[Scooby_Doo]

And the other thing--what happens in a few short years? Activation server not worth it for SPORE? Maybe SPORE 2 is coming out. Hmm--let's just shut it down and all those legit customers a few years ago are screwed out of $50--and now can't even play the game!!

They love doing this with their sports games.

[achtung]

DRM is there to prevent the honest consumer from selling the game after they're done with it.  They don't expect to actually put a dent in piracy.

[Colonol Dekker]

Ironically, the game was leaked several days before the official released date and a quick search seems to indicate that pirated copies, along with mechanisms for bypassing the copy protection mechanisms, are freely available on the Internet. So it seems that the copy protection schemes only inconveniences legitimate customers.

It won't stop it anyway..

I for one keep every game i buy. Nostalgia always wins. I've got a reasonably sized box in the Attic with TA, Battlezone, Frontier Elite. SPeedball and some embarrising others,

[karajorma]

Like I said the last Valve game I bought in a store required me to be connected to the internet everytime I play it, and requires me to launch Steam everytime I play it despite the fact I bought a box, in a store. But who's *****ing about Steam?

Have you been living under a rock the last few years?

There are tons of people *****ing about Steam. There are lots of people who completely refuse to buy any Valve products which use it. The only difference is that the Steam argument is old, the battle lines are already drawn, the argument doesn't need to be rehashed for every single Steam release.

[blackhole]

Steam really isn't that bad in comparison to this. Which makes me wonder how bad this is going to get until games refuse to be published under certain publishers due to the DRM they force.

[Davros]

Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever Thanks to DRM

According to Torrent Freak, Spore has been downloaded more than 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and this number is increasing rapidly. Most critics agree that Spore is a great game. However, the users aren't too happy with the absurd DRM restrictions that come with the game. EA decided that people who buy a legitimate copy of the game, are only allowed to install it three times. The idea behind DRM is that it will stop people from pirating the game, but in reality, it often has the opposite effect. As Forbes points out, many commenters on various BitTorrent sites now legitimize downloading this game because the official copies include some heavy and intrusive DRM.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Have you been living under a rock the last few years?

There are tons of people *****ing about Steam. There are lots of people who completely refuse to buy any Valve products which use it. The only difference is that the Steam argument is old, the battle lines are already drawn, the argument doesn't need to be rehashed for every single Steam release.

      Well I have been under a bit of a rock, but haven't head too much about Steam. Heard a few complaints, but nothing really all that recent. Anyway, I know what battle line I'm on. Half Life 2 might be the shizzit but damned if I'm ever going to play it.

DRM is there to prevent the honest consumer from selling the game after they're done with it.  They don't expect to actually put a dent in piracy.

      I don't see why. Console gamers trade in their games all the time, restricting resales on one platform seems fairly pointless to me. The moment EA NHL 2K9 or whatever comes out, hundreds of 2K8 games probably flood into EB Games. And I don't know how the market between consoles and PCs compare but going in general I've found that more stores carry consoles games, and more of it, than the PC titles.

[Grizzly]

Funny thing is that Stardock went in the exact opposite direction and decided to make it as *easy* as possible to buy their games legally. No DRM, no CD checks, and you can buy them online and download them if you prefer that. Guess what? Their games are selling beyond all expectations.

the concept of Buying and downloading the game online rules IMO. I can buy a lot of games, without aving to drive to the nearest city (which takes half an hour, a car, petrol, and the ability to convince my parents as I do not have a driving license (I am 15)),  go to the computer-game store there, and hoping the game I want is there. If it is not, I screwed my parent's temper for nothing, amongst other things.

[karajorma]

Have you been living under a rock the last few years?

There are tons of people *****ing about Steam. There are lots of people who completely refuse to buy any Valve products which use it. The only difference is that the Steam argument is old, the battle lines are already drawn, the argument doesn't need to be rehashed for every single Steam release.

      Well I have been under a bit of a rock, but haven't head too much about Steam. Heard a few complaints, but nothing really all that recent. Anyway, I know what battle line I'm on. Half Life 2 might be the shizzit but damned if I'm ever going to play it.

When HL2 came out the complaints about Steam were much larger than anything I've seen about Spore.

