101–110 of 178 posts
DRM is a crazy thing. Now it distorts the already DRM-distorted reality.
Steam's DRM isn't technical, it's the community and platform itself. Any technical restrictions are completely optional.
In reality, the vast majority of games on Steam will not start if Steam isn't running. And some which appear to work at first will have strange errors later on. There's also no way for me as a consumer to tell if a given game has DRM before I buy it. That pcgaming wiki has been wrong for me before (many times), and sometimes games that used to work will no longer do so after an update.
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Steam? How about pretty much every digital storefront? You can't sell prime movies, you can't sell iTunes music and so on. All of these store fronts should ideally allow people to resell all digital content they purchased.
Why should? The whole idea of copyright is that only the author (or otherwise copyright holder) can profit from making copies. Just because you purchased a copy yourself shouldn't automatically result in a right to making another copy for someone else as long as you promise not to use yours.
I think this is a bad idea which will encourage more in game transactions to be profitable. Margins aren’t good enough for the majority of games. I hope this doesn’t expand out of France.
This will likely expand to at least the whole European Union since european texts were used to arrive to this ruling.
Each EU country implements EU law in its own way I suspect this would be challenged at the EU level.
Some European countries are known for not really implementing EU law as they are supposed to - Spain and TUPE for example
Personally, I like the fact that Steam games can’t be resold. Why? Because that keeps the prices down since the resale value of a game does not need to be included in the price. If games could be resold then I’d have to go through the trouble of reselling them in order to recoup the difference.
The fact that triple A games have similar prices today on steam to the times when they also had both disk printing, physical distribution to stores and resale figured in seems to contradict that assertion. The main thing that’s keeping prices down seems to be the storm of smaller indie games and sales (which for Triple A games happen much much later in the lifecycle these days).
Another problem is that the court probably means that you can resell games for real currency. Currently you can buy games with the Steam currency, which means that reselling games is a legit method of piping out real currency from Steam.
I don't really see a problem here to be honest.
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They wouldn't necessarily need to implement that though, just a way of transferring licences to someone else. People could figure out their own payment.
There's the problem of needing escrow for selling the game in that scenario; if, say, they implement game resale as "You can ask Steam to cut your access and give you a unique code someone else can enter to gain access," there's the problem that if I buy that code from you, I have no knowledge of if it'll actually work when I get home (maybe you sold it twice?). ... and then Steam can offer payment via their in-store…
A tariff on resales would cut back on that (if the ruling allows it). But the effective price of a game would still tend to approach the cost of reselling it. You would need to re-download the game every time you buy it, but with modern broadband this is feasible.
An efficient marketplace for 'renting' games (or game licenses) would let you buy a game just before you start playing, and resell it when you go to sleep. The marketplace would only need to buy enough licenses to satisfy peak demand and could amortize the cost across players and games.
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Companies release features to some regions all the time. For example, in Google Photos, you can search by face in the USA but not Europe (due to differing privacy expectations).
Huh. TIL regarding Google Photos. That sucks; glad I'm in the US because I use that feature often. It's great for when friends ask for the photos I took of them. In any case, I predict the Steam situation will differ because privacy and retail goods are valued differently. Americans are going to want that feature if Steam has to implement it, and they have options regarding what game store they use; it becomes a poin…
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Steam's DRM isn't technical, it's the community and platform itself. Any technical restrictions are completely optional.
This always gets brought up when Steam and DRM are mentioned in the same sentence, and it is true technically speaking. However, I'm not convinced it matters in practice. In reality, the vast majority of games on Steam will not start if Steam isn't running. And some which appear to work at first will have strange errors later on. There's also no way for me as a consumer to tell if a given game has DRM before I buy it…
I know a plethora of people who support only Steam on principle alone. Not only have they been kind to the Linux community but they've so far held up their end of the bargain when it comes to Steam. Valve's willingness to uphold free speech (while accepting all the downsides like negative brand attention) also means a lot to me.
They used to be awful for customer service but it's really come around lately.