Online Activation Is a Ripoff
Online activation is not reasonable, it's anti-consumer.
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Online activation is not reasonable, it's anti-consumer.
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Online Activation Is a Ripoff
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
I agree, I think steam is annoying and gets in the way, I miss the days of discs that installed the game and all you needed was the disk to play it, they were simpler times.
One major problem with online activation is that after a certain amount of years you will simply no longer be able to play them. When you want to play a 15 year old PC game now you simply download DOSBox and look in the game's manual for the copy protection (if you've lost it you can quickly look it up on the internet). But when you'd want to play Bioshock 15 years from now you'll probably have to find and install some kind of crack to bypass the online activation, something that can cause a lot of trouble.
I completely agree with this, while I use Steam, you can, in essence, with a little finagle, play the games without Steam.
He makes a lot of good points.
He makes a lot of good points.
Steam isn't innocent in this either. If you trigger a false positive on their VAC system (which they claim is impossible, but isn't) you lose access to 99% of servers on which to play your MP games on. And if you close your account and open a new one, you can't use the same games to install and work with your new account, you have to purchase them all over again. Your money goes down the tubes, and you're out even more replacing your collection. They steal your money, essentially and leave the customer with no options.
You have absolutely no recourse to fight it, they won't tell you what happened or when, they won't answer your emails with anything but a form letter saying their system is perfect. They will ignore requests through the BBB. Basically, you are presumed guilty and you get nothing but doors shut in your face by Valve.
This happened to someone I know and soured me on Steam. Why would I want to invest in a game collection on there if they can just snatch it away without any explanation or ability to defend myself?
This is obviously a specific example, but it just highlights one of the many problems with digital distribution, DRM, online registration, etc. It treats us as thieves who need supervision and takes all rights out of our hands as consumers.
You have absolutely no recourse to fight it, they won't tell you what happened or when, they won't answer your emails with anything but a form letter saying their system is perfect. They will ignore requests through the BBB. Basically, you are presumed guilty and you get nothing but doors shut in your face by Valve.
This happened to someone I know and soured me on Steam. Why would I want to invest in a game collection on there if they can just snatch it away without any explanation or ability to defend myself?
This is obviously a specific example, but it just highlights one of the many problems with digital distribution, DRM, online registration, etc. It treats us as thieves who need supervision and takes all rights out of our hands as consumers.
Online activation seems perfectly reasonable for online-only games, such as TF2. The only times you can't activate the game, it's unplayable anyway. However, there's no damn way a game that has a single player campaign should require online activation.
There's nothing wrong with a Steam version of a single player game if there's also a box copy that doesn't require it, and in fact I'd probably use the Steam version because I don't plan on getting rid of my account, or cheating and getting banned from VAC, or anything like that, but it's important that they give that option for single player games.
P.S. Thanks
There's nothing wrong with a Steam version of a single player game if there's also a box copy that doesn't require it, and in fact I'd probably use the Steam version because I don't plan on getting rid of my account, or cheating and getting banned from VAC, or anything like that, but it's important that they give that option for single player games.
P.S. Thanks
I remember there was a time during the late nineties here in Argentina when companies realized they wouldn't be able to curb piracy if everything they offered from game price to service was a hundred times more expensive and lacking in support than what your local "pirate" could whip up(we're talking about 56k modems era here in a non US/european/japan area).
In fact these merchants would actually compromise on what they sold ,make sure it worked and offer an exchange in case it was faulty.
So the big companies finally started selling original games at reasonable prices and improved their service.
Nowadays the idea of globalism seems ironically lost to these "massive" platforms,as trying to acces them from a non-american/european/japanese location will most likely result in the system stating lack of support or knowledge for this areas.
What does this means?
That a great potential customer base in a whole lot of countries is left with nothing else but access to pirated software if they are lucky enough to have access to a provider or a good internet connection.And the companies in keeping a few pennies have lost the chance for massive income
In fact these merchants would actually compromise on what they sold ,make sure it worked and offer an exchange in case it was faulty.
So the big companies finally started selling original games at reasonable prices and improved their service.
Nowadays the idea of globalism seems ironically lost to these "massive" platforms,as trying to acces them from a non-american/european/japanese location will most likely result in the system stating lack of support or knowledge for this areas.
What does this means?
That a great potential customer base in a whole lot of countries is left with nothing else but access to pirated software if they are lucky enough to have access to a provider or a good internet connection.And the companies in keeping a few pennies have lost the chance for massive income
I also hate DRM, and online activation, mainly because until a few months ago, I had no internet connection. I had just got a new computer, which I thought I would be able to walk into any store, and pick up a game and buy it without looking at the system requirements. Bit me in the butt when I did that with my HL2 Collector's edition. I was very mad, it was months before I could play that thing.
