You're right, but that probably works only with smaller businesses.

If Activision sells gazillion games a year, and every year brings them more sales, they don't really need to hear why several thousand people refused to buy it.

Because even if they knew, they wouldn't change their strategy just for them.

People have been "suggesting improvement", meaning, dropping DRM completely, for years, but it didn't change anything. Why? Because sales are growing regardless.

I probably would never buy an iPhone because of iOS closed platform. There probably are many others. But if I believed Apple suddenly would make their platform open, I would be rather delusional, because vast majority of their buyers don't seem to care.

Ummm, no. You are completely wrong.

GOG does not revoke your license to e.g. an Electronic Arts game you have bought through the GOG digital store. They can revoke your access to it through the GOG service, but that is all. You still have the license to play that game, even if you can't redownload it though the GOG service anymore.

So no, the GOG game installer you have on your hard drive does not suddenly become illegal in such a case. In fact it is the opposite: Steam (Valve) can technically prevent you from playing a game for which you still have a legal license. So, you still have the game legally, you just can't play it anymore because you have some argument with the Steam store, not the game publisher.

Many people seem to constantly mix up the digital store (=service provider), and the game publisher (=IP rights holder). They are usually not one and the same.

Something claimed of so many companies in history and yet later disproved as society, tastes and trends move onwards. Gaming is a cyclical thing. There's always a new bandwagon that everyone jumps on every few years or so. It's Steam now - it'll be some new thing that the PC master race claims to be "TEH FUTUREZ" in 5-10 years.

When the initial reports of THQ's troubles started rolling in, everyone said that there was bound to be a buyer for a company so rich in assets. We know how that turned out.

The thing is, if Valve got into financial trouble, there'd be a reason for it, and there'd be very little reason for any financier to buy out Valve and save Steam. My bet is that Valve will hit rock bottom no more than 10 years from now, and that any potential buyer will probably buy the company, shut down Steam and just use the Half-Life, Team Fortress and Portal brands.

Given that HDDs have a fairly poor lifespan, I don't doubt that Steam will outlive any external drive that I have. But I can tell you one thing - I have games on CD that have far outlived any online service that they were associated with them by a good decade or more. I can just be thankful that the only thing that has died on those games is the multiplayer.

You mean TPB? Yeah, good luck with that one. Seeders are not at your beck and call, and they don't stick around for long.

Good for you. I've just spent four weeks in the UK unexpectedly without reliable internet and a Steam installation for which Offline Mode went Pete Tong after two days. I can be thankful that I did have a few GOG installers still on the hard disk of my laptop as well as my PSP.

This is something I've often wondered about. Many gamers on this site have said that they only buy Steam games if they're heavily discounted.

So lost sales is not the only cost to developers. There's also the reduced profit from heavily discounted sales.

From various torrent sites I downloaded content I never believed I will be able to see again. Some obscure anime series not being sold anywhere, perfectly downloaded in FullHD.

Some old magazines I used to read when I was youunger? Great quality scans, avaible for download, for free!

Superman issue #1? You can either buy a retail copy for 1mln dollars or download one for free. Gee, I wonder which one I'd choose.

Of course, there will be troubles with some content, Oh hell no :D That would be even more absurd, to switch to digital distro only to burn everything on Cds? I have c.a. 200 retail games in boxes, and it's already pain in the ass. There's no way I am going to burn anything on cds in any foreseeable future.

btw. when you buy a game on a cd, it will probably last long enough. But when you burn it on a cd, it will probably last around 10 years before oxidizing or whatever happens that makes Cds unreadable. It of course depends on CD quality.

Gaben once told that reducing a game's price around 75% makes 3000% more profit than normaly. Yes, three thousand percent.

If anything, large discounts only made the market grow bigger than it was. Why? Because back in the day, when games were not easily discounted, poorfags like me were pirating. Simple as that.

Also, with large discounts people tend to buy stuff they don't really want to. I bought so many games I have never even launched it's crazy. And that would never happen if it wasn't for deep discounts.

I am not saying Gaben saved PC gaming, but when everyone was "hurr durr PC is dead", PC market started to grow and grow, when digital distribution arrived.

That's an urban legend with no basis with reality whatsoever. A debunked myth.

Out of interest, what do you think was a bigger contributor to you no longer pirating games: the Steam DRM or the Steam sales?

Just make sure you first disable uploading on your Bittorrent client, because sharing the pirated game you are currently downloading is still just as illegal, even if you have license to that game already. I guess that works, as long as most don't disable uploads the same way as you do. Because if others disable the uploads too, then how can anyone download it in the first place? :)

And the pirated version might also come with some unwanted trojans. After all, that is the best way to lure people to install trojans on their PC, by bypassing all the Windows security features to stop something like that happening without your consent. "Are you sure you let this installer program do whatever it wants to your PC, by installing this software? Yes/No"

With GOG it is optional, you decide if you want the control or not. With Steam it is not optional, you willingly give the control to Valve/game publisher whether you will be able to access the game.

