for example Blizzard would shut down the World of Warcraft servers you could still play it on private servers. Same for a lot of other MMOs that do not have their official server anymore like Star Wars Galaxies and Earth & Beyond. People can still play these on private and / or emulated servers.

Don't you need some kind of a cracked version of the game for that? I don't know if you can play on private servers with a Steam version of a game anyway.

It probably depends on the game and how they store server information. For instance, if they hostname for the server that broadcasts available game servers is sitting in a .ini file, you don't need a crack. If it was a hardcoded string in the binary, then you would. Of course some games may also employ other mechanisms to restrict what/where you can connect to, but in a lot of cases I've seen it is a matter of pointing to an IP with a server running.

As an example, Counter Strike: Source stored the servers in a human readable file and you could add alternative servers in the config file without a problem.

And where do you get the software that runs on the servers?

Most server software is emulated but I suspect there might be instances of leaked server software.

In 2007, at least, you could play WoW on a private server merely by changing your config file to point at that server; no crack was necessary. It probably was not worth Blizzard's time to shut down this configurability.

private servers on WoW are illegal, and you might have to downgrade to be able to join one.

Illegal? What law is being broken?

Blizzard actively shuts down people that reverse engineer their servers[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

His point is that it's a EULA violation, not a criminal one.

It is a non issue for Steam, as such they have no ground to remove the game from users library.

I just checked and steam lets me re-install it if I want to.

Maybe they were requested to remove it by Square Enix?

It doesn't matter, because Square Enix doesn't own the games that were in players' libraries.

I think the important point missing from that is that Challenges was a free multiplayer add-on given to the owners of the base game. That really changes the nature of them removing the game from user libraries from they removed software that users paid for to they removed a free program that's useless now.

Those circumstances does make the removal less controversial. However the better course of action for Square Enix would be to release the server software and let people host their own servers. Why destroy the whole community and prevent people from playing your game?

To sell the new game, of course.

Nothing ruins future sales like lack of demand due to past sales.

Killing of a living active game is surely bad PR, no? Badwill ruins future sales too.

You're still missing the point that Steam is "reaching into people's systems" and removing programs.

That said, it's done all the time via apt-get or windows update or other program updates. People think that this rises to a new level though, and given the fact that Steam users are younger, tech-saavy, and more vocal it's no wonder that it's raising a stink.

Is it? In Steam, one's "Library" is the list of games you have access to, including games that aren't installed on the system. Has anyone had the game silently uninstalled if they already had it on their system? If the listing is removed even if the game is installed, can the game be launched by running the executable directly?

Always on DRM is also a threat to the preservation of artistic works for future generations. Folks still play the early Civilization and Sim City titles even after all these years.

All server-based MMOs will be canceled sooner or later. Dead sites will be preserved by the Internet Archive, but dead MMOs will be known for future generations only in Let's plays and secondary sources. Relevant article, "MMO graveyard": http://mmohuts.com/editorials/mmo-graveyard

Which, interestingly, is why one of the head developers who worked on Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (the MMO, that was quite enjoyable) wants the debug dev version cleaned up and release: It removed all the online content, and just let you take a character through the entire world, all offline. He wants to do that, as a way of preserving the world. It might not have the content, but its something, and an interesting take on it!

Got a link? That sounds interesting.

Some googling turned up his blog post: http://shinytoys.org/blog/war-in-a-bottle

I play a server-based MMO that effectively ceased to exist over a decade ago. Third-party reimplementations of many MMO servers are thriving.

> I play a server-based MMO that effectively ceased to exist over a decade ago.

Second Age, In Por Ylem or Forever? :P

…and Asteroids and Pacman via MAME and other emulators. Those are even older.

I recently purchased a game from Steam (Max Payne 3) and after I download the full 30 gig game it tells me "cannot connect to key server". After several emails with their support they inform me that Steam doesn't have enough CD keys, yet they continue selling the game on their website. It has been about a week now and I still cannot even play this game.

