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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

I love GoG. They have one of the best online shopping experiences I have seen yet. And they are the antithesis to Steam: No nagging ads every time I start a game, no pointless “updates” to the client (just so it can nag with even more ads), no DRM. GoG knows how to win customers with goodies instead of forcing crap on them, like Steam does. Seriously, I only ever buy games on Steam if I cannot get them anywhere else. Even Apple's AppStore sucks less than Steam (and it's not easy to suck more than the AppStore).

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Do you mean the pop-up ads when you start Steam? You can turn those off under Settings->Interface->Notify me.

Thanks, I hadn't found that yet. Then again, I didn't look that hard, either...

Also they add a lot of cool features to the updates, especially if you are in the beta program. They just recently added the ability to cap the download rate and allow for downloading while playing a game, both really great features. I'm not anti-DRM, I'm just anti-BAD-DRM (ubisoft comes to mind.) Steam's is a perfectly effective level of DRM for me.

> I'm not anti-DRM, I'm just anti-BAD-DRM

This sounds like a faulty logic to me. Being anti DRM on the basis of comfort seriously misses the point. Because DRM can't be good. It can be comfortable enough to ignore though, and that's actually a problem.

How is that faulty logic?

You can take the stance that DRM is a good thing if it's protecting creators' rights and doesn't get in the way of consumers using the product. I'd argue that most creators take this stance, because they want to get paid for the stuff they made so they can turn around and make more stuff.

Or you can take the stance that "DRM can't be good", because reasons. This is the stance that a lot of people take who don't create (or who aren't paying the bills by creating).

Personally I'm somewhere in the middle, but I see the validity of both sides. Creators want to get paid, and consumers don't want to be told how/when to use the things they own. Being anti-BAD-DRM is taking that middle ground, and in terms of Steam they're doing it pretty well.

The problem with such approach is that it ignores the root of the issue - the unethical nature of DRM.

I.e. to draw an analogy, imagine someone objecting to the police state methodology not on the grounds that it's evil and abusive, but on the grounds of discomfort of such invasion. By that logic, if police state would employ covert methods, that would be acceptable since it doesn't disturb one's comfort.

I think such logic is pretty flawed.

> you can take the stance that "DRM can't be good", because reasons. This is the stance that a lot of people take who don't create

No, it's the stance of anyone with common sense. Those who create including.

Examples:

* http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blog...

* http://brutalgamer.com/2012/03/09/cd-project-red-drm-no-long...

* http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/6/1/will-the-real-pi...

If you don't believe DRM to be unethical, then surely it's perfectly consistent? You're argument seems to require DRM to be unethical a priori

No, even if one assumes DRM not to be unethical, one can observe that DRM is nonsensical from the practical standpoint. I.e. because not only it doesn't reduce piracy while punishing only legitimate users, it even induces piracy! (See second and third links above).

Does it, though? Even if you can't eliminate something, making it prohibitively difficult has an impact. In my younger days, at LAN parties where people could just pass around the installer of a game almost no one bought most of the games. As it became more and more difficult to find reliable sources of cracks/installers, the ratio of people deciding to purchase rather than put up with the hassle increased. Even if you CAN get a free version if you try hard enough, the level of trying required will cause more and more people to find it worth the purchase.

> Even if you can't eliminate something, making it prohibitively difficult has an impact.

Technically adept pirates are actually encouraged by the mere presence of DRM, since they see breaking it as a sport. That happens fairly quickly, and the rest of the pirates never deal with it again.

So, there is an impact, just not the one you'd probably expect. Firstly, pirates are encouraged to pirate the material even if they don't care about the contents. I.e. DRM boosts piracy. Secondly, legitimate users are punished with this DRM degrading the quality of the product for them (while pirates enjoy the full quality, DRM-free pirated version). DRM is abysmally dumb from any common sense perspective of doing business.

> Even if you CAN get a free version if you try hard enough, the level of trying required will cause more and more people to find it worth the purchase.

Hard part of breaking it can be done by one pirate. The rest will use the DRM stripped version, nothing hard in it anymore.