Although I love Steam, I don't have a bunch of DRM to worry about, I just need an internet connection for a few hours to get my games downloaded, then I could put it in offline mode and I can play my games at any time. But I do think it would be nice if they added a way to do it over the phone or by email, or something. Just fior people that don't have an internet connection.
Although I love Steam, I don't have a bunch of DRM to worry about, I just need an internet connection for a few hours to get my games downloaded, then I could put it in offline mode and I can play my games at any time. But I do think it would be nice if they added a way to do it over the phone or by email, or something. Just fior people that don't have an internet connection.
And idiots, you don't win pirates by detracting value from your product. Seriously has no one learned from the mess that is the music industry? Punishing legitimate customers, means that later in life those customers are going to hate you because you made their product worse, because they paid full price. And doing it under the pretence of piracy? Pay full price = game can be taken away from you at any time, hoops to jump through. Piracy = you always have the game, few/no hoops to jump through.Captain Pancake said:
If you want to stop piracy add value to your product and don't punish paying customers using BS excuses. Because if people like you, your product and your company they are less likely to pirate! Starcraft is a good example of this, I used to be someone who would've bought Starcraft as soon as it became available, now with all the splitting it into 3 parts (*cough* moneygrab *cough*) and stupid hurdles to jump through I probably won't bother.
I do mostly use Steam, and while I don't particularly like that they can halt your access at any time, I do it for the convenience, because I can't be bothered carrying discs around with me.
I had a similar issue like this when trying to purchase "Guild Wars" a year or two ago. I got it off Half.com real cheap, and it installed pretty well, but the registration code for the game wouldn't work because it was registered to someone else. I sent a few emails back and forth with NCSoft and they basically told me that they wouldn't change the registration code to be labeled as 'owned' to me. So I purchased a perfectly good copy of "Guild Wars" from someone that won't work because they already played it. -_-
Might not fit in this topic--"Guild Wars" being a MMORPG then a single-player game like "Bioshock" is--but I think MMO's can face this outcome as well. I thought I heard from the GameFAQs forum that some servers were down for a Month with WoW a few times that some people couldn't play. If that story is true (though it could happen), then I'm sure they got their $15 USD dollars of play time...
Might not fit in this topic--"Guild Wars" being a MMORPG then a single-player game like "Bioshock" is--but I think MMO's can face this outcome as well. I thought I heard from the GameFAQs forum that some servers were down for a Month with WoW a few times that some people couldn't play. If that story is true (though it could happen), then I'm sure they got their $15 USD dollars of play time...
Before DRM, I made a point of *never* pirating games. My first few were pirated when I was a freshman at the Milwaukee School of Engineering but any game I tried and liked I bought the CD for the next time I was at a software store. I still have most of those CDs somewhere.
Now I travel internationally for business. Even my factory-installed, 100% legit Windows complains about all the changing time-zones (and regions). If I can't trust a game with DRM to work reliably here in the US, I certainly can't trust it in Turkey, Germany, or Russia.
Interestingly, what I found when I lived in Russia for a few years was that DRM and draconian licensing procedures were one of the primary root causes of Russian piracy *not* in response to the piracy. Pirate copies were often retail price or higher but they were available in the original language (not just poorly translated into Russian), played off your hard-drive (great for notebooks and now netbooks), and clean of DRM and other forms of malware.
Now I travel internationally for business. Even my factory-installed, 100% legit Windows complains about all the changing time-zones (and regions). If I can't trust a game with DRM to work reliably here in the US, I certainly can't trust it in Turkey, Germany, or Russia.
Interestingly, what I found when I lived in Russia for a few years was that DRM and draconian licensing procedures were one of the primary root causes of Russian piracy *not* in response to the piracy. Pirate copies were often retail price or higher but they were available in the original language (not just poorly translated into Russian), played off your hard-drive (great for notebooks and now netbooks), and clean of DRM and other forms of malware.
Funny that you write about this now. I just recently bought Empire:Total War and once I installed it and played for a while I decided to move the icon to the desktop from the weird location it was hidden in before. It was my first time using Steam and I didn't know how to start the game without the icon and I got tired of using the search function to start it. Turns out moving the icon was a mistake. A big one. The game couldn't find a certain steam_api.dll file anymore and since I didn't know where the icon had been before, I couldn't move it back. I had to reinstall Steam and the game in order to make it work again. Believe me, that was not the way I was planning on spending my first day with the game.
This is what I was pointing out about the SC2 LAN thing. People are like "oh it's only authenticating with Battle.net, that's fine." No. There is no need for it to do that, and it's not a "reasonable compromise." When [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.133037.2984905] I [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.133037.2986052] said [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.133037.2988022] that [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.133037.2989472] stuff [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.133037.2994740], I had already read elsewhere about the Battle.net-authenticated LAN-like mode. It isn't good enough.