The other big thing about Steam is, it works. Valve isn’t being pushy and annoying about the DRM, and they’re raking in money like crazy. They’re the biggest company in gaming, and they got there through the simple expedient of treating their customers well, and doing what they want. You simply can’t argue that “we need annoying DRM to protect ourselves from pirates”, when Steam is out there not being destroyed by pirates.
But BigT just said that he downloads cracked versions to avoid using Steam (after he buys them). I guarantee you that a whole lot of people skip the “after I buy them” part. Steam isn’t effective DRM for most games – the exception being those that rely on Steam for multiplayer, etc – which is why publishers still elect to add their own DRM.
Steam is great for people who are going to buy legitimately but little to stop those who feel entitled to free games. So, in that regard, it doesn’t work much at all.
It does work in the way that actually matters - it gets people to buy games because it’s easy. Steam and GOG both. I buy most of my games these days because it’s easy, whereas years ago I pirated most of my games because it wasn’t easy. I buy games I don’t even play because sales. I have…way too many games…on Steam that I haven’t even gotten around to playing, just because they were affordable and looked interesting. I have many like that on GOG.
And these days I mostly just don’t play games that have things I dislike, like DRM - but when games come out that I really, really want to play, if they have some serious inconvenient DRM attached? I continue to pirate them, and no, I don’t buy first, and no, I don’t feel even a little bit bad about that, and no amount of screaming that it’s stealing is going to change that. There’s really no argument that can be made to change my mind on this.
Trying to prevent piracy is a losing proposition - it can’t be prevented, at least not unless the likelihood of being caught goes way up, and the penalty for being caught is significant. But making sure the majority of people buy instead of pirate? That’s easy: make it easy to buy the game, give it a good price that people can afford, and make sure the game is good enough to justify that price. Like BigT says, Steam, GOG, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and so on, show that this works: when it’s easy and the prices don’t make people’s eyes bug out, the majority of people will buy instead of pirate.
And consider successful games that go without DRM. The Witcher 3, released on GOG and totally DRM-free, was very successful. The fact that undoubtedly it was pirated didn’t make it unsuccessful. If a developer makes a good game and doesn’t burden it with DRM, it will still be successful, and can be more successful than games that have onerous DRM.
It is this, 100% this.
The best thing that happened to the music industry was the mass illicit downloading of music. Millions of people downloading millions of songs for nothing. When the industry finally woke up to the new paradigm they realised that if they made it cheap and easy then people would…by and large…give them money. And so here we are now with cheap and immediate access to pretty much unrestricted and portable music or movies for a few quid a month. It would not have happened this far or this fast without the pirates.
Remember the unskippable anti-piracy ads on DVD’s? You know how to avoid those? Get a pirated copy. A classic own goal by the movie industry in making the legitimate version that you pay top dollar for a worse experience than the free version. What do you think is going to happen?
So, “I really really want it, so I’ll just take it?”
that’s the reasoning of a spoiled little child.
On the scale of bad stuff it is a very minor issue. No-one is deprived of a physical object or financially worse off because of it. It certainly seems wrong because they are getting the benefit of something without paying the price but I see it on the level of someone climbing a fence in order to look over it and watch a football match.
If that then prompts the stadium owners to do something like put on a “fans zone” where people can watch it in comfort for a few quid then it is all good.
As other have pointed out, that shouldn’t be an issue; all my Steam games run fine without a connection. When did you last attempt it?
In any event, I like Steam, simply because it makes the process of purchasing and managing my games a lot easier. I wish ALL my games were Steam games. I used to dislike it, but it’s damn convenient now. PC games are also a hell of a lot cheaper than they used to be - I don’t know how much of that is due to digital distribution, but it’s a factor.
That’s beside the point.
Or, at least, never on EA/Origin.
The OP was " Game devs still don’t get it" and so anything that influences them to “get it” probably is very much on point.
Some of them. But piracy is still a major issue despite the existence of Steam, et al.
I’m not going to try and change your mind. I am going to think your opinion on how much Steam “works” holds little to no weight when you happily admit to stealing games because the developer made you mad or whatever lame excuse you have.
People who want to steal stuff will always find reasons to justify it. “It looked like it wasn’t worth $10”, “The developer made me pissy about some design choice”, “I just wanted to ‘test’ it first”, etc. When you’re the sole arbiter of whether or not your reasons to steal a game are good enough, there’s no bad reasons.
It certainly made it LESS successful than it would have been if people paid CD Projekt Red for each copy instead of stealing it.
Anyway, I honestly don’t really give a shit if you pirate games (your laughable rationalizations aside), the initial point was that no, Steam isn’t especially effective as a DRM. Neither on the technical front nor the social decision front. Which is why publishers continue to add layers of DRM to games.
It just isn’t stealing though is it? no matter how much you use the word.
If I actually steal something, that deprives someone else of that thing. In my previous example of sneaking an unauthorised view of a football match…have I stolen something? no, of course not. If I look over the shoulder of someone on a plane and read their magazine…have I stolen it?
Calling it “stealing” is just hyperbole.
You’re depriving them of the rightful money they should have received as a result of you using their intellectual property. But you came up with some cute reason why they didn’t really deserve that money.
If you need to rationalize that in some weird way to cleanse your conscience, I’m not really motivated to stop you.
But then, the fact that people DO come up with cute rationalizations for why they shouldn’t have to pay people for the video games they play explains WHY publishers continue to add DRM to games.
Its not. Its stealing because you end up with something you didn’t pay for. Own your actions.
I like how we have an OP asking why publishers are using this DRM and then the responses rapidly slide from “I pirate stuff after I buy it so I don’t have to use Steam” to “I steal it because I want, shut up crybaby you can’t stop me” to “It’s not even stealing and what if you read a magazine then who’s the real monster?”
Hey, you want to know why your games have this DRM and increasingly require internet access for single player stuff? I don’t think we need Slylock Fox to crack this case.
If you break into a secure Imperial facility, access the plans to a super-weapon, and transmit them to an orbiting cruiser, can you really be said to have “stolen” the plans to the Death Star?
My point is, the idea that “stealing” something includes the concept of distributing information to which you do not have legal access predates the current debate about copyright and digital file sharing by somewhere between twenty years and several centuries.
Makes me wonder what iampunha is up to these days… 
Boy, thank goodness for that super-hard-to-crack DRM that helps prevent piracy, huh? You know, the one that doesn’t exist?
Denuvo originally worked well for a good while. Was a big deal when they finally started being able to crack it. Seems not to be working so well any more but I guarantee you that they’re going to try something else and hope for another six month+ run before they say “Welp, I guess we just let everyone pirate”.
no, not really. You’ve copied them.
well that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and I don’t think the empire was too fussed about setting legal precedent.
Sure, you can use the word “steal” if you like but if I created a piece of writing and someone made a copy of it without my permission purely for their own amusement, I’d be far less bothered than if they stole the actual piece of writing.
It is hyperbolic language that attempts to inflate the offence to absurd levels. It ends up making your side of the argument sound hysterical. You can rightly criticise those who make illicit copies without resorting to that language.