I linked a few articles above where the point of DRM actually encouraging piracy is discussed. If you missed that, go through them:

* http://brutalgamer.com/2012/03/09/cd-project-red-drm-no-long...

* http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/6/1/will-the-real-pi...

Another impact of DRM is certain amount of users who would simply avoid that product because they don't want to deal with any DRM to begin with.

If it was beneficial for a company's bottom line to abandon DRM they would do it, so why don't they?

Does DRM boost piracy, are there actual statistics for this, those links seem short on facts? World of Goo was heavily pirated.

One thing piracy has boosted is the explosion of the freemium model.

> Does DRM boost piracy, are there actual statistics for this, those links seem short on facts?

Those links explore the psychology of piracy, and note that DRM can boost it. Since pirates can be not interested in the material itself, but interested in breaking DRM for sport. Producing numbers is not an easy thing here, since there is no definitive way to count this globally (a concrete factual example was shown by CDPR though with their Witcher game).

However that's not even the main point. Even if DRM doesn't boost piracy significantly, the main issue here is that doesn't deter it, while on the other hand it punishes paying customers.

> If it was beneficial for a company's bottom line to abandon DRM they would do it, so why don't they?

Several possible reasons, none of them good and valid though. I listed them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070346

Probably #1 (intertia / lack of common sense) is the most common.

See what Cory Doctorow writes about authors actually losing opportunities to gain money because of publishers stupid insistence on DRM:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blog...

> You can take the stance that DRM is a good thing if it's protecting creators' rights and doesn't get in the way of consumers using the product.

You could, but there's a problem with that. Because DRM by nature can neither operate without getting in the way of consumers using the product, nor effectively protect creator's rights.

DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad, not as a moral proposition (though it may be that, too), but simply at what it is nominally intended to do.

> DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad, not as a moral proposition (though it may be that, too), but simply at what it is nominally intended to do.

Which often reflects the fact that DRM is used for completely other purposes. None of them good.

It reflects the fact that DRM is a fundamentally incoherent concept -- you can't provide data and all the tools for legitimate users to access it freely and still deny illegitimate uses of the data.

What I meant to say is, that often the real reasons behind using DRM are different from the stated ones (i.e. preventing piracy). And all of those reasons are bad. They usually are some of these:

1. Lack of common sense or just "following the herd" (Lysenkoism).

2. Covering one's incompetence. (Poor sales are blamed on piracy, and DRM is used as a demonstration that they are "doing something about it").

3. Controlling technology progress and direction (like standards poisoning and so on).

And etc.

My rebuttal to that is: Steam (which is appropriate because that's what got this discussion started in parent comments)

I've been a Steam user for 8ish years now, and it's never once gotten in the way of me playing games. The only downside that I can see is that you can't gift old games to friends (or sell them), and they're very upfront about that fact from day 1. They just recently made a change that allows you to share game libraries with friends/family actually, so that small gripe is going away.

It's hard to have a real discussion about DRM because it's like religion to a lot of people, and many are quick to dismiss DRM because it's not perfect. Saying "DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad...but simply at what it is nominally intended to do" isn't saying that DRM as a concept is bad, but that the past/present implementations have been bad. Dismissing the idea because a few implementations have failed doesn't seem very hackerish :)

The core of DRM is: Creators should be paid for the stuff they create, by the consumers of their stuff. There have been plenty of misguided attempts at this, for sure, but I think you'd have a hard time defending the counter position (especially if you want to have a morality discussion RE: DRM and not just a conceptual one)

> The core of DRM is: Creators should be paid for the stuff they create, by the consumers of their stuff.

That's not the core idea, while it's often presented as such. The core idea is "we need to control consumers and limit what they can do with their digital goods, lest some piracy happens". That's why such idea is flawed from the beginning.

Saying that it failed because implementation wasn't perfect and more policing will help to solve the issue reminds me the story of the Watchbird: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

Definitely read the whole thing if you didn't yet. What's hackish is not to be eager to implement even more draconian overreaching preemptive policing, but to understand from the start that it's a defective and unacceptable idea.

