That sounded suspiciously PC-fanboyish. I can still insert a disc and play it without having Steam, EA or Activision dictate to me when I can play what. I don't have any games with online passes for single-player content, I don't buy any such games.

Of course, it does irritate me that PSN forces me to spend ages downloading patches for games, but of course, Steam doesn't do that, does it? Oh, wait...

And yes, sometimes entering codes for online play is irritating, but on the PC, we don't have such nonsense as CD keys, do we? Oh, hold on, wrong again.

Get off your high horse.

I actually own the consoles too, I just find it amusing people can try to justify Xbox Live over Steam. You literally are cut off form a huge chunk of your content if you don't pay monthly fees for most games on that service. How is that not a much worse form of DRM than Steam?

I don't know why you brought up patches, since I didn't say anything about that. And I'd probably argue that's a good thing for all systems. In fact, you kind of reinforced my point about consoles becoming more like PCs that way, so uh thanks?

My CD-key comment was to further my point that consoles are becoming more like PCs everyday, not that PC games don't have CD keys.

I personally am fine with most of the DRM out there, but it's the insane arguement that somehow consoles aren't already there or heading there is what boggles my mind.

You are from Europe for christ sake. Ever heard of consumer protection laws? Can your electricity provider simply cancel you out? Or your cable provider? Or can GOG simply decide to delete your account? Not they can't. Neither can Steam. Steam cannot treat you on a whim. They are in a contractual agreement with you. Where both sides have rights and obligations. Steam isn't "all powerfull". I don't deny that they try to test their limits, especially when it comes to people that try to cheat the system, but who says you have to take it? They have 40 million active users, don't you think that there would be a lot of upcry on the net, the courts and the consumer protection agencys if Steam would fuck around on a regular basis.

There is no German court case against Steam (apart from the original). Not even a notion in the legal documentation.There is,however, plenty of talk amongst european legal professionals how strict DRMs could be an illegal monopoly (Why do you think itunes ditched their DRM?). So Steam might need to adjust.

All this talk about "Steam can take my games away" is simply "future angst". If you are really afraid of abusive, illegal action by Steam, than adjust that with your own illegal power towards Steam. You have more power than Steam. You can get every game that is on Steam for free. And you get get all my games on my HD and simply kill Steam of and continue playing. This is excactly as legal as Steam doing the opposite.

I don't "like" Steam (I "like" GOG), but I respect it's accomplishments. And I would bet my hairy ass that the success of Steam is not based on the fact that it is a DRM, but because of the services they offer (which are actually your right). Steam is vastly successfull in Russia, a place were piracy is not only dominant, but (was) often the only way to get something at all. People for whom it was perfectly normal to get all your games free and without DRM are moving en masse towards Steam.

Anyway, this is pointless. People who flat out reject Steam without even considering it aren't people to be swayed by facts. I was a very vocal critic of Steam when it was a lot worse, but I tryed it and found out that I actually consider it a good service. If now Steam decides to cut me out of my games, than I will simply pirate Steam games from now on and take my money to GOG or GG. But I'm sure Stean won't do that, because I think they want my money...

Well, fair enough, that's the reason why I prefer my PS2 heads high over my PS3. Since Sony and Microsoft have introduced the ability to patch games, it's made publishers very lazy with respect to quality control, because they know they can patch it out. On the PS2 and original Xbox they were a lot more careful simply because a major gamebreaking bug could force a very costly recall and a lot of legal problems.

But as much as modern consoles fail to differentiate themselves from PCs in any meaningful way, at the end of the day, they still have the benefit of allowing me to buy a game, insert it, install it if necessary and play it without ever having any kind of contact with an external server.

Ok, and I also repeated myself enough - this is the reason we (we as people who are against Steam-only option) are going to voice for drm-free option. The bigger "Steam only? no thank you" crowd is, the bigger chance of negotiations with developers.

After all - it's developers decision if they want bigger piece of cake. But we have to show them first that our part of cake is bigger enough to care.


ps. I'd like to point out, that I've never said that developers shouldn't use Steam. I'd be first to tell them to use it, if they had doubts about that.

Off-topic as it is, I'll share an anecdote: for many years now, the main hub of Czech piracy have been student dormitories, particularly those of technical universities, as they had much better internet connection than everyone else and students are usually down on money and eager for entertainment. To this day, these dormitories are all linked with a large DC network, with enormous transfer speeds and high availability of pretty much anything you care to name. And from someone who lives in a dormitory like that, I've learned that the #1 topic discussed on the actual internal chat on the DC network in the week before Christmas 2011 was -- Steam sales.

You can't deny that's quite an achievement, no matter what you think of Steam itself.

If anything, the way that RACE and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic (and by a fluke, Prey as well) did it was perfect. On the one hand, you had a disc version of the game that did not require any kind of online connection. You can install the game and play it without ever connecting to any online server.

But the games also included a Steam code that provided you with the convenience of a download. It was a match made in heaven. It doesn't antagonise those that really don't like Steam, provides all of its benefits and none of its weaknesses.

But then, such Steam integration costs money, and if the publisher has nothing to gain from it, why should they do it? From a gamer perspective though, it was a superb solution and an incentive to buy the original.

Actually, I believe that was orcishgamer. I don't recall saying anything of the sort.

The point is - nobody is asking you to participate in anything. It is just your own choice. You are making a choice - the developers also. You both have to live with the consequences of that choice - you do not get the game, the developer do not get your money. And in my opinion that should be the end of it.

My apologies, then, I thought you did. But there were people saying that, so the point still stands. I'd like to know how many of those "no Steam or no sale" people are out there, because they're the ones the discussion is all about.

I actually donated to the kickstarter really early, long before it was clear they'd make their goal and justified it to myself because I wanted this game to be made whether or not it was eventually available in a way that I like.

As much as I like my point proven, we also have to take into to account that a lot of "no Steam or no playing" might have already pledged in good hope. Because even I suspected a bigger surge after those news.

Edit: ninja'd and proven!

There was something of a surge actually, but considering they announced quite a few desirable things it's hard to say what contributed and how. I spent quite a bit of time in the past few days on the comments page, and yes there were quite a few who, like me, contributed and then asked if a DRM-free version was possible.
There were a couple of people demanding (that's entitlement), but most people were just saying "it would be cool if you could do this". That's just letting the developer know your preferences (which is what the OP is about).

Yeah, well the methodology is flawed. But I'd love to see a chart of how the money poured in over time after it's all done, and see if this announcement caused the line to jump and by how much.

Because I've finally come up with an analogy I'm comfortable with -- the whole issue is like arguing for adding foreign-language subtitles to a movie. Only a very special kind of madman would go "Don't translate the thing! If anyone wants to enjoy the film, let them learn the Queen's English first!", which is what many people in this discussion have been painting the pro-Steam wing as. But as the distributor of the film, you have to look at the target language carefully, because adding those subtitles costs money you might not make back. So the point of the whole thing is to determine whether the "DRM free" requirement is the equivalent of asking for subtitles in, say, Spanish (huge), Polish (decent) or Welsh (tiny). And that's something we just don't know.