Plus, not only does that require a Steam account but you also have to have a Rockstar account. What has PC gaming become?

If you want to enjoy PC gaming buy from gog.com, I think that's the only guarantee that it won't have some crap DRM. If you want to play recent titles you're out of luck...

Also Humble Bundle.

Humble ->Indie<- Bundle. There are Humble Bundles with DRM.

I keep a library of cracks for games that I own on Steam, it's one way to ensure I have access to what I bought.

It's looking like it will be needed for lots of GFWL games now, too.

Bought Far Cry 3 and it does the same. When you launch the game on Steam it installs UPlay which requires you to have a UPlay account as well. With an account you can launch the game from Uplay.

I bought it on sale months ago, booted it up and was told I had to sign up for this Rockstar account and haven't got passed that yet. I'm sure it's a wonderful game.

I've only played single player but it's a pretty decent game, lots of cutsceens and loading screens though.

No refunds? Really?!?

The guy who sold me my bong has a better fucking return policy than that.

The main appeal of the game was apparently the multi-player, which isn't going to be that great if nobody bought the thing. You can't expect a refund for this type of purchase from either Steam or the studio that developed it, that is ridiculous. They shouldn't have removed it from people's libraries though, and the developer should have released one last patch that disabled the DRM and let you run your own server.

Wrong link. Order of War still works, it was multiplayer version "Order of War: Challenge" that was shutdown. It was not available for sale since April, and it was removed from Steam in September.

http://www.steamprices.com/us/app/34670/order-of-war-challen...

Ah! Thanks for the correction.

Why can't people expect a refund? Why is that a ridiculous expectation?

Maybe because the people who bought it early on have already played it and derived significant value from it? It doesn't seem right to me that they get all their money back when presumably most of them weren't playing it any more.

I don't agree with the kind of always-on DRM that's led to this, but I don't think full refunds for everyone is a reasonable solution either.

Would you expect a refund for the cost of WoW when they shut down their servers in 2032? Of course not. It was an online game. You played it for years, and it's now over. You don't get take-backs.

Because it's in the contract that you agreed to upon purchasing. The only thing you can do is no longer agree to those types of contracts.

You can not sign away all rights on purchase, or otherwise scam artists would have a much easier time.

Maybe not all rights, but pretty close. This is the norm these days. People will pay for temporary use of music, movies, tv shows, and video games until some old guys in a skyscraper somewhere decide otherwise.

Not really the same. Buying a subscription to a service carries a different expectation vis-a-vis the payment of a lump sum for the product.

So its not a ridiculous expectation, since it had to be explicitly included in the contract.

Every consumer protection law in existence just called and asked for their money back. Those laws exist precisely to unambiguously defeat the kind of argument you're making.

That contract doesn't have legal weight in many jurisdictions.

Running your server is probably too much to ask for since their server is likely integrated ito many of their other systems and the code is probably something they want to keep out of public hands BUT I like your idea of one last patch for DRM free version. Online will no longer work but at least single player would.

As with WoW, Ultima Online and various other MMO's, unauthorized servers tend to be written from scratch using an analysis of incoming and outgoing client/server traffic. Nobody would expect Square Enix to release their server software, just simply to disable the DRM so that others can play the game and attempt to write their own server software if they choose.

That's amazing. I agree that would be a fair outcome with no losers in the deal.

Bongs can't be returned for health and safety reasons.

I would argue that "no returns" is a lot more lenient than someone stealing the stuff you bought from them and not giving you a refund...

While "Order of War: Challenge" might have been sold separately at some point (I'm not sure), I think that most players (like me) were those who bought the original "Order of War" and got "Order of War: Challenge" as a free add-on.

Just go to GoG.com they offer refunds AND they have a wide selection of old and indie games.

GOG does have a few games with DRM even though they advertise as 100% DRM free. They have also sold games that phone home, although I don't think they have sold any that have phone home DRM. They are more reliable than anywhere else I know of, but do have some amount of false advertising.

I was answering parent's claim for refund policy. I haven't really encountered a game with DRM yet.