Because DRM can't be good.

This is a philosophical position, not an infallible universal truth.

The problem with DRM, in general, boiled down to it's most salient point, is that it destroys value. It gets in your way, treats you like a criminal, and generally makes your life miserable so the people who made the attached product can feel like they're flipping off those eeeevul pirates.

Every system I can think of meets that definition, with one exception: Steam.

What's the benefit to me of SecuRom? There isn't one.

What't the benefit to me of Steam? I get all my games in one place, my save files synchronized across an unlimited number of machines, user-generated DLC automatically brought in (and synchronized the same way), in-home streaming, library sharing, the whole social network, in game overlay providing same and web access, some unheard-of-elsewhere sales, and quite a lot more.

What's more, if despite all of that you're still not interested and would prefer to go back to the dark ages, Steamworks is trivially defeated with an emulator program.

> This is a philosophical position, not an infallible universal truth.

Not more than the claim that police state is evil. We aren't talking about moral relativity here however.

> The problem with DRM, in general, boiled down to it's most salient point, is that it destroys value.

Somehow ethical problems of DRM you try to devalue, while practical problems of DRM (like being infective against piracy and punishing legitimate users) you promote as the main issue with it. I don't think that's proper. However both are enough of a reason to never use DRM.

> What't the benefit to me of Steam? I get all my games in one place, my save files synchronized across an unlimited number of machines

Benefits of Steam have nothing to do with it having DRM. They could all be provided in a DRM-free fashion. Yet they chose not to.

We are talking about why your moral stance should be applicable to me, complete with comparisons to a police state (of all things..)

You haven't convinced me yet.

The fact that you feel there are ethical problems is again a philosophical position.

The premise of DRM is the same as police state ideas, that doesn't require convincing, it's the very definition of it. Whether you find it acceptable or unethical is another question however.

See also updates above about other points.

You'll forgive me for regarding your implication that "Log in to play your games" is somehow equivalent to a police state, as utter nonsense.

If that wasn't clear, here is a simple explanation.

DRM is built on the presumption of guilt and overreaching preemptive policing. These are quite standard features of some abusive police state ideology. It was well spelled out by one Sony exec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit#Background

> "The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."

Concise and to the point. That's what DRM is about. I.e. assuming everyone potentially criminal, and policing everyone preemptively in abusive fashion which violates one's privacy (because DRM is found in your private digital space). This core idea applies to any DRM by its definition.

I hope this makes the analogy with police state approach more clear.

I think what you mean is that DRM is like the police, and bad DRM is like a police state. The police are there to enforce what you can and cannot do. Do they stop 100% of people? No. Bad people can get away with bad things that good people can't, just like pirates can break pretty much any DRM system. But in a normally functioning society, good (normal) people don't really notice that the police are there. They understand the rules and they try to stay within the rules. The rules mainly prohibit things they wouldn't have done anyway, like cheating in a multiplayer game or distributing the game to hundreds of other people for free. That's not infringing their rights in any way, I'm sure you can agree. This is how Steam works.

However, bad DRM exists. You have to authenticate to their servers every time you play, you have to stay online all the time even in a single player game, if their server goes down you lose your games, they can take your games away from you whenever they want. The DRM is noticeable from the beginning because of the bureaucracy the lack of trust that comes with it. You're being punished just for the fact that you exist. You have to install rootkits or shut down/uninstall programs on your computer. There's no benefit to you other than the fact that, after they have been satisfied, they let you play the game. That DRM is like a police state. That DRM, however, does not describe all DRM. This DRM describes Sony's DRM, or SecuROM DRM, or Games for Windows Live.

See the difference (probably not)? I know I'm wasting my time, you've made it clear that your opinion won't be changed, but just know that not everyone agrees with you. Steam is DRM, and that's not a bad thing. You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

> I think what you mean is that DRM is like the police, and bad DRM is like a police state.

I see any DRM as bad / police state like.

