Is that sarcasm? 'Cos while Steam restricts you in a few ways (e.g. no giving free copies to friends) the experience is so superior I continually choose to buy games on Steam over any other method.
Hell, one of the biggest reasons I patronize the Humble Indie Bundles is because I can get the games into my Steam account.
I liked Humble Indie Bundles precisely for their DRM free Linux releases. Other good DRM free source is GOG (though requiring Wine). Steam is of no interest to me because of DRM promotion. It's a choice the company has to make. You can see DRM free releases being successful, so those who stick with DRM need to be discouraged.
There is a positive side of Valve's interest in Linux though. It'll encourage others to pay more attention to Linux, and eventually more DRM free games will be available too.
DRM needs to be discouraged by its definition IMO. I was saying above, that if that raises an objection that making a financially successful game without DRM isn't possible, then such objection is not true. Or if you want to phrase it in a positive way - those who don't use DRM need to be encouraged.
The thing is, for some games (competitive internet multiplayer), some forms of DRM are a net positive, and arguably strictly necessary. After easily used cheats started to be widely distributed for CS, the game experience for the typical player went trough the floor, and the community voluntarily and without any kind of financial incentive created and enforced a type of DRM.
Steam takes that to the next level -- because they can add fines of real money (losing your account), and actual permanent bans (of credit cards and real identities) as the cost of cheating, the gaming community embraced it and cheers for it.
So, we are in a situation where the vast majority of the player base considers DRM not just acceptable, or good, but a strictly necessary part of the product. The things that are commonly considered the evils of DRM (ability to take away ability to use product) are instead considered a primary selling point. How's that for food for thought.
I think your argument can be rephrased in a way, that multilayer games require third party arbiters (server admins, GMs and so on), who should be able to ban violators of game rules, reconcile conflicts and so on. I fully agree, but I don't see why it should be equated with using DRM for the actual software.
And to single player games this issue doesn't apply at all.
> I think your argument can be rephrased in a way, that multilayer games require third party arbiters (server admins, GMs and so on), who should be able to ban violators of game rules, reconcile conflicts and so on. I fully agree, but I don't see why it should be equated with using DRM for the actual software.
GMs do not have the power to that job, unless they have something that's approximately equal to DRM. Catching a subtle cheater is a much, much bigger job than cheating. If someone cheats every day, you'd be lucky to catch him once a month. To actually stop cheating from happening, you need penalties that are high enough to make that once a month count -- so permanent global (so they won't just move on to the next server) bans (and ip bans don't cut it), or failing that, monetary punishment.
Tell me how your third party arbiters achieve that without essentially implementing DRM?
> And to single player games this issue doesn't apply at all.
Except when there is publicly visible scoring/achievements system that you want to keep pure. >90% of new games on the market are either mp or do that.
I still think using any kind of DRM is an unethical overkill for controlling the MMO..G and the like. Firstly, the game can be designed better avoid (some) exploits. Secondly automated mechanisms can be built on the server side to prevent cheating (monitoring unnatural stats boosting, unrealistic mods and so on). I agree, that it's not easy to do it manually. So, write server side protection code for that. It's not DRM, and not some kind of client targeted kill switch. If the user is caught - ban will follow. Let them register again, and get another ban if they want to waste their time. And if that cheating is so hidden that it's not even unnatural IG - who cares (i.e. it's still not fair, but at least