UK Retailers Accused of Blacklisting Steam-Required PC Games

[darksideslayer13]

I like that most of the comments here are about the good and bad of steam with only a hand fall talking about the thread head.

as some one that sstill buys games from a store there is more then one shelf the game store by me has about 16 shelfs of brand new and some slightly older ones. A lot of witch need steam, some of witch are cheaper then steam. so were this te truth of this tale is supect to me.

and were is all this stuff about needing a conection to play the games singel player comeing from. I lost my connection for 2 weeks but i was still playing the games i brought of steam.

 

[JediMB]

1) You're not free to run them offline any time. You have to be online for every installation. Not every game supports offline mode, even some single-player games. And, every now and then, Steam simply decides it wants to go online again and gives you no other option. Good luck when you're roaming with your laptop.

2) Maybe downloading 10 GB of data is faster then installing it from the disk where you live - not everywhere. I for one have a 5 GB per hour limit (otherwise my speed drops to 1/20 for the day) and that's still above average. Of course I CAN install a retail Steam game from the disk - only that the Steam installer is so fucked up that some games take 2 hours to install (SiN Episodes, Saints Row 2). No thanks.

3) Passwords and other shit aren't just a problem of Steam - I say we should refuse EVERY shit like that.

4) You can't resale retail Steam games.

5) When Steam (or other services like that) go down one day, you're screwed. And one day, it will.

I could go on.

1) Eh, I'm no expert on offline mode, since I'm pretty much always online, but I've never had any trouble with Steam games not running offline. Unlike Far Cry 2 and a few other SecuROM-infested titles.

2) Too bad. Maybe eventually Slovakia will catch up on the Internet side of things. I'll cross my fingers for you.

3) I say most of them aren't even intrusive enough to be classified as an inconvenience. Except when Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2 keeps logging me out from my EA account, which is really fucking annoying.

4) I see the lack of possible resale as a good thing, personally. I might sell one of my old games maybe once a year, if that, since chances are that I'll want to play the games again in a couple of years of they were good to begin with. As far as principles go, I regard a video game as an experience, and don't think a consumer has any inherent right to sell the disc the experience was delivered on to someone else. (Granted, this means I can't lump off Call of Cthulhu or any of the other less than stellar games I got in my QuakeCon 2010 pack on someone else, but I'm okay with that.)

5) Or you're not. For retail games it's easy enough to release a quick DRM-removing patch, and for Steam digital distribution games they can prepare offline installers for people to download before the servers go down. Valve has made a promise that no-one is going to lose their games if Steam goes down permanently.

 

[Shycte]

That's funny, I'd imagine doing that would earn them less money, overall. "Hey, nobody has this game I want?" "It's on Steam!" "To Steam, with our CASH!"

Logical flaw, you can't use cash to pay for games on Steam.

 

[PurplePlatypus]

Well UK retailers, if you consistently stocked more and a better verity of PC games it wouldn?t actually be a potential problem to sell games that use Steam because there would be a lot less possibility you would lose them for good.

And hell DD services aren't really the proper competition right now. DD is a bit lesser known and a lot of people are attached to having physical copies. I'm sure they losing a lot more business to things like Amazon.

 

[Plinglebob]

The reason they're doing this is because from their point of view its like buying a piece of clothing in one shop, but then having to go to the local Supermarket to have the security tag taken off. I can't think of any company that would be happy with selling something that forces their customer to go to a rival store because they're scared (rightfully so) that they will just stay with the rival store. No-one would accept this sort of practice with any other good or service so why should game retailers?

 

[Korolev]

It's really not that surprising that physical stores would have a problem with electronic stores. Of course gamestop, EB games, Game and other retailers dislike steam. That's natural. They're direct competitors, and Steam, frankly, has a huge advantage over physical retailers (no staff, virtually instant delivery for those with good internet connections and they don't have to worry about refunds or scratched disks). So it's completely natural for physical stores to try to force publishers to not use Steam. It doesn't make it "right", but it doesn't make it "wrong" - if you are a business, would you stock games that would steer customers away to a competitor?

It's only a matter of time until physical stores stop selling PC games completely. And if the next batch of consoles also go online (as they probably will), then the brick and mortar stores will die out completely, and I have to say.... I personally won't miss them at all.

 

[Michael Hirst]

Wait a minute! "This game is on Steam and will detract from our profits so we're not selling it" So by NOT selling it you're allowing Steam to have 100% of the game sales of that game...this is ass backwards logic.

 

[9Darksoul6]

@The Escapist staff
I'd really like to read objective articles on this site from time to time. You know, the ones that aren't essentially some dude's rant about news he read elsewhere...

 

[Booze Zombie]

Logical flaw, you can't use cash to pay for games on Steam.