Policing can be good when it serves the proper purpose and doesn't cause other problems. Overreaching policing is bad however. I.e. preventing crime in general is good. Putting police surveillance in every home to do that is bad. I already explained above why any DRM is always overreaching. I.e. presumption of guilt and violating one's digital space. In case of Steam, its DRM is run on your computer, so it's analogous to putting policing mechanisms in your own house.

What kind of DRM does not have these characteristics? I know of none. DRM is defined as such, and as such is always bad.

I know I'm wasting my time, you've made it clear that your opinion won't be changed, but just know that not everyone agrees with you. Steam is DRM, and that's not a bad thing. You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

> You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

Feel free accepting a local police department dedicated solely for policing you located inside your own house. Or for example, imagine yourself with ball and chain, or some kind of electronic device attached which limits what you can do in your own house as if you are a criminal. Others find it completely unacceptable. That's exactly why it's police state like and it seems that you don't get the point.

What is Steam's DRM limiting me from doing? Every possible limitation that every other DRM system has that I can conceive, they've already addressed in some way.

You keep bringing up "limits" and "preventions", yet I am at a complete loss to describe anything that Steam meaningfully does along those lines. Even the incredibly broad fair use arguments that could be made against other systems don't work here.

Actually, come to think of it, not every game on Steam uses Steam DRM (aka Steamworks).

A significant amount of games on Steam require you to run the client to play them (i.e. no service - no game). Also, you can't use Steam backup tool without being connected to the service (or more exactly, you can't install games from that backup).

While technically, some games which don't require the client to run can be manually copied to back them up, Steam forbids using them in the TOS if you don't have an active account. Now imagine a scenario when you have hundreds (or more) games in your library, and such kind of DRMed service just goes bust. Having no access to all those games would make all the downsides of DRM so much more clear, though it would be quite late already.

Either way, Steam is clearly geared towards DRM approach. In contrast, GOG doesn't require anything like that, and neither enforces anything like that. Once you bought some game, you can back it up all you want and install / play it regardless whether your GOG account continues to exist or not.

Actually, offline mode is a thing. You still go through the client, but the service being available is neither here nor there.

However, I find that the client offers enough on its own (the in-game overlay, mostly) that I'm more annoyed when I can't get it to work with a game. I have re purchased games I already owned on physical media and other ways to get the Steam integration (and I'm not alone there).

Steam going bust, in addition to being really unlikely, would be a mild annoyance at best, since bypassing it is a simple matter of replacing a DLL.

People are more accepting of Steam because it has other benefits (e.g. keeping drivers up to date) and most of the drawbacks are as bad or worse outside of Steam, other than the pirate editions.

That said, you're right that there's something a little off about accepting other people monitoring what you can do in your own home with your own property.

> People are more accepting of Steam because it has other benefits (e.g. keeping drivers up to date) and most of the drawbacks are as bad or worse outside of Steam

That's why GOG has a good chance to provide a strong competition and actually change the landscape for the better. Comfort of usage with no DRM would be a clear contrast to other services and can eventually prompt them to ditch DRM as well.

I imagine the number of people that are philosophically opposed to DRM (rather than practically) is asymptotic to zero.

GOG's going to have to out-feature and out-customer-service Valve, because the Steamworks DRM is transparent enough that most people are not going to see that as a valid selling point.

> I imagine the number of people that are philosophically opposed to DRM (rather than practically) is asymptotic to zero.

GOG think otherwise. And GOG users confirm that. Visit GOG forums and find out for yourself. Unsurprisingly, many GOG users don't use Steam at all. Whether that is because of ethical or practical reasons doesn't change the fact that they don't. GOG know what they are doing and know their audience as well.

He's not comparing the two. He is not saying "DRM is like a police state."

He's saying that both DRM being a bad thing and a police state being a bad thing are self-evident truths.

(I'm not taking sides, just hoping to clarify.)

To clarify - I am saying that DRM shares core ideas with police state methods. Some of them. I explained that above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070304

It's pretty telling that your threshold for bitching about something on HN is lower than your threshold for trying to solve it.

It proves that people are more willing to play a massively multiplayer typing game than a point-and-click adventure.

