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Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

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Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#41

Post by nene »

aeturnum wrote: post #23
Cushman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Steam's secret right there, yeah? Use DRM to make the product more convenient, and pirates will pay you for the privilege.

I think this is one of the things that good DRM can provide the end-user that has been largely ignored by everyone. I mostly blame the industry for ignoring the possibilities, but they're exciting. You could "loan" games to people without physical contact, you can securely transfer ownership of the digital item, you can play your games from anywhere, etc. There's a lot of potential in having strong digital copy prote…

Well... you can do all these things when there's no DRM at all. It's like counting up all the things you can do in a new modern prison, but it's still a prison.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#42

Post by ak217 »

aw3c2 wrote: post #10

Convenience of purchase or convenience of ownership/control? I am refusing to use Steam since I cannot be sure that I will be able to play when and however I like. In fact, I can be sure that at some point I would not be able to play my games because I lost internet access and Steam does not let me play (do not reply with "there is offline mode", that mode is a joke as you have to enable it whilst being online).

To me it's the direct opposite. I can't imagine life without Steam anymore, because to have to track down the install media/images of all those games, go through their ridiculous install procedures, updates, etc. every time I have to reinstall Windows or switch the game to a different computer is a tremendous waste of time.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#43

Post by shinratdr »

pixie_ wrote: post #29

Nowadays if a game isn't on Steam I just won't buy it. Mainly because keeping game CDs around is too much a hassle. When I buy something on Steam, I know I have that game for life and can re-install it quickly on any computer.

Agreed. I'm really hoping that EA sees this in BF3 PC sales and reverses direction. I refuse to be shoehorned into keeping around a different gaming client, if EA pulls their titles then I'm not buying EA on PC.

I don't even have a problem with Origins as a service, but I don't trust EA to keep putting effort into it once they get the marketshare. I trust Valve to do so because they're doing it, right now, as we speak. They even took time out to breathe new life into Mac gaming, a move that earned tons of respect from me.

Using EA's store supports a trend of individual publisher stores and a situation where I have 10 different clients from 10 different companies, something that I am strongly against. It's true that Valve is a publisher as well, but the fact of the matter is they got there first and have proven themselves trustworthy. EA did neither and is now trying to lure us into their gingerbread house with candy and a fake smile. I just don't trust it.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#44

Post by shinratdr »

DanBC wrote: post #8
rsanchez1 wrote: post #3

I know that I didn't buy games before Steam, or at least as much as I do now. But price is also a factor. I really have to think about it when a game costs more than $15, but Steam usually has good games on sale anyway. Steam and other digital distributors have made me more of a gamer.

I buy, play, then sell games. Steam does not let me do this; thus those games are more expensive to me. I do not buy Steam games.

Who buys used PC games? Why should I trust you not to have copied the CD key? This is a reasonable enough argument for not buying digital titles on a console, but seems irrelevant in regards to the topic at hand, which is PC gaming.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#45

Post by ethank »

http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2008/08/23/the-frustration-of...

I worked in an industry (still do sort of) that took a huge hit from piracy, and reacted by making it more difficult to do things rather than respond to what piracy exposed.

While I still worked at a major I wrote this.

TL;DR summary:

I heard a song on the radio, and used Shazam to look it up. The song was "Forgotten Years" by Midnight Oil, and it was 2008. I tried in vain to buy this song legally before having to finally get it through illegal means (torrents). To offset this, I donated directly to the lead singers political campaign in Australia.

As I stated then and I still believe:

"I believe that the ultimate challenge for media providers is to make systems of actualization which narrow the gap from desire to the fulfillment of said desire. The only true way to fight one form of ubiquity is with another form of ubiquity."

PS: Ironically the video embedded in my blog post is now blocked because it was uploaded by the band's non-US label.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#46

Post by kelnage »

w1ntermute wrote: post #33
wccrawford wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them. I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays be…

> I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Localization isn't just bureaucratic nonsense that was conjured up to aggravate gamers in foreign countries - the games actually need to be translated to the local language. As for if you were living in one of those countries as an ex…

But yet they pirate the games anyway. My guess is that you'll find that a large percentage of "gamers" in non-English speaking countries speak English well enough to understand most games and don't want to wait the 6+ months required to translate the game to their local tongue when they could be playing online against US players.

This was especially true a few years back, when some publishers wouldn't release games in the UK until the "European" translation was finished!

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#47

Post by aeturnum »

nene wrote: post #41
aeturnum wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is one of the things that good DRM can provide the end-user that has been largely ignored by everyone. I mostly blame the industry for ignoring the possibilities, but they're exciting. You could "loan" games to people without physical contact, you can securely transfer ownership of the digital item, you can play your games from anywhere, etc. There's a lot of potential in having strong digital copy prote…

Well... you can do all these things when there's no DRM at all. It's like counting up all the things you can do in a new modern prison, but it's still a prison.

You can do that sometimes...as long as your key isn't bound to a user account (Battle.net), and as long as you have the patience to get it working (mail the cds, give them your steam account password, find them a crack, etc). Some of those restrictions are reasonable and some aren't.

My point is that good DRM can protect rights of both parties , but never does. Instead, if often restricts the consumer's rights in favor of the publisher. Steam comes closest to balancing interests, but falls short as well.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#48

Post by tjoff »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #37
redthrowaway wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a 250-word article; not sure a tl;dr is warranted. I certainly don't think it should be the top-voted comment.

Yes, it is discouraging seeing willful ignorance (aka, tl;dr) voted up on HN. If people can't take the time to read the article, they shouldn't comment. Period.

Who said anything about commenting? I often enjoy a tl;dr because a tl;dr will, with more accuracy than the title, tell me whether the article is worth reading.

And yes, I almost always check the comments before reading the article (but I always read the article before commenting).

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#49

Post by jcscott81 »

Of course. From games to music to movies, when you limit the utility of a legitimately purchased product you will only serve to make the pirated version that much more appealing. Case in point: I can buy a movie from a Hollywood studio in Japan, but I play it on my US DVD player. If I were to pirate that same movie - I can save $20 and watch it anywhere! Localization and DRM = terrible concepts.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#50

Post by nitrogen »

slowpoke wrote: post #38
chadgeidel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out the roaring indie game scene. The Humble Indie bundle ( http://www.humblebundle.com ) has given me spectacular gameplay for very little money. (No, I don't pay pennies for the bundle).

I know a bit about and highly respect the indie scene. They are, in my opinion, the future of game development in general. I paid for the second bundle, and was highly entertained for quite a while. It's a very cool project. Slightly offtopic, but Wolfire has also written one of my favorite articles/blog posts as of recent, as well - http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-deve...

Thanks for the link! The concept from part 3 of treating the axes as unit vectors that default to (1, 0) and (0, 1) but can be rotated at will really helped bridge the gap in my mind between rotating vectors "manually" and using matrix multiplication.
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