EDIT: Yeah, it seems some multiplayer games need serial keys to play multiplayer on their servers. You can't blame GoG for providing serial to multiplayer mode of a game. Single player should work without serial though.

The benefits it brings (no serial typing) compared with faults (overloading servers and allowing bots) and costs (huge to re-implement server from scratch), just make it virtually impossible.

The response to these news are surprisingly meek, but I guess we can attribute that to the game in question not having a large player base. I for one think this behaviour is unacceptable and it destroys gaming as an industry. In 20 years will the teenagers/kids of today have no way of playing the games they grew up with simply because the servers have been turned off?

Patching DRM out of the game and releasing server software to allow people to host their own servers should be industry standard in these cases. This is must surely be the result of politics at a much higher level than the studio, I don't think any studio likes to see their game just disappear of the surface of the earth just like that; after all that would be the equivalent of murdering ones child.

And people can't wait until they get OS-level DRM like in Windows 8 and Chromebooks, just to play Netflix in "HTML5", even though it plays just fine now in Silverlight, and TPM in their hardware?

I don't think they really know what they're asking for. Once the Pandora's box is open, you can't put the evil back inside. You'll regret ever wanting that "safety" or "convenience" feature, when it will make your computer a lot less safe (from the vendors themselves, government censorship, etc) and a lot less convenient (when everything you want to use has frustrating OS-level DRM enabled).

Wake up and smell the coffee. If it can be abused, it will be abused.

The root problem was them shutting it down because the game client hit their servers and they were shutting them down. Running servers is costly. But game developers should do an update or at least provide a way to turn off multiplayer or allow others to run servers when the game is finished. There isn't really a system for this yet but there needs to be, multiplayer support ends for most games eventually. The good ones allow it to live on in communities if they so desire. And killing single player missions for DRM sake highlights the problem. Good networking middleware and cloud services for this could solve the problem rather than every game company remaking this over and over and having to deal with this.

There's a pretty decent system. Self hosted game servers, and a patch to disable the DRM once the official servers go belly under. Unfortunately few developers care enough about their users to do such.

It's not so simple as "few developers care enough". Do you seriously think that there are a signficant number of game developers who just turn around and say "fuck them, they're only our customers anyway"?

It generally comes down to restrictions placed by the publisher. Due to agreements with the publisher[1], the developing company can't just release a patch to disable DRM whenever they want - they are contractually obligated to not release anything without publisher approval. And publishers are very, very reluctant to approve disabling DRM.

[1] Source: contacts and contract work in the industry, and got to deal with the second-hand effects of publisher restrictions myself.

We had similar problem: InstallShield is very expensive software. The company which sells it was renamed, and they changed domain name together with license activation server...

So we could no longer activate software we bought. Suggested solution was to buy new version. Pretty bad since we could not make new build without this software.

Luckily for us we had everything virtualized already (not so common a few years ago).

Hah, nice suggested solution there. I've been wondering why NSIS isn't more popular, it was fantastic when I was using it, very light, fast and extensible.

NSIS is light years ahead of InstallShield. But all sucks compared to APT or other Linux installation systems.

The article does not make clear if the single player aspects of the game were running on the now defunct servers or not. There's a pretty big difference in "DRM" and "requires remote hardware running server code".

the article said the game had always-on drm, even for singe player game. The company who made the game shutdown the servers, making it impossible to play either multi- or singleplayer, so valve simply removed a non-functional game from the library

I don't think the issue is Steam deleting the game so much, since this game had always on DRM and the servers were going down. It makes sense to delete the game rather than dleaving an inoperable game around. The issue is more the always on DRM and the idea that people pay for a game upfront that requires the servers to be running.

It would make more sense if a game that you buy will always run to some extent without servers, or else, if servers are required, then don't charge upfront, and pay for the game with subscriptions that can maintain the servers.

editors should be required to provide a patch so that the solo part of the game can still be played after the editor consider that the game is no longer and decides to shut down the server.