GOG also assumed that, and made a mistake delaying the release of the much awaited Divinity Original Sin, because they weren't ready with multiplayer support in their Galaxy. A lot of users were quite upset, and GOG rushed to release the version with single player only as a first step.

They also publicly admitted the mistake. Not many companies do that.

You've always been able to turn Clippy off.

You've always been able to go through twelve screens of settings and figure out which Facebook radio buttons are the "don't share everything" option.

You've always been able to opt out of spamming all your email contacts when you import from LinkedIn.

You've always been able to cancel your recurring subscriptions, you've just got to call our customer support number, no it absolutely cannot be done online.

Super obnoxious defaults are still super obnoxious if they can be changed. I've used Steam for a while, and don't mind the ads that much, but it would never would have occurred to me that I had the option to turn them off.

Have you considered that for a lot of people the ads aren't obnoxious because they actually help keep them up to date on new releases?

I too like the ads. But programs with "tip of the day"s in them have had this problem solved for a long time, just including a check box for never show me again. You could make the argument with some programs that it interferes with a minimalist design, but you'd have to admit this does not appear to be what steam is going for.

Steam’s preferences are an absolute mess. Completely disgusting and disorienting UI. Valve have only themselves to blame for this. There is no excuse for that atrocious UI.

I never expected there to be a setting to turn those off so I never looked for one. Thanks!

Except it's a setting with what one might consider 'shitty bundling tactics':

i.e. "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases."

I only want the setting to apply up to the first comma.

I find it a bit disingenuous to say that they have pointless updates, every update has a change log right there on the updater to see what's changed. While the vast majority aren't features you rarely see a change go out that doesn't warrant going out.

I think it is the frequency and method by which steam updates that is the annoying part.

Google Chrome can do silent updates, which install themselves after you reopen the application. Why can't steam do this for all their non-security updates?

Are you guys on the beta client? It updates all the time. I didn't feel they were that often when I was on the mainline. IIRC both let you ignore the update, which solves keeps it from being annoying to me.

Nope. That was one of the first things I checked.

I find it funny that half of this subthread is complaining that the client isn't updated, and the other half is complaining that it's updated too much.

The extraordinary thing about Steam UI is how it's clearly just a browser .. but a very slow one. It's as if they've embedded a copy of IE6.

Steam did used to be based on IE's rendering engine (Trident) [1]. It moved to WebKit with the big UI redo a few years ago, but it certainly doesn't feel like a recent version.

This seems like a problem with Valve's "No management, work on what you want to" [2] strategy. Maintaining (not to mention continually improving) a piece of software like the Steam client takes a lot of work, and it doesn't look like there aren't enough people at Valve doing it. There are new features like family sharing, big picture, and home streaming, but there's next to no progress on the slow bloated client that's constantly getting in my way.

I've bought a couple of things from GoG and I'll buy more as the catalog grows. I hope they eat Steam's lunch.

[1] http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86186...

[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24205497

And yet, it works.

I mean, it kinda sorta does? Watching trailers for games is agonizing through the Steam client, even using a pretty beefy PC that can play the games themselves just fine. When I go to the Steam website instead, the trailers play just fine.

Steam seems to deprioritize it's foot stamp when it's not in focus which is why you might find the videos to get choppy if you happen to also be multi-tasking. If you focus the client they work just fine (at least this is my experience.)

I'm not so sure. I've had numerous problems at this point including breaking bugs where games simply wouldn't launch or install. Also, the game management ui is pretty poor by modern standards. There's no way to sort/filter by play time, genre, or any other qualifiers that would make it easier to select a game to play. I imagine after all the sales, big picture mode, and steam os there's a huge need for a better, more fluid UI. The current version is pretty antiquated these days. To put things in perspective, there are open source MAME UIs that are better now.

Could you point me to some good examples of those open source MAME UIs? I want to show them to someone who wanted to build a game grading web page.

Steam effortless downloads, installs, and updates my games in the background. The Gog downloader doesn't even work on my computer. I guess it depends on what is important to you.

I love both sites though :)

> The Gog downloader doesn't even work on my computer.

If you are using Linux, you can try this one: https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader

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