The cash is what goes directly into the bank account, so in spirit...

 

[robandall]

I agree with DRM, despite the annoyance, but Steam's involvement beyond that is irritating and necessary. But hey, it could be games for windows live.

 

[ph0b0s123]

I think the point being missed here is whether games are sold on steam or use 'steamworks', which are two different things.

If a retailer says that they will not stock your game because you are selling it on steam, that's unfair. Gamestop could not say they won't sell a game just because it is also being sold be Wallmart.

Now if a retailer says they don't want to stock games that use steamworks, then I have some sympathy. Would Gamestop want to stock a game that has Wallmart logo's over it and requires you to load a wallmart app before you play the game. A wallmart application that bombards you with other game offers from wallmart, when you play the game you purchased from gamestop. No, they would not. So I do think people are being a bit unfair by how much of a hard time they are giving the retailers in this story.....

 

[tkioz]

This is only going to backfire badly on the retailers, seriously have they forgotten "the customer is always right" and if the customer wants this game and can't get it in that store, chances are unless they are very loyal they aren't going back to that store.

Also I wonder if this "ban" extended to Portal 2?

 

[vxicepickxv]

If I were valve, I'd set up a couple of game retail stores, stock it with games for all the consoles, and nothing else but Steamworks games and merchandise. So many iPhone covers, so many plushies.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

Thank God there are smart people on this planet.

Steam doesn't let you to return a broken game you bought retail to the retailer you bought it,and it also doesn't let you to sell it to somebody else if you didn't liked it,killing the used market.
These are two things a consumer has the right to do,that Steam makes them unable.
Since no judge is feeling to making something to defend the legal costumer's rights,it's good to see that the retailers themselves decided to do something.

Imagine being in the place of a retailer,and have people coming every day to you that ask you to take back the games you sold to them,and trying to explain them that you can't because of Steam.
Imagine all the troubles and hassles retailers are getting because of it. Steam doesn't let retailers to work as they should.

What retailers say isn't that they will ban games that are also sold on Steam,but games that use Steam as a DRM and don't operate without it.
And it's a good move,and I wish this 'ban' will be also applied to other countries.
Not all players in the world have a constant 24/7 to the internet,or want to keep forever games that they bought and ended up to be below average.

 

[Therumancer]

I want to have control over what I own, if the winds change in say 10-15 years, STEAM goes down, and I say want to play "Fallout: New Vegas" I'm pretty well screwed...

Except Valve have promised that in the event that Steam would go down, all its games will be "freed" from the Steam servers. If this would happen in the form of patches or separate installers remains to be seen, though, and I sincerely believe that Steam will still be running as usual in another 15 years.

The thing is that if a company, or major service like STEAM, is in trouble the last thing they are going to be doing is work on a project like that. Rather they are going to all be wondering about their jobs, the company's future, and trying to find ways to cut corners and make money, not to do work for what amounts to free.

I mean it's a nice thought, but not something I'm going to put faith in. I think it was said to build confidence in STEAM, but under examination isn't really a promise they are going to be able to keep under the circumstances in which it would become nessicary.

That said, it doesn't get into the central issue of the game itself. The game data itself is stored on STEAM. Unless I'm using a 15 year old computer that I never uninstalled the game from, where do I get the game itself, something I paid for. When STEAM goes, it takes my games with it. When it comes to disc based games, I have the game itself right there on those discs, I might need some kind of program to help run them (like you use DOSBox for some old DOS games) but I could do it.

The only way Gabe could keep this promise is if he basically had the authority to release the games on STEAM as Freeware after the collapse of the service, and I very much doubt he has that Authority. Even so it would be dependant on being able to find a torrent, or a website with enough storage space that is willing to archive all these old games, knowing it's likely not going to be making any money off of it.

In the end we might agree to disagree, but I support the retailers here, even if their motives are less than pure.

On a much larger scale, I think humanity is asking for it. As conveinent as digital technology, cloud storage, and all of these other things happen to be, we're storing very little information physically anymore... at least not in the first world. Some kind of techno-apocolypse happens like various speculative fiction and sci-fi authors have proposed, we really are starting to render ourselves that vulnerable. Video games are the tip of the iceberg, as conveinent as they are, E-readers like Kindle are starting to cut into books and stores like "Borders" seem to be feeling the crunch.

I'm hardly a technophobe, but to be honest I have been of the opinion for a while that digital technology needs to be legislated (as much as I hate big goverment). Right now it's causing all kinds of issues with the very idea of property ownership, and at it's current rate is going to replace physical records and perhaps even hardcopy publication entirely. I don't mind change, but again in 10-15 years I think there are going to be some pretty big problems that are already starting to appear, the eventual fate of things like STEAM being a big deal to us gamers, but the tip of the iceberg overall.