Saying Valve’s method of defeating pre-release piracy was successful is like saying France’s Maginot Line was successful at protecting the border with Germany. All the enemy did was go around the inpregnable defenses.
We happen to be talking specifically about pirating. You think X (in this case same time release) = Y (less piracy). And I counter that you are a fool.
[quote=Apos]
]One of the major causes of piracy is games not being available for purchase at the same time in different parts of the world. Why wait to buy the game, with people in America already enjoying it, when you can download it right away?! The Steam release ended that motive.
[quote]
I counter this with my opinion (as ‘facts’ on why people do anything is generally an opinion) that the major cause of piracy is that pirates want to play games for free or at least very cheap. Some games might be pirated if they aren’t released in another country but I doubt it’s more than ~10%. Small games generally aren’t even widely pirated for instance (like X-beyound the frontier which I had to ship in from the UK). I am quite willing to work at getting a nice game from any country selling said game (like Indepenance War 1 and 2) but if these games needed assholish activation/registration/online verification systems then they can fuck off.
Steam did allow for same time delivery. Congrats to them. Steam (and it’s counterparts) is a good idea as a delivery system for patches and maybe buying games (I wouldn’t mind having to download and burn a game for half the original cost) but online registration DOES NOT STOP PIRACY. It does NOTHING to counter piracy except piss people off, the exact people you don’t want pissed off.
And it runs, no? Just not to your satisfaction. (Not to nitpick too much…)
Try updating the drivers for your graphics card. My old machine was underpowered and this solved problems with those resource-intensive games more often than not. Can’t really hurt. And yeah, it will definitely help to add at least another 256 MB of RAM.
Your powerful counter is, unfortunately, made a little silly by the fact that you basically agree with me in virtually the next breath.
Man, you’re right: 10% of nearly a hundred million dollars isn’t very much money. You’ve sure got me beat on this issue!
Again, it only seems to piss off hystronic little turds like you. For most normal people, its a ringing success. But then, maybe you didn’t think very seriously about how digital rights management would work when you distribute all the content for free and allow users full legal control over copying, burning, and distributing it.
Wow, your command of English is astounding. Unlike in your world, in my world “one of the major causes” means “a large percentage” or something to that affect. I guess 10% is a “major cause”! Shit, I guess you got me there!
And a ringing sucess? Excuse me but HL2 is the one of the few games that could have made Steam work. You think a shitty no-name title would have gone anywhere if the type of bad mouthing Steam gets was out on every message board? I guess I’ll be waiting for a Steam delivered “Masters of Orion 3 version 5.64.345.235” with bated breath.
HL2 is probably a very good game and I have nothing bad to say about what Valve does. But Steam is a steaming pile as a counter piracy tool. This has shit all to do with MY personal feelings over crappy DRM and it has everything to do with the fact that I want to play my official games without jumping through hoops.
The only ‘piracy’ that Steam could prevent, by definition, is piracy by:
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Foriegn customers
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Who would have pirated HL2 is they could not have gotten it at the same time
I admit, I can’t know exactly what that comes to. But I have a hard time believing it amounts to a substantial portion of the total. The real problem pirates - cheap, mass printers in SE asia - will still do it. And even then, it probably does not affect Valve’s bottom line much.regardless of the morality or ethics of it, the people buying these burned CD’s at 5$ a pop probably weren’t gonna pay 50$ for a real copy from Valve.
OK, you’re argument is that Steam prevented pre-release piracy in some countries by enabling a world-wide simultaneous release. Fine, firstly they could have used a significantly less intrusive system than Steam and achieved the same worldwide release. You could do that either physically via a decent distribution system or electronically.
Secondly, as everyone else is trying to say, the majority of pirates are not trying to get a game “cos them over-the-water have it”, they’re just trying to get it free. They’re not going to buy it just because they can. Most major games are released at pretty much the same time everywhere anyway aren’t they ? Delays are normally for translation and localisation reasons.
You know Steam doesn’t piss me off that much. I got HL2 free with a graphics card I bought ages ago but I had to download via Steam. I didn’t do this for ages because I’d heard the horrors others had encountered. When I eventually did do it I had to leave it overnight but it worked seamlessly and I was impressed with the technology.
This doesn’t stop the idea of Steam annoying me, it’s intrusive and controlling. Sure if that’s the conditions Valve wants to put on me having their software then so be it, that’s their call. But I don’t have to like it.
Saying that it helps prevent priacy is somewhat dubious because a less intrusive and controlling system could do everything Steam does to prevent piracy. Again, their software, their call. Now they have pissed off customers and there are still cracked HL2 copies floating around. Even if it’s only a few pissed off customers that’s still a few people who might not shell out the money next time.
As other people have said they’re only getting away with it at the moment because HL2 is so good.
SD
HL2 ain’t that great, either. It’s pretty sweet, but it doesn’t break much ground the way HL1 did. Most of the cool things you can with the engine they, well, didn’t actually use. And the fact is that the game is much more linear than HL1.
I’ll probably pick it up when it’s $10 in the bargin bin.
