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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

#61

Post by DrStalker »

Steam used to be a great way to get games at the same time as the USA for the same price. Now it allows access at the same time but with significantly higher prices in Australia.

In this case it is about price. I don't like being ripped off, even if the amount I'm being ripped off is slightly less than if I went into a physical store to buy the game.

So far this behavior is limited to AAA titles from publishers other than Valve, so I'm happy playing indie games and waiting for Half Life 2: Episode 3.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#62

Post by suivix »

nitrogen wrote: post #52
getsat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have that game for life Not for life, but rather for the life of Steam as a platform. I don't see Valve going away anytime soon, but you never know...

Rumor has it that if Valve went under and Steam was shut down, they'd release a patch to allow their games to continue to function.

But how could you back the games up or move them to another computer?

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#63

Post by Maxious »

parfe wrote: post #5
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…

>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... In regards to pre-lease, A bit of a stretch calling what Valve does DRM. The pre-release stuff is straight up encrypted. It's a convenience for the end-user to pre-load the data. Once the game gets released you don't need to contact valve's servers for decryption keys every time you want to play.…

They also just leave key .exe/.dll files out of the downloadable content until release day. With Dead Island, Steam accidentally distributed debug builds on release, leading to some hilarious misuse of cheats.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#64

Post by vacri »

DrStalker wrote: post #61

Steam used to be a great way to get games at the same time as the USA for the same price. Now it allows access at the same time but with significantly higher prices in Australia. In this case it is about price. I don't like being ripped off, even if the amount I'm being ripped off is slightly less than if I went into a physical store to buy the game. So far this behavior is limited to AAA titles from publishers other…

Lifelong game pirater here, back to the Amiga 500 games bought on floppies from a software cracker (yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me! went the into screens)

Australia has always been shafted in price - a AAA game for $110-$120? Total nonsense, even when our dollar was very low.

Steam is largely what's turned my behaviour around. I've always bought a few, pirated a few, but the convenience of Steam is hard to beat. I mostly wait for specials or bundles, and have a lot of indie games (my catalog is up around 200 games, slightly less than half are unplayed bundle-fodder). Mid-year and new year sales are great times for bargains. But a AAA game at a ridiculous price? Hello pirate bay. Duke Nukem Forever at $80? Good luck with that (not that it's a AAA title... but it theoretically occupies that space).

I've found that over the years, with few exceptions, once a game is played, it's done and I don't go back. If I do go back... it's pretty dated and I realise it was better off in the realm of nostalgia. For me the issue of "but what if Steam dies / goes offline - you'll lose all your games!" is a non-issue - I have a couple of racks of dusty game CDs behind me that haven't been opened in years.

Long story short: it's mostly about the convenience, but partly about the price.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#65

Post by mappu »

watty wrote: post #60

Piracy has never been more convenient in gaming than the traditional route, even with DRM. How convenient is it to download 4GB, follow cryptic instructions, apply a crack, be banned from online play, be unable to update patches, etc. I'm sure a small few pirate games due to DRM reasons but price is the main reason.

Hmm? Piracy is incredibly convenient. Cracks are consistent and easy to use, updates generally appear regularly, you can pass the installer to your friends offline, and you can happily play without internet connection long after the official servers die out.

Online play is a different matter, since you might have centralised server-side authentication. Online multiplayer is a definite advantage to going legit. Otherwise, piracy is nothing if not convenient.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#66

Post by Anti-Ratfish »

fourk wrote: post #57

There are plenty of people who pay between $10 and $100 a month to have access to a dedicated seedbox in order to maintain ratio requirements on private torrent trackers. These people are a clear example of existing willingness to pay for access to content. Whenever content providers figure this out and can provide a service that has similar selection, availability, portability, and quality, they'll be sitting on a g…

Very good point. Here in NZ much of what I want is literally years away from coming out and paying for it through legal means isn't an option. But paying in the form you suggest is an option. It's annoying to have to resort to illegal measures which actually cost money to get something.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#67

Post by brc »

The only 'piracy' I've done recently is to purchase a Kindle book using convulted means (fake US account, Proxy service, using gift card) then crack the DRM on the books so I can read it on my Kindle.

I'm sure the publishers and licensing people think they are very clever restricting content to people in other countries, but in reality, they are shooting both feet off.

The old ways are gone. There is now one global IP market, whether they like it or not. They either get with the program or they lose money and die. Sucks to be them, but that's creative destruction at work. You can't differential price, you can't licence in one market but not another. You either release the content for sale to everyone, or you will be worked around.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#68

Post by kornholi »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #40
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…

"Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken" That's because it can't be broken. You can't break what isn't there. Pre-load only downloads 99% of the game. Let the user download the game sans a few important bits, say the entire executable, and upon release enable download for the last tiny bit. Most retail games release weeks early because it's impossible to stop once the disc hits manufacturing. Retail d…

I'm pretty sure that it downloads 100% of the game in an encrypted format, and the decryption keys get sent out on release.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#69

Post by towelrod »

rick888 wrote: post #59
politician wrote: post #2

TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.

so, you need to give them everything for free at the fastest bandwidth possible. The only way to stop piracy is: 1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone wil…

People have spent billions of dollars buying music on iTunes. Its pretty obvious that people will pay for things if its more convenient than pirating it.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#70

Post by te_chris »

wmf wrote: post #55
nene wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm skeptical that rental business models can work without DRM; the temptation is just too great.

It doesn't need to though, the key thing with the rental business model is it needs to be easy and convenient enough. It's clear that it's a rental in the name, but people will get pissed off if it's not easy to get the content and outlandishly priced, and just go back to BT.
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