What I actually missed though was this post of yours. Sorry for drawing you back in, my comments weren't specifically aimed at you alone. I can actually relate to part of what you're saying, I just meant to say that it doesn't get any better by people bashing the bashers and the repititions all the time and so on and so on ad infinitum. All it does it raise the level of aggression, and I think what makes forums like this superior to a lot of others on the net is the general patience and helpfulness of its users.

Yeah, which is why I stopped here eventually. But I will respond to your previous post: I can see your point, but this place is not only a group of individuals, but also a community, and as a community, I'm pretty sure it's seen way more than its fair share of discussions about DRM, regardless of what I think about the topic personally. I understand newcomers don't necessarily see that, but I am also of the opinion that as a newcomer, you really ought to try and find out what is this place you've stumbled into before you start actively participating.

I like the metaphor of seeing internet communities as villages; when you first come into a village, you don't immediately start nailing your manifesto to the church door. And if you do, you can't be surprised when an old fart looks at you with disapproval because he's seen it all before.

Okay, fair enough. :)

Next you'll tell me that gog isn't really DRM free because some of the staff members have steam accounts...
It's easy to go down the foolery route to try and discredit the other side's position, no ?

You're downplalying the DRM free aspect of gog. Check the interviews, Q&A's and whatnot and then let me lnow if the DRM free aspect made gog's life any easyer when it comes to approaching and eventually signing publishers on and getting games on catalogue.

As it turns out it is both. You don't care about it Fred, but quite a few other folks do - your metric isn't THE metric even if it's the most popular metric. You have your motivations to hang around and others have theirs - no right or wrong about it, just different motivations for different individuals.

Like steam does you mean ? Yeah, i'd day that at the very least you should be greateful for that, i know i am.

Most times i don't see those who keep ranting about steam doing it untill folks such as yourself decide to bring up steam on every other post they make. Contrary to your claims above it doesn't seem to me like you're really THAT interested in talking about good old games, seems to me your much more interested in talking about steam and its place in our lives as the 8th wonder of DD. I fail to find a single post of yours in the vast majority of the spepecific boards discussing the good old games you claim to be so keen on discussing, but i bet it will take me less than one minute to find 20 posts from you from yesterday alone on the subject of steam. Like everybody else you're free to talk about whatever you like whenever you feel like it, just please, don't go spinning the table.

I'm with you on this one, Fred. Saying the DRM is irrelevant because it can be bypassed is just people rationalizing the room they make make to bitch and moan a little about DRM here and there and then turn around and buy whatever from whoever under whatever conditions while completely distancing themselves fromt their dirct responsablility in what we currently have and what their actions shape for the future of us all. And yeah, like you said, it doesn't help any.

"sigh" this steam hate is getting ridiculous, hell I would use steam if I had a connection that didn't suck so bad (20-30 Kbs, yes it is that bad).

Yes, gog.com is anti-drm.
http://www.gog.com/en/news/gog_coms_plan_for_the_future_gets_some_news

Q: Isn't your name Good Old Games? It seems kind of silly to sell new games on an old gaming website.

A: We've always been about our core values: DRM-free games, flat prices worldwide, and extra goodies included in our releases. So don't think about us as "Good Old Games"; think of us as "GOG.com", and perhaps you can work your way around that objection. ;)

Q: I see your terrible plot! When you guys start selling games with DRM, I will leave the Internets in disgust and never return.

A: Don't worry: we're devoted to those three core values that we mentioned above, and we know that if we ever abandoned them we'd quickly become just another digital distributor. Our goal is to become the best alternative digital distributor out there: the guys who do it differently, who respect their customers, and who can help change what the industry is doing as a result.



If you prefer gog.com to stay focused releasing older games that work hassle free, I agree with you. However, I don't mind them selling newer games as long as they're drm-free and keep up the good work on the old games.

It might not even be a democracy of the majority.

It's all about numbers: straightforward, single-minded mathematical optimization on the income - cost figures.

If they can make more money by selling at an outrageous price to fewer individuals than they can by selling at a reasonable price to many, they will do it.