As it happens, I have most of my hundreds of GOG games backed up. It is even a convenience thing, much faster to install some odd GOG game for a quick try from my external hard drive, than first downloading a few gigabytes from GOG servers.

At first, when I bought my first Steam game - FEAR2, I was pissed.

I spent hours of downloading a 2GB mandatory patch with my 512kbps internet connection. Then I bought Orange Box and was pissed just as much.

Later, I had better connection, so it wasn't that much of an issue. Even later I started my bank account, and if I happened to earn some extra cash, I was wondering how to spend it on games.

I was buying mostly retail games back then, but I figured, they are still kinda expensive for Polish buyer. And then steam started their -75% offensive and suddenly I was able to buy not so old games dirt cheap without even going outdoors :P

So, to answer your question - deep sales brought me back from pirating games to buying them. When I asked myself a question - if I care more about DRM or playing good games for low price? The answer seemed to be obvious.

Also, DRM on physical games was always a bigger isue for me, so even today I am downloading no-cd cracks for games Steam DRM is less bothersome for me than a simple cd-check on a retail game.
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You're right, uploading is still illegal.
One minor earthquake, your HDD drops, and you're out of games, ha-ha! :P

My father had that attitude with music. Some of his old CDs were not playing anymore, so he decided to download every piece of music he ever bought and store it on HDD.

After few years.... zit....! HDD broke and 200 GB of mp3s went to hell.

I adviced him to download only the stuff he wants right here, right now, and he seemed to listen :P

Depends if Valve/Steam is a viable platform at that point anymore. Steam's success is so much tied with the success of x86 (mostly Windows) gaming. If future home users rather play their games on ChromeOS, Android, iOS or whatever future devices instead, don't be surprised if Steam has no market in those alternative markets, at least with their x86 Windows gaming library.

Steam will be eternal the same way as Amiga was. Ie., it won't be. Some people never learn about history.

As if GOG installers can't be copied from one HDD to another.

Funny, I have no objection of keeping all my Pink Floyd music in digital files on my hard drive, which I can easily copy to any of my electronic devices capable of playing mp3 music. I don't like the idea that all those devices should download the same music through ITunes. My mp3 car stereo does not even support ITunes.

Only because you have chosen to keep all your purchased media only in the cloud controlled by someone else. GOG going offline does not affect the GOG games on your hard drive. It is just your own stupidity, nothing more.

And yes, I have in many occasions been unable to play my _installed_ Steam games, just because Steam servers were offline, and the stupid Steam client behaved badly, like the offline mode not working as advertised. Last time this happened was last week.

That's really all the anti-DRM community is trying to tell developers: DRM may not play such a big role in converting pirates to customers, but it certainly annoys some of us who are customers.

Like you, I have a massive backlog of games. I've bought them on the assumption that I will get to play them someday, but DRM makes that assumption very dubious if those games are not already DRM free.

1. No earthquakes that I know of in Finland.

2. I dropped one of my external 3.5" HDDs last week to the floor, while it was still running. It still works fine. Then again, even if it had broken down, I wouldn't have lost anything, as it was just a portable HDD, just for moving stuff around between computers. I guess that's why I dropped it anyway.

3. Even if the external HDD suddenly gets broken, I just take the backup copies from another HDD.

Tell me, what do you do with your personal photos and family videos? Do you keep them all in the cloud because you are afraid of losing them if you keep them in your hard drives? You keep no local copies of them at all, because you feel you can always download them again from the cloud?

I stopped trusting that as one of the cloud/social services, where our family had lots of our personal videos and photos, sent an email earlier that they are closing their doors. We were in a hurry to download everything back from the service, and decided to make sure we always have local copies of them in a safe place from now on.

I don't store my personal files in the cloud not for convenience reasons, backup reasons, but for security reasons.

I delete every photo I get send via e-mail just in case someone hijacks my account and thinks it's funny to upload it on 4chan.

I try to follow a rule - don't upload anything you wouldn't like to see going public.

Those photos which we hold dearer to our hearts, we print and store in albums. Like some old people. But analog is rather trustworthy.

Well, if games being updated, content added etc - manually keeping up to date the install files for all my 600+ electronically owned games would be "a bit too troublesome". Then again, i have decent internet access and can wait to download them - especially as i know the gog one will always be up to date only that way. Ive got family and work to take care of after all - gone are the days of youth and idle time.