It’s funny, years ago gamers put up with horrible protection crap (like ‘find this word to start the game’) and we couldn’t do much about it. Gamers were a fringe group with little money.
In the past 10 years I went from a no-money kid with a parents-bought $2000 486sx/25 to an adult gamer who’s easily spent $50,000+ in computer parts, games and DVD movies over those years.
I’m your typical 9 to 5 joe with a late model car, a soon to be wife (and mortgage) and in a few years (perhaps) kids. I’d like to hope us adult gamers (old timers) won’t put up with this sort of crap. I’ll vote out DRM and it’s ilk the only way I can, with my money.
Steam serves a lot of other purposes than simply anti-piracy (which again, they seem very pleased with how much money it has saved them compared to other methods, so who are you to tell them it wasn’t useful?)
I don’t see the point of this argument. Steam reduces the disincentives to simply buying the game instantly online, if you want it so bad. No that isn’t going to change every pirate’s mind, but it most certainly has an effect that was worth it to Valve’s bottom line. They also have been able to simply account-ban and track pirates, which is another disincentive.
With Steam, you can instantly have your game localized in any language or country laws you want.
Except it couldn’t. You tell me how you would design it so it would be both as good but less intrusive? It people would get off their high horses for a second, they’d see that with Steam, Valve has done something very positive for people’s ownership. Once you’ve bought the game, you own all the content and the right to play it anywhere, anywhen you want. That means you are allowed, with none of this DMCA bullshit, to burn copies of the game, back them up anywhere, etc. It’s yours, you do what you want with it. They even have a DVD/CD burning system built right into Steam.
And of course Steam does a heck of a lot more than just combat piracy. Anti-cheating measures, auto-bug fixes, steady new game content, etc.
I’d say that the physics in DM breaks some pretty sweet ground. I’d say that the physics system in general finally get it right in a FPS game for the first time.
It’s exactly as linear as HL1. Where in HL1 could you really explore “off the path”?
Well, if you used a cheat in the introductory level and gave yourself all the weapons after you got the HEV suit, you could play in “Disgruntled Former Employee” mode and hunt all your erstwhile colleagues down with a crossbow…
Again, speaking strictly regarding piracy, Steam was defeated in about 1 hour by some kid in his parent’s basement. As a distro method, it has merit. As a counter-piracy tool it lasted about as long as “safedisc” did.
The word “instant” is misleading. It still takes several hours to download this game. With Steam normalized (I hope) it’s still faster and better to pick up a CD at the local Walmart. Unless Steam starts using a Torrent-based distribution method, it’s going to be quicker to buy the game (which is now available in every country HL2 was meant to be in AFAIK).
And “tracking” pirates? The mass ban was caused by the first HL2 pirated editions hitting the net. Steam didn’t kill them off when they should have (as soon as it was detected). Once Steam banned these pirates (and it was +20,000 accounts) new HL2 copies do not try to go online.
I say, stop using protection. Offer key based (or account based) online gaming but don’t fuck with the people who have no interest playing anything online. All valve has done is make a MMORPG-style authentication single player game. I don’t want Vavle’s permission to install it on another PC. I don’t want to notify Vavle when I install it on a new HD and I certainly don’t want to have to go online to authenticate my copy when all I want to do is install a game, install the patch (I typically keep all my patches on my local HDs because many of my old games no longer offer patches) and play.
No one has attacked Steam over it’s auto-patching, anti-cheating measures. These types of systems are already in use in all MMORPGs and many off line games and I have no problems having a nice “check for patch” button on my launcher. I have no problems buying software online (I’ve done it before).
And you’re mistaken if you think the buyer ‘owns’ anything. The idea of Steam is that you own nothing but the right to play (when the server authenticates you).
I loved doing that. Except they’d always fire my ass after the first shot. But I’d reload the game and hit them with a crowbar for firing me!
I got HL2 to work now, BTW. Found a great deal on some RAM and upgraded to a gig. The game is cool but they took off the “shoot your allies” option! sigh. Those people in City 17 need to be put out of their misery and, by gum, it’s up to me to do it.
While true, this wasn’t what I meant: there’s a lot of cool stuff to do in the game, but it’s much harder to find ways to use it. And they still ‘cheated’ the phsyics in a lot of areas to mske something spefific happen. In other words, there wasn’t much in the way of emergent coolness, or even scripted opportunities. Do you remember that early video where they had the Gordon going through an abandoned cityscape, setting off traps to kill guards? That was cooo. But you didn’t get to do much like that except in few short sections.
IN HL1 there were actually more ways to accomplish things. Often, the path split off or involved large, half-way open areas, in which you had many ways to explore and fight through. In 2, these didn’t show up where they were useful: instead of half-way open areas to fight in, there was a lot of room-to-room and hall-to-hall fighting, along with large areas that looked cool but had very little effect.
When they did incorporate such things, they were very fun. I don’t think they did enough of it. I wasn’t looking for Deus Ex 3 here (the DE2 totally sucked and blew at the same time!), but the vast majority of the game was on rails. There was one path and only one real way to go through it.