[Colonol Dekker]

Very true, that's the reason i opted for the orange box on my 360. I noticed this week when trying to find a patch for half-life 1. I could only find steam installers. (Found one in the end) but how bloody stupid. Half-lifes going on a decade old.

[MP-Ryan]

I'll never understand the *****ing about Steam.  The resource usage is minimal if its properly configured, you can play without an Internet connection just fine if you have the content fully downloaded, and it doesn't load the system full of various other intrusive DRM systems.  Frankly, I've found it to be a fantastic system which balances copyright protection with ease of customer use.  The only legitimate worry I've ever heard about the Steam system is that if Valve ever went belly-up, what happens to the servers and the content you've paid for?

That aside, I used to play games on Steam with a 1.2 GHz processor from 2001, 512 MB of RAM, and a 9500Pro video card.  if that system can use Steam without resource issues, no one with a semi-modern computer has any right to *****.

[karajorma]

I'll never understand the *****ing about Steam.  The resource usage is minimal if its properly configured, you can play without an Internet connection just fine if you have the content fully downloaded, and it doesn't load the system full of various other intrusive DRM systems.  Frankly, I've found it to be a fantastic system which balances copyright protection with ease of customer use.  The only legitimate worry I've ever heard about the Steam system is that if Valve ever went belly-up, what happens to the servers and the content you've paid for?

You miss the point that Steam is the thin edge of a large wedge. What happens if everyone copies Valve and adds their own content delivery systems? Would you feel the same if you have to have 10 or 20 stream copies on your machine?

There are other problems (security concerns, what happens if someone steals your Steam ID, etc) but they don't concern me as much cause I've never been stupid enough to install Steam.

[Solatar]

I got Spore off the online store and don't really recommend going that route. They give you six months to download the game or redownload it. Or they charge you $6 and they'll let you download it for two years.

I've gotten games off online stores before which were great, and you could download them again anytime. That damned EA Download Manager is annoying...it starts up everytime I start Spore which just makes it take that much longer to actually load the game (which for some reason takes freaking forever to load, and this computer really isn't that slow).

[MP-Ryan]

I'll never understand the *****ing about Steam.  The resource usage is minimal if its properly configured, you can play without an Internet connection just fine if you have the content fully downloaded, and it doesn't load the system full of various other intrusive DRM systems.  Frankly, I've found it to be a fantastic system which balances copyright protection with ease of customer use.  The only legitimate worry I've ever heard about the Steam system is that if Valve ever went belly-up, what happens to the servers and the content you've paid for?

You miss the point that Steam is the thin edge of a large wedge. What happens if everyone copies Valve and adds their own content delivery systems? Would you feel the same if you have to have 10 or 20 stream copies on your machine?

There are other problems (security concerns, what happens if someone steals your Steam ID, etc) but they don't concern me as much cause I've never been stupid enough to install Steam.

Computing is moving to content-delivery systems.  You look at the number of web applications which are gaining popularity and I imagine that within 5 years the old "buy it on <insert medium here>" method is going to be all but eliminated.  And that's a good thing so long as the digital security features keep up.  Content-delivery is a damn sight better than computers loaded with various DRM software, including rootkits.  So long as industry users keep the standards for such systems high (low resource usage, unobtrusive, etc) then I don't see the problem.

As for security issues, given that all your credit information, banking information, personal address and identification, and telephone records are wired into the Internet I think the security of a game account would be my last concern when it comes to security features.

The elimination of hard copies as a means of delivering a service is pretty much a certainty.  I think valve has done brilliantly in launching Steam when they did - they've successfully demonstrated that a product can be easily, successfully, and securely delivered over the Internet with a minimum of customer grief.  That and the system is still evolving.  Sure, valve has stuck their store and community functions into Steam, but that is not to say future systems will function in that manner.  Frankly, I think we're going to see web applications come even further into their own and you'll eventually access your various content-delivery applications through a browser and without dedicated executables of their own.

We may eventually get to the point where applications are no longer installed on an individual machine, but rather accessed, cached and updated entirely through an internet connection.  Google is pioneering that sort of work even now.

[NGTM-1R]

And yet you paid to be the owner of the software. You should have free, easy, permanent access to it, because that would be what you paid for, and that is not what Steam is designed or able to deliever.

