I do not believe these arguments are specifically for Win98, but it shows the simple fact that all games you purchase will become unplayable if you do not continue to update your system according to their schedule. The company literally has control over more aspects of your gaming than they should have. With retail, none of this happens, and you can upgrade at your own pace as your budget allows or you see fit.

The obvious solution for consumers to simply keep their PC upgraded. However, I feel people grossly overestimate how common this is. I live in a small country town outside of Houston, and I helped a variety of people with their PCs. Many are still running an older OS for one of many reasons, from budget concerns to being scared of the upgrade process. There are quite a few countries around the world as well where upgrading right away is not always financially feasible.

These people do play games though, and with Steam, they are being forced to shell out more money to continue playing games that have always worked on their system. This is the problem. Heck I'll just give an example. My mother plays Peggle through Steam on a Windows XP laptop. She only uses her laptop for email, internet, and the occasional casual game. She has no need to upgrade, and is perfectly content where she is. When Steam abandons XP support, there go her casual games unless she wants to shell out another $100 for an OS upgrade. That is a bit of a crappy deal, and there is absolutely nothing she can do about it. With retail, this never would happen.

As gamers, it is easy for us to berate each other for not upgrading our systems, but we are ignoring a large part of the population that functions very differently than we do.

You know, that would be a very valid solution, if it actually worked. This does not work the way it is believed.

First, the function itself is broken. I have told many games to not update, but the next time I launch Steam, the games begin updating again. This is a very common problem that has been echoed on the forums for quite a long time, and has yet to be fixed.

When it does work, telling a game to not update simply means it will not update automatically. When you go to launch the game, then you will be forced to update regardless. You cannot avoid updates, unless you set your Steam to offline mode and never go online again. Once you are online and Steam notices updates are available, then you have no choice in the matter.

The forced updates have always troubled me. I tend to use in game recording features for titles that support it, and if a surprise patch comes out the next day, often times those demos are no longer playable. I have lost quite a bit of footage, and thanks to Steam, I have no way to recover it since I cannot modify what version I play.

But in the end whose fault it is is totally irrelevant, the only important thing is the end result, and it is that Steam, or other similar DRM using DD, gives them the technology to do it, and even worse to do it retroactively. If ever the legislation change in you country you have the risk of having all your games censored or even completely deactivated.

For me it's a perfectly reason to avoid Steam or other similar services. But the aggravating factor with Steam is that more and more games starts using it even for retail effectively killing any other possible legal means to get the game.


But personally I don't blame Steam for selling games with DRM, I know that they are, most of the time, "forced" too by the editors, but if there is something I do blame them for is that they never ever have done anything to try to promote DRM-free gaming. Yes good old Gabe is always ready to say in random interview how DRM are bad and useless and how they hurt the customer but in the end it's only just that, some meaningless random words never followed by any concrete action. The only time they announced they would "render DRM obsolete" it was only a PR stunt to add another layer of DRM on top of the already existing ones.

And yet if there is a DD that would have enough "weight" to promote it's definitely Steam.

Yes, I do. But even GOG staff have stated they have an issue with people pirating the games from here.. (Was one of their reasons for why GOG couldn't stay the way it was) so even here they still add to the desire of companies to stop that...

DRM free is attractive, no doubt. Sadly, it's always going to be abused.

I truly loath Steam when it does this. The latest example of when this got in my way had to do with Plants vs Zombies and the transition from the standard edition to the Game of the Year version. I wished to keep the MJ Thiller zombie instead of replacing him with the new disco zombie, but Steam forced the update on me even though I had auto-update turned off.

This is always going to be contentious for people, I use a specific definition of DRM: Is someone else deciding whether I can play a game that I've purchased, in an either automated local fashion (e.g. CD check) or remote fashion (e.g. server auth)? If the answer is yes, the game uses DRM.

As far as I know I could give any game downloaded from GOG to 10 million of my "closest friends" and they would all be able to play it fine (no, I don't do this).

I actually dislike Steam type DRM even more than most DRM because of two issues: 1) people have trouble differentiating other, non-DRM dependent features of Steam with the actual DRM (e.g. the community tools, etc.) and since they like them, they defend the DRM, never realizing those tools and services can (and have been in the past) offered separately from a DRM platform; and 2) Steam is sort of a gilded cage, it's nice and convenient and so people are tempted to like it; it's still DRM and one day something really bad will happen; the 3 of us who hate Steam will say, "We told you so," and the rest of the world will say, "Meh, oh well" and sign up for the next Steam-like platform.

Because Steam serves the same ends as DRM, albeit in a different form, it is essentially DRM.

I think the real issue here is that the forms of DRM, and therefore the definition of DRM is expanding.

first of all, let's start with a random definition, let's say the first two sentences on wikipedia, it says that drm "...is a generic term for access control technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to limit the usage of digital content and devices. The term is used to describe any technology that inhibits uses of digital content not desired or intended by the content provider."

that covers steam.
follow up on the wiki sources if you so wish.
however, even if you argue that you would rather use a narrower term that is favored by publishers, then you can still make a case for steam being a DRM substitute.

Whatever way you say it, the effect of steam is make things tied to the platform (in it's intended usage), and thereby control access to you games.

