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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Steam is not DRM-free. It's just gamer-accepted DRM.

Which seems more rooted in the overall ease-of-use and lock-in Steam creates as well as goodwill towards Valve from their games. Steam's terrible - fight them on a transaction, and you could lose your entire library.

You don't even have to fight them on a transaction to lose access to your library. My Steam client (on Mac) is hanging on startup every time and as a result I can't play the games I've bought and paid for. And of course Valve's customer support is doing nothing but sending canned replies.

Steam's DRM is still DRM and has all the downsides that come with it. You're exactly right that it's accepted by gamers due to Valve's cult status (which I honestly don't understand given that I only have mediocre to terrible experiences with their games and services) and the fact that people have bought huge libraries through Steam and have to defend their decisions.

Hsve you tried creating a new clean OS X account? it could be that you have a corrupted preference file, or something similar.

If Steam works on the new account you can start deleting plists.

Had this happen recently. The error logs and console output ended up not being particularly informative, so I downloaded and installed the Steam client again. Sorted out whatever kink was hanging the client at start, and the game library was still intact.

It's accepted because of things like:

- Great selection. Just about any game can be bought on Steam

- Steam sales. Amazing, unprecedented prices for games

- The DRM successfully stays pretty much out of the way for 99% of users

- Centralized game management. I don't want to have twelve different game distribution clients, each with one or two games. I would much rather have just one

- Centralized automatic updates. Less of a big deal today than years ago.

I don't think you lose your library. From what I was told, your account is put into a no-purchase mode where you can play your games but can't purchase any new ones.

They used to ban users altogether, I think they've changed their policy. They also used to ban users if someone gifted them a game and the transaction buying the game was charged back.

It's pretty unreasonable to claim fraud (charge back) if you buy a game and then someone gifts you...

I think the problem was, I could have your account shut down by gifting you a game and charging back the purchase.

Maybe if you're a total jerk about it?... I purchased the full iD collection once for like $90+, and the next day I requested a refund because several of the old titles didn't want to run. Despite the no-refund policy, they reversed the transaction. I've heard more positive stories than negative ones.

Do you seriously not understand the situation ?

It's great that you had a good experience with your particular customer service agent. But what if you request a refund from someone who is feeling unwell that day, had a death in the family or is just feeling like being an asshole. Then you're account could be blocked with limited recourse.

In this day and age there really is limited point to DRM. Everything becomes available on Torrent sites anyway and all it ends up doing is treating legitimate, paying users as second class citizens.

Are you in Europe? Because I'm pretty sure european law forces them to refund you in that case.

Sure, but they ignore the law. Had that with GTA 4, which didn't run fully because the integrated Microsoft-Always-Online-DRM didn't work. Got the "no refund" answer despite having a 8 year old account (at that time) and a not so small, albeit not massively large, library, and without ever having requested a refund before. I'm still angry about that and minimized my purchases there.

Edit: This also means, to the original comment, that Steam does not necessarily make it especially easy to evade SecuROM Hell or other DRM methods, as games on Steam can still have their own protection schemes. It only makes it easier insofar as those are normally marked and games have with Steam only another, better option. Maybe that was meant.

The trouble with laws like that is that they are only worth anything if you have the means to enforce your legal rights under them. If Steam -- or any other supplier or on-line service you use -- is based in one jurisdiction and you're based in another, the cost of actually taking them to court to force compliance could easily be prohibitive.

I'm a little surprised that they haven't been dinged by the card companies yet if reports of whole accounts being blocked based on one chargeback are true. Even Valve are just another retailer to the likes of Visa and Mastercard, and the card services tend to take a very hostile view of merchants who try to evade their obligations under the card service policies if something comes to their attention.

I'm also surprised there haven't been more legal cases considering the implications of SaaS, on-line media library services, software that requires phone-home activation/DRM, and the like. There are obvious ways that such systems/services could provide unfair leverage against consumers in the event of any dispute, and as you mentioned it seems very likely that they would fall foul of the law here in Europe, or at least in several national jurisdictions within Europe. The US tends to give businesses a lot more slack to play with on such matters, though.

it still only takes it happening once to you to lose your titles.

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