[Akalabeth Angel]

I'll never understand the *****ing about Steam.  The resource usage is minimal if its properly configured, you can play without an Internet connection just fine if you have the content fully downloaded, and it doesn't load the system full of various other intrusive DRM systems.  Frankly, I've found it to be a fantastic system which balances copyright protection with ease of customer use.  The only legitimate worry I've ever heard about the Steam system is that if Valve ever went belly-up, what happens to the servers and the content you've paid for?

  My concern is that if I buy a game, in a store, it should be the game, not 95% of it. You wouldn't buy a car that was 95% there, one without the steering the wheel, why pay money for a game that wasn't complete? Fantastic? What benefit is Steam to the consumer, except helping them spend their money easier? And are games cheaper on Steam than in the store? Because they're sure not paying for any sort of distribution for it.
   And I'm not sure about the whole "no internet required" thing either, but you may be right on that front.

[BloodEagle]

I'll never understand the *****ing about Steam.  The resource usage is minimal if its properly configured, you can play without an Internet connection just fine if you have the content fully downloaded, and it doesn't load the system full of various other intrusive DRM systems.  Frankly, I've found it to be a fantastic system which balances copyright protection with ease of customer use.  The only legitimate worry I've ever heard about the Steam system is that if Valve ever went belly-up, what happens to the servers and the content you've paid for?

  My concern is that if I buy a game, in a store, it should be the game, not 95% of it. You wouldn't buy a car that was 95% there, one without the steering the wheel, why pay money for a game that wasn't complete? Fantastic? What benefit is Steam to the consumer, except helping them spend their money easier? And are games cheaper on Steam than in the store? Because they're sure not paying for any sort of distribution for it.
   And I'm not sure about the whole "no internet required" thing either, but you may be right on that front.

I'm pretty sure that you have to validate a game once a week in order for it to function. Even then, every single damned game must be updated before you can run them.

If I wanted to wait four hours (after installation) before playing a game that I bought, I'd invite some people over for a round of Monopoly.

[karajorma]

Frankly, I think we're going to see web applications come even further into their own and you'll eventually access your various content-delivery applications through a browser and without dedicated executables of their own.

Which is what they should have done in the first place.

[CP5670]

Some extra comments about Securom are in order here. Apart from the restrictions it places on actual usage (internet activation and so on), Securom itself exhibits many properties in common with malware.

1: Games that contain it install it silently and never give any indication that they include it.

2: It stays on your computer even after you have uninstalled all games using it, and there is no official removal procedure for it. It is a little difficult to remove manually and some of its components cannot be deleted with standard Windows programs. (null registry keys, for example)

3: It operates in kernel mode like a driver, which is a possible security hole and creates additional potential for problems. There was an incident with the Mass Effect content update recently, where installing the content set off something in Securom that made systems BSOD immediately upon right clicking anywhere in Windows Explorer. (they did fix it quickly though)

4: It contains a "blacklist" of programs that Sony thinks you're using to tamper with it. If you open them at any time, Securom will detect that in the background and games will refuse to load until you restart your computer. Process Explorer (an enhanced Task Manager) is the most well known example, but there are others as well.

5: It reduces performance in games, particularly loading times but sometimes also the average framerates. There have also been cases where Securom was actually the source of instability in a game and a crack was needed to solve various crashing problems. The rather funny incident a few months ago with Ubisoft issuing a crack as an official patch was a recent example.

6: Some Securom versions are not compatible with certain DVD drives (for the Securom games that require a DVD). Crysis was an example at least when it came out, as it didn't work on a large number of SATA drives. Apparently those are detected as SCSI devices by Windows, and Sony thinks that any SCSI drive must be an emulated drive.

Fortunately, Securom and all of these other systems have been reverse engineered a few years ago and cracks for the games are trivial to find. I always apply a crack before running the exe (for Securom and Starforce, it's the exe that installs the DRM, not the game installer) and never buy a game until I know that fully working cracks are available. Some games will still work fine online with the patched exe and others will not.

Steam is probably less intrusive than this, but still annoying and easy to bypass. I don't know a lot about it since I don't care about most of Valve's games anyway.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I don't remember steam being an issue with HL2.  I installed the game, let it do it's thing to finish installing it, then removed steam.  Never had a problem running HL2 without it.