And what constructive comments do you bear, good sir?

This isn't about third party DRM though, this is about the restrictions the Steam service itself places on games.


@Eclipse: I think there is some confusion here. When I say 'Steam' I'm referring to the service, not the client. I'm talking about the fact that they have a level of control over when and how you play the game.

I have Half-Life 1, Opposing Force and Blue Shift on cd-roms and they work without problems even on win 98.
That's because retail versions of Half-Life never used steam to begin with, the first game to use it was Half-Life 2.
Of course if you buy Half-Life from Steam now you get another version of the game

We're not talking about voluntary gestures of goodwill, we are talking about technicalities. That is what this thread is about. The topic is "Is Steam DRM?", which I say "yes it is". What I said is absolutely possible for Valve to do without any repercussions on their behalf. The topic is not "Is Valve a nice company?" to which I would also reply "yes it is", because I also believe they would not do it for no reason, but that is not the question at heart. GOG on the other hand is not DRM, because even if you were banned there are no repercussions in regard to playing your games as long as you have downloaded them once.

people that never used the service tend to confuse the two things sometimes... Technically there's a much, much bigger possibility in GOG closing or doing weird shirt (as we experienced) than Steam banning you.
Also, GOG can close your account just as Steam can do, of course in the second case you wont be able to play the games without applying a crack, but the first case is more prone to happen

This is still a customer-service oriented answer as opposed to one regarding DRM.

Made them yesterday. Basically, while I recognise that it's a DRM, there are far worse DRMs out there and why people go anti-fanboy over Steam on this forum (and, really, only on this forum) is beyond me when there are worse things happening on the world. Plus the one thing that annoys me more than fanboys are anti-fanboys.

Half-Life 1 never used DRMs, the lobby server was hosted on WON, and as it's closed of course you can't play online with the old retail version.
You can play online with the one now on steam and you can still register your copy even nowadays (not that's played online anyway)
Also, they released Half-Life 2 Deathmatch for free

It's a bit like complaining that EA shut down the servers of their old sports games: you would expect them to do that because no-one was using them at the time. Besides, multiplayer being shut down is not DRM. Technically, it's an ongoing promotion with Nvidia and the company formally known as ATi. No sign of the promotion ending, however.

Steam is DRM, there's no doubt about that; the only thing that matters is if to you, the added benefits of the platform outweigh the things you give up. And as I've said time and time again, for me, they do outweigh the things I give up.

You expect a software company (ANY software company) to support a 12 year old OS? And if you do I hope that they keep ignoring you because I for one want my software to be as stable as possible and not keep open known attack vectors just because someone doesn't want to upgrade.

In two or three years Win 2000 (which was never supposed to be a consumer OS) will be 4 generations old and XP 3 generations old. Why would they dedicate resources supporting such old software? Why would they have to work around issues in those OSes that have been fixed in recent ones? Why should I be vulnerable to attacks because that piece of software MUST support a 10 year old OS?

Select the game and tell it not to update ;) Also, this is a publisher decision on how to balance the game and if you don't like it take it up with them or don't patch.

Yet again, this has nothing to do with Steam but with the publisher and the rating institutions in each country. Germany doesn't tell Steam to sell you games without blood, it tells Valve or whichever else publisher did the game to sell it without blood no matter how they distribute the game. Also, the nameless M rated unmodified titles passed the rating comity without being asked to have modified content.

Thank you. I wanted to post something similar, but I would probably just be interpreted as insulting him.

Of course they disable paid features. And why can a title like Grand Prix Legends still played online, even though the vendor of this title already vanished?

May I recommend opening the console in HL1 and typing connect ip-address, where ip-address is the IP address of the server you're trying to play on? And if you don't know how to find the IPs, may I recommend and [url=http://www.gametracker.com/search/hl/]this to you?

I just not expect anything but disabling games remotely that worked fine yesterday. Is this so hard to understand? Why should players with games that work very fine on these platforms forced to move to a new OS with compatibility problems with their old games? (You know on which site you are posting here?) And then try to start it. Have you ever tried, what you suggest here? You don't have the choice with Steam. Most of them passed not, because they are not submitted to the respective authorities (this costs money). In Germany these unrated titles must only sold to matures with written age verification (like pr0n), even if they are rated 3+ by PEGI or others. If Valve would remove all titles with no German rating from their catalog, they can close their store altogether.
Thus they pretend to do something about it, annoy some legit buyers and otherwise ignore the issue. If somebody gives a child access to the Steam client with Audiosurf installed in it, then someday Valve adds a totally inappropriate Left4Dead Demo to the games list, just for marketing reasons. On the other hand, they cripple legit titles bought in UK, when someone moves around in Europe and uses them in a country with restrictive law.
The single problem around DRM is that Third-Parties can do all these things after the money moved to them.