Good Post Cormoran

Exactimento!

well im looking forward to what gog has in store for us. remember the only constant is change. keep moving forward you will be around for years to come. just dont forget where you came from ;)

Awesome! With all the activation stuff has now, it's gotten really hard to buy anything...save for GOG. Glad to hear you guys are trying to expand :)

Ugh, GOG! How dare you become even more awesome!?

Plenty of DRM doesn't require me to be online to reinstall. I just transfer it from one hard drive to the next and I'm good to go. If a product totally unlocks after that brief process, I say I have full ownership. It feels no different than entering a CD key.

In the past I've had to deal with DRM that gave me a hassle when I switched hard drives, and I don't like that.

As far as I'm concerned, a one-time digital activation is reasonable for digital purchases. I don't like piracy, and I don't think DRM is terribly effective, but have no problem with it so long as it's a minor inconvenience and unobtrusive.

Resale of games is a very good point-one that's not personally important, but it is an important distinction when it comes to the concept of ownership digital games. I hadn't considered that, but I think it would be important as digital distribution moves forward to create ways to 'loan' games to friends or to have the option to sell digital copies back (green man gaming sort of does that now). Right now, a lot of DRM throws up obstacles for those things that you would otherwise be able to do with physical copies that you've paid for.


As to who does it right, well, I'd have to weigh it alongside what other digital distributors provide, including pricing, title selection, and reliability. I mainly use Steam, Amazon, and D2D (and GoG, of course), and I avoid GG and Impulse. Amazon and D2D have generally the types of DRM I like- a quick activation and I'm set. Their pricing and reliability has also been flawless so far.

I have over 80 games with Steam, and I've never had a problem with them, but I recognize people's issues with it. Some control is out of your hands (though offline mode is a decent practical solution, even if it doesn't get to the heart of the matter), not to mention various regional issues.

The main reason I use Steam is because of their history of reliability with me, the features of their platform, and frequent sales. In the few times the my internet has gone down, I've always been able to play games offline.

In principle, though, I always cringe when I go to purchase a game and see that it requires another piece of software to run, be it Impulse or Origin. It's not necessarily enough for me not to buy the game, but I'd look elsewhere first.

A decent compromise for DRM that I've favored would be to do what GoG did for TW2. A short time after the game is released, a patch is released that eliminates the DRM and future copies are sold DRM free.

Yes, that really was a p.i.t.a.
And that's exactly the (one!) point, that makes me worried.

drm cannot be "benign" and as far as I'm concerned there is no compromise for it.
remember, drm exists because you make it so, with every purchase you make you support shitty drm, you support the violations of your own rights.

games are not a vital necesity in life, they are not like water and food and shelter etc, you could have a nice living without games, so nobody is forcing you to buy drm'ed games.
you buy them because you're not seeing the whole picture, because "YOU NEED IT NOW" (but you really don't know why), because you act like a child, on instincts, without thinking, making stupid pre-orders and even paying a premium price on a drm-infected title.

Obviously, that game/title can be played in, let's say, a year after it's release, patched-up, matured, with all dlc and expansions and shit included, much cheaper and, most importantly DRM-free! here on gog, from now on.

Do you lose something playing a game a year-two after it's release an not on day-zero? I tell you: you lose absolutely nothing, you even gain by playing a matured, cheaper and drm-free product!!!

you say drm is now unobtrusive for you. tomorrow, those execs, seeing a lot of people considering that drm is "unobtrusive" for them, they'll add another layer-small-step-unobtrusive-drm-feature. And that will seem, again, "unobtrusive" to you. The day after tommorow, the same etc. When it'll be obtrusive to you? See my point? You have to be able and say stop from the begining, otherwise you're screwed. Be smart.
Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intensions. And drm is hell for sure.

Think a while before you act on (animal) insticts. Wake up

Do you really think you're going to persuade people like that? Slippery slope arguments and inflammatory language aren't compelling.

If you want to look at overall trends, I'd say DRM is becoming more user-friendly. Limited activations used to be somewhat common. It was unpopular, and, in a real shocker, companies responded to that. Ubisoft's online system is also unpopular in the gaming press, and they've also backed away from it somewhat.

Companies look to protect their products and also satisfy consumers. If consumers are unsatisfied with DRM, a smart company will address that. PC gaming has experienced a resurgence in recent years, somehow in spite of this evil DRM. Maybe most people just don't find it that bad?

Let's take the wild assumption that DRM doesn't get more obtrusive than it is. Are people really being taken advantage of by having to enter a code once?

It is not hard to imagine that people are willing to pay extra money to play a game on release or that they find DRM to be a momentary inconvenience that's forgotten almost instantly. They aren't childish or animalistic. They enjoy playing a game when they want to and are satisfied with the service they get from places like Steam to offer repeat business.