In the case of games, it's not so bad, because you only buy a game once (ideally) and the competition is intense & uncooperative (so far), so they have to phase out the price overtime to get at those who wouldn't pay the initial release price, but it might not be so for other consumer products for a slew of reasons.

It is possible to charge sky high prices on vital or highly important goods or otherwise engineer an artificial scenario where people will crave badly for something and then make sure you charge them a lot for it.

Furthermore, a company will sometimes push their interests as far as customers will 'tolerate' it, but that doesn't make it democratic.

A customer might be willing to put up with an intrusive DRM scheme to get a game they really want (perhaps is a genuinely innovative and good game or perhaps it's just been hyped through the roof to generate a high artificial need for it), but that doesn't mean that they'd agree to have the DRM scheme on if they could vote on the matter.

And before you tell me that if they could vote on the matter, they'd vote to get the game for free and wouldn't make any money, I'd tell you the situation can be compared to balancing the budget of a country.

Yes, people would prefer not to pay any taxes and get everything handed to them by the government, but practical realities don't work that way.

So, they have to compromise with practical realities, but still vote to get as much as they can out of it.

Similarly, if the market was truly democratic, then the need for companies to make some profit would be recognized, but the ability of companies to push their interests too far would be kept in check by something a little stronger than just the customers having the option not to buy.

If people like Steam, fine, I don't care. Don't force it on everyone else though.

How to solve this? How about making Steam a paid service. That way they don't have to try to introduce ads into games and try to make people only purchase games from them. Only the people who want Steam are bothered (convenienced?) by it. Then I can go back to purchasing my beloved PC games. The least that could be done is to not require Steam for single-player games but require it for the multi-player aspect like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic did.

Yeah, exclusive agreements blow.

I hate consoles, mainly because of that.

Many of them aren't selling hardware, they are selling their exclusive rights to game titles or at least, that's how it was when I stopped buying consoles.

Sounds good if you only play single-player, but some of us also like to play on a LAN with our buddies and like to do it without having to be connected to some third party services on the internet.

Ah, I should have clarified. LAN should be free (as in, I'm free to do whatever I want with it) too. I'm just thinking about the people who want Steam for it's worldwide multi-player and community aspects.

Edit: I don't know whether Dark Messiah had LAN available or not.

what drm do paradox games use?
in particular their paradox webshop games?

I have never been clear on this, and i really want to buy crusader kings 2..............

basically, can i download and archive the installer, sit in a cave with laptop and reinstall the game from the installer without recourse to web activation, install limits, etc?

Well until the developer says "We no longer give a damn about releasing patches for the non Steam versions; go to Steam if you want updates" like it happened for King's Arthur I.

It depends a bit on where you get your game from. Their older releases had DRM attacked to them, but their games released on Gamer's Gate are all DRM free. The boxed copy of Crusader Kings 2 uses steam though (so if you don't like that, get the GG release).

Note that this ONLY holds true for their first party releases, they seem to take a relatively hands off approach to publishing, and lets the individual companies who make the games decide what DRM (if any) they want to use. Many use steam, but not all of them.

Note that King Arthur was only published by Paradox, it was NeoCore who made it, and the decision to only release the last patch on Steam was apparently made by NeoCore themselves, and not Paradox.

Publishers were almost always corrupted that way. Only they didn't have the means to do it effectively without online activations. Online DRM is the one you are really fearing and well, from the technical perspective, this madness came out of Pandora's box and never ever will go there back again.

You might feel cheated, but then you could seek for financial compensation. Only buy games very cheap henceforth. For a couple of dollars, buying a game is more like renting a game. Anyway from the DRM scheme used it's like renting. So only pay and adequate amount of money for it. Hint: Say no to >15 dollar per game.

However now comes the big problem. Many people think differently from you or me, or they do not think about this at all. They simply don't listen if somebody says: DRM is the source of all evil, like you are doing here.

There is not a deficit of voices critical for DRM. However the publishers want it like hell and the customers mostly do not object. And this thread will not make much difference.

The only thing we can do is hoping that people change their mind (not completely impossible) or that the publishers change their mind (some will, some won't) and offer games in all flavors for all customers, also for people like you and me.

Because me too, I bought more than a hundred (never counted all of them) in my life and every single one without online activation or crap like this.