Posted December 28, 2014
The requirement to login anywhere is of course DRM. It's the Minecraft style of DRM.
Early online updaters like the one from Sierra, which updated Half-Life before Steam came around, didn't require any login credentials and don't qualify as DRM. It wasn't needed, because HL's DRM was still disc- and key-based instead of account based. Even the CD key wasn't checked by the updater, so Sierra's online updater was completely DRM-free: It just conveniently downloaded patch files, saved and applied them. (Running the patched game was a completely different story, of course.)
Now I clearly see a trend of "PC gaming" slowly changing into some sort of "cloud gaming" depending on the Internet and that's the point where I quit. Nowadays game developers do not want to sell games anymore, they want you to continuously pay for "entertainment services" run by them, with weird "EULAs", bogus "subscribers agreements", server downtimes and so on. But this is not going to happen for me, I have more than enough paid games in my backlog, so I can just sit this out, even for a decade if I have to.
Early online updaters like the one from Sierra, which updated Half-Life before Steam came around, didn't require any login credentials and don't qualify as DRM. It wasn't needed, because HL's DRM was still disc- and key-based instead of account based. Even the CD key wasn't checked by the updater, so Sierra's online updater was completely DRM-free: It just conveniently downloaded patch files, saved and applied them. (Running the patched game was a completely different story, of course.)
Now I clearly see a trend of "PC gaming" slowly changing into some sort of "cloud gaming" depending on the Internet and that's the point where I quit. Nowadays game developers do not want to sell games anymore, they want you to continuously pay for "entertainment services" run by them, with weird "EULAs", bogus "subscribers agreements", server downtimes and so on. But this is not going to happen for me, I have more than enough paid games in my backlog, so I can just sit this out, even for a decade if I have to.
Post edited December 28, 2014 by jtsn