Piracy is not a good reason for allowing DRM platforms to exist, never has been and most likely never will be. Show me the an independent research which states the accurate lost revenues because of software piracy.

Software piracy still exists inspite of DRM mechanism, it hasn't gone down, in fact I would say that with digital distribution platforms like Steam supplying to a larger client base piracy has actually gone up since more people have access to more games [and because more games exist now then 10 years ago, more games are pirated as well].

DRM mechanisms interfere with PAYING customers not those who pirate the games since a pirated game LACKS the DRM mechanisms. The only conclusion I can reach is that the DRM mechanism is in place to track legally owned games and excuse me if I don't like that.

I've bought every game that I own, some from GOG, some from Steam and some as physical copies. I've actually had to return some physical copies to the shop because of DRM driver incompatibilies and my machine. I've also had to contact Steam THREE times already because the client bugged out and locked me out of my games!
Never had such problems with DRM-free games [either physical or GOG-based].

Physical copy protections [like those stupid wheels in the original Monkey Island] were just as useless and annoying as DRM software since they were easy to circumvent on a pirated copy but not on the legal one [have you ever tried searching through the entire manual of Curse of the Azure bonds to find the second word on the third paragraph?].
And you know what, as someone who's developing a game at the moment, I understand the fear of piracy; I just don't think that it justifies such an ineffective method of control.

That is probably because they aren't reliant on a master server. As I said before, multiplayer being shut down is not DRM. This argument is academic anyway, considering that multiplayer is still up for the Steam'd version and Counter Strike 1.6 remains one of Steam's most popular games.

This is a perfectly fine technical definition. The problem is that you immediately abandon it.

Your stated definition requires it to be a technology that limits the *usage*. You can *use* some Steam games wherever you want by copying off the game. Some will run completely without Steam. Get the game, delete Steam and they run. There for the generic "Steam" isn't a DRM for those games whatsoever since it doesn't even exist at *use* time. Extending a the common definition of use to include acquisition is a slippery slope that leads to the assimilation of GOG in the consequences.

Personally I don't know what the more restrictive definition could be that you speak of nor do I know how I would use it (assuming the you is not the generic third person, in which case I don't know how one would use it).

With a technical definition you can throw in stuff like "if it looks like it, it is it" those just don't work Feeling and appearance just don't count at that level. Intent and arbitrary assertions are irrelevant when talking at that level.

Now, my personal proffered definition would be a more 'general use one' (something I'd use when talking to an outside CEO) and that one would include the entire process and how a users rights are being limited. This is not the exact technical definition although many in this thread are using it or a milder version of it. Rarely is anybody here using that technical definition and understanding the consequences of using it. Mostly it is just a "wave your hands" discussion (which is fine as far as it goes and expected in an open forum).

Anyhow I've exceeded my personal allotment of general definition time on this concept and will step aside. Anybody on the boarder of whatever (I don't have a good word for it) has now seen the ideas, others know it, never will or *know* that I'm an idiot (which isn't out of the question, but probably not for the reasons one would believe).

Can we include also re-installability and patchability in the definition of DRM, because thats commonly done before playing and often required when changing the OS, hardware, whatever..?
Because then no Steam and no Impulse game but every GOG game would be DRM free, wouldn't it?

Euh.. No. You can run some without starting Steam client... but only if Steam is running in the background, or if you are already in offline mode, I don't own any Indy games on Steam so maybe those are really DRM-free, even if I have some doubt (maybe some, but all I doubt) but I have Dark Messiah and if you try to run it without Steam the game will scream that Steam service is not running, try to copy it to another computer, it will be impossible to run it, same is true for Doom 3 (even if the game didn't use Steamwork originally and even if the CD-check was patched from the retail version), same for Prey and same all other "Steamwork not used for retail version" games I own.

So maybe I am just unlucky and all the games I own happens to be the only ones using Steamwork but somehow I have some serious doubts.

EDIT: There are some really DRM-free games on Steam mostly those that use Dosbox (and maybe some Indy games) but they are more the exception than the norm.

The argument that Steam is bad DRM because their service goes down is fundamtally flawed.

Gog could go down too. Hard drives and files get corrupted. Thumb drives get lost. Your gog installers aren't any more permanent than a multimillion dollar company like Valve. If anything they're less permanent, because Valve will outlive your current computer.

You are bit mistaken:
If GOG goes down I can still play any game I have purchased as I have downloaded all
If my drive crashes I play them on any one of my other computers as they are backed up

Nothing is permanent as we saw this past week but I can play my GOG Games unless of course I don't have a computer - in which case there will be more important things to worry about than games.

I simply stopped buying from Steam due to its DRM structure. I disliked playing my games offline but still needing Steam installed. I disliked the idea of losing all my games if I were ever (mistakenly) thought to do something ban worthy. I disliked the idea of Steam going down and losing all games. I have to wonder if a company is going under will it really work hard at making sure every user can play their games. Steam has too many negatives for me, and very few positives as I see it.

I will stick with GOG, GG, and Indie Publishers for my DRM free game purchases.

Speaking of multimillion dollar companies perhaps you should look into how alot of the old Doctor Who episodes were recovered......
and as far as your computer not outlasting Valve. Valve could be gone tomorrow and unless you planned ahead of time (cracking your games) you'll be in for alot of work finding all of the cracks after the fact.