I'm pretty sure their EULA mentions that you agree to such terms, so there is not much buyers can legally do.

The simple solution is to do a quick scan of the EULA( tools to help exists ) of the next game you would like to play for a longer period to and then if the it includes these ridiculous terms simply don't buy it.

Even if it's included in EULA, it doesn't mean that this would be allowed in a lot of jurisdictions. A lot of clauses from most EULA are not applicable everywhere.

I think there'd be a case in most european countries.

My point was that instead of getting screwed, you should not buy the game, this way you hurt them them most.

If they break some local laws what are you, the buyer, going to do really.

> If they break some local laws what are you, the buyer, going to do really.

Sue the retailer?

What would you do if you bought a car, and the car seller broke several laws by giving you a lemon? Give up because its not manufactured in your country, or go after the store who sold it to you?

Games aren't some fungible commodity you can shop around for. If you want to play that game, what else can you do?

A single game isn't a commodity, but entertainment is. There is an almost unlimited amount of entertainment available for only a handful of dollars.

Games are art. If you don't like the policies of the Louvre, do you go to the Musee d'Orsay instead and have the same experience? Not if you know anything about art.

Keep your integrity.

The contractual legality of and superceding of consumer rights by videogame EULAs seems to vary on a country by country basis, if not province by province/state by state.

And this is why I'll never feel comfortable paying for a full priced game from a digital download. Until they can sell it to me in a digital format that allows me to own it and have complete control over it in whatever way that I want I will either not play the game, pirate the game, or get a boxed copy.

Anyone got original license for that game? Did it include clause that could have allowed for anything like that?

This case is clearly SquareEnix's fault and not Valve's. When are gamers going to finally wake up and start voting with their dollars against DRM? This couldn't happen in a market where the consumer doesn't just swallow whatever shit is flung their way.

Aren't you allowed to circumvent DRM for certain fair use cases? Certainly disabling DRM on the single-player parts would fall under that, wouldn't it? Valve would earn respect back by releasing a crack/replacement DRM that uses Steam.

LOL... steam and all their holier than thou blog posts about being open and better than Microsoft - That was never anything more than a rant about the Windows 8 built in app market that they were afraid would undercut their profits and dominance (a scheme against competition). They are neither open nor respect rights of ownership. AFAIK, Microsoft themselves have never forcefully removed an app from Windows in this manner.

Did you even read the article? The game was to become literally unplayable because its developers (Square Enix) decided to pull the plug on the DRM and multiplayer servers instead of handing out a DRM-disabling patch.

So you're justifying Steam deleting the game, even though you won't come out and say it.

Microsoft certainly did remove apps from Windows even after they are purchased. They had Crackdown on WP7 as a tower defense game. They shut down the servers and the game disappeared, never to be seen again. Really pissed me off. They also refused to update their Texas Hold'em game, so when I moved to WP8, the game I had purchased disappeared.

FYI, When someone says "Windows" they generally are talking about a PC desktop. Not a phone version.

I am guessing that you probably already know this, but want to push any angle for a rebuttal.

I am referring to Windows 8 specifically (yes the PC version) because this is the version that Steam was vying as evil.

Comparing Steam to Windows is invalid to begin with. The only valid comparison is comparing Steam to a similar Microsoft offering. The Windows 8 marketplace and the Windows Phone marketplace are not dissimilar, so my point remains valid. Microsoft cannot remove applications from Windows because they do not control the distribution. They can and have removed apps from their controlled distribution channels which are comparable with Steam (which is what Valve considers their competition). Valve isn't worried about Windows 8 desktop, they're worried about Windows Marketplace. Your attempted comparison is like saying Netflix has never broken into your house and stolen your DVDs. They can't do that because that's not a distribution channel they control. They can and have removed movies from their own distribution channel.

If you want to argue Windows desktop versus Steam, though, Microsoft does control Windows Defender anti-virus which can force-remove applications or prevent them from running. In that sense, Microsoft surely can deny you access to application you've purchased. Your comparison is still uniquely inappropriate, though.

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