DRM-free a year after its release? I wish!

Most of the games on GOG are old; very, very old. Some originally had DRM, but most had copy protection (i.e. "what's the third word in the second paragraph on the 33rd page?"), so there wasn't much to remove, if anything.

Modern games don't lose their DRM after a year or two and they certainly don't end up on GOG. If that were the case, we'd see tons of more recent titles on here, without any DRM. Right now, I don't see these illusive games, because they're not here. The most recent game on here is The Witcher 2 and that's only because CD Projekt makes it and they own GOG!

I buy most games on Steam because they're usually cheaper than in-store prices. You generally see games ranging in price from $60 to $70 in Canada, whereas on Steam the prices are often much lower. Even if the price isn't normally less, they have tons of sales every year.

I call Steam's DRM benign because most companies will put DRM into their games and if I have to choose between SecuROM or Starforce and Steam, I'll choose Steam every single time. This doesn't mean I like DRM. I wish no game had it, but that's simply not realistic because piracy is a very real issue.

I know what you're going to say: "People already pirate games that have DRM!" Yes, they do, but most DRM schemes aren't designed to fight these people. These are the people who'd pirate the game regardless, probably because they feel they're entitled to it for some reason or another.

No, DRM is there to keep you from loaning your game (or giving it away) to a friend or installing it on every computer in your house. Is that fair? Maybe, maybe not.

From our perspective it looks unnecessarily restrictive, but when games were released without DRM this occurred on a regular basis. One of the most notorious examples is Starsiege: Tribes, a multiplayer FPS game released in the late 1990s, that no DRM or copy protection -- not even something as simple as a disc check.

Dynamix (the company that developed the Tribes series) lost tons of money due to people passing their discs around to their friends. That's why Tribes 2 forced you to make an account.

Oh and for the record, when ANY of us buys a game, we don't own it. We've purchased a license to use that software. That's it.

AFAIK, GOG doesn't want day 1 releases. If my sources are right, 'new' is supposed to mean 1-3 year(s) old. I highly doubt that those kind of people you are talking about would come to a site which offers minimum 1 year old games. And by the way, Steam, GamersGate and the other 'mainstream' publishers also offer games like Doom, Quake and the kind, so I don't really see the big worry here.

People who says that DRM is no big deal never had problems with internet. I have no internet at home right now (yes, I'm writing this at work :/) and I can't play most of my steam games. GOG games on the other hand...

Steam has an offline mode.

If you're just copying a previously installed game from one folder to another, then that isn't really a proper "test of ownership". The key issue is whether you can install a purchased game without it needing any network connection - if it requires one, then its tied to the service/provider and will die when that service (or your account with that service) closes.
As Shamus Young notes in his Authorization Servers article, this means you losing your purchased content when the server goes (and there are plenty of previous examples of people losing out with DRMed music services).

Last time I checked, Direct2Drive encrypted the game .exe itself breaking compatibility with any third party mods that needed to alter it.
Consider yourself fortunate. Steam can be particularly nasty when things go wrong since your purchases are linked to one account and will all fail if that account is suspended - some examples here, here, here, here and here.

A bigger issue long term is that the reliance on a working Steam account can be exploited by Valve, by charging an annual (or even monthly) fee to keep accounts active. With 35 million accounts, a $5/month fee would bring in over $1.7 billion (assuming an 80% acceptance rate) with little extra effort on Valve's part. Provision for this has been made in seciton 4B of the Steam EULA (which is even helpfully titled "Subscriber Agreement" just to make things clear), subject to Valve giving 30 days notice.

Of course, as more people sign up for Steam accounts and link more games to them, the amount that such a fee could generate rises geometrically with Valve being able to consider a higher fee as well as having more users to exploit.

Offline mode is no help since, according to Valve's Offline Mode FAQ, it has to be configured in advance, for each game and even then doesn't work properly (many users reporting that they have to re-activate with Valve after a few days).

And then there are the privacy/security implications - Valve can track what you play (as well as where and when) and if their system was compromised, it could be used to distribute malware to all subscribers. Valve have protected themselves in their EULA (section 9C: "VALVE DOES NOT GUARANTEE CONTINUOUS, ERROR-FREE, VIRUS-FREE OR SECURE OPERATION...") but it should be a concern for anyone using Steam.

So that's why I would never touch Steam with a bargepole myself - the other services (Impulse, D2D, GamersGate) do allow more leeway since they activate on install only, but anything that links multiple purchases to a single account and requires activation against that account can be abused in a similar fashion.

I consider GOG a safe purchase since their downloads are completely stand-alone and would be happy to purchase new games from them.

Which is fine, unless he wants to install a game that needs Steam to authenticate it. Or unless the offline mode fails to work properly (which it has done for people).