More like paying to see individual episodes of e.g. Game of Thrones on Amazon.

Although I'm not sure how that works; could be that your right to stream them is explicitly limited to a certain time.

ahhhh sid alpha

You don't need to run those games, you just need to run something like Idle Master with negligible CPU usage.

Our electricity prices are already very high, no reason to raise them even more. O.o

Ah I see, kind of cheaty. I think that is just silly but better than wasting 100W/h+.
Well, in Finland they are seemingly not enough as they are building two new nuclear power plants.

actually, no, that's not the case. Your subscription is to the Steam services, not to the actual games. Steam's ToS only covers Steam, and each individual game have is own ToS and license agreement.

Theoretically, even if Steam folds, you still hold your game licenses, you just can't use Steam to access them anymore. Same as when a game is removed from the store, it has no effect to the game license you have, and it can therefore stay in your library. The same applies to gOg (although instead of "subscription" they use the term "license to use")

edit - maybe it helps to think about it as a subscription to Steam to access your games? or something like that.

I must admit, regardless of the dev's transgressions (it was fairly obvious that they were a produce-a-minute shovelware peddler), I had my fun with the GooCubelets games, but then I've always had a soft spot for sokoban games. I've probably got some of the other games, I'll check Steam later on.

Edit: Looks like Steam has removed the AppIDs completely. Doesn't bode well.

Edit 2: The two Zatwor games are still on my account, as are the four GooCubelets games I had, Beast Blaster, Brilliant Bob, Why So Evil 1 & 2 and probably some others I picked up off Indie Gala. However, the achievement pages cannot be accessed, although I can still apparently unlock achievements.

There is the argument that these games are no great loss - aside from GooCubelets, the games were card-farming shovelware at its worst. But still, it stands to reason that if I enjoyed GooCubelets, there's probably someone out there who liked at least some of the other games. And it's a knock to game preservation, illustrating the dangers of relying on digital distribution (the games were "DRM-free" as far as they can be on Steam, so if you copied out the archive, they will run independently)

It's in the licensing agreement that everyone agreed to. Not sure how it holds up in court, and won't until someone tries it, but it does lay good groundwork for a defense either way.

It's happened before:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

' Good News " soon on Gog , :p

A game is not a "product"? Isn't this what piracy laws are trying to address? Is software a product? Does it "exist" in the physical sense? All very confusing, if you ask me.

What I don't get is: how much demand could there possibly be for trading cards from a shitty, universally despised game? Sure, "earning" this cards by receiving the game for free and idling it for a couple of hours is virtually effortless, but who in their right mind is going to buy them, even for 3 cents? How is it financially advantageous for a "dev" to wait for the individual cents to drip into their account? Are there really so many idiots on Steam that will buy every single card there is?

I guess some of the people that receive a free key for the game buy the other cards needed to make a 'cheap' badge. Don't forget that making a badge also drops a discount coupon, a background (can be sold), an emoticon for Steam chat (can be sold) and gives an increase in Steam XP that goes towards raising your level (which in turn raises the likelihood of future booster drops which can either be sold or used to make more badges)

Also remember that these developers are giving away many tens of thousands of keys for each game, and releasing a new game every few weeks. With that kind of scale, if only a small percentage of the free key recipients buy the other half of the cards they need to make badges you can earn much more money than you spent on making the 'games' themselves.

Hmm, hadn't looked at that angle: suckers that buy the other half of their collection. I'm still kind of surprised it pays off, but I guess it's not impossible. However, it's not so clear-cut: Vouchers are often for scrappy games and the discount is never higher than the ones you get at regularly scheduled sales. Backgrounds and emoticons don't sell for $hit, it's usually more profitable to sell a couple cards individually. And I never got a booster pack so far, so I guess their drop rate is almost negligible. But yeah, it's a thing, I guess.

I've had a few booster packs for games. I keep getting them for Pills 4 Skills for some reason (not a bad game incidentally, one of the better amateur Unity Personal Edition efforts), and on two instances I got a foil card that fetched 30 cents, so I'm not complaining.

But as you say, the coupons are usually worth diddly squat and I don't use Steam intensively enough to give a flying fuck about backgrounds or emotes (and I wouldn't care about them even if I DID use Steam so proactively), so it's really only worth selling the cards to someone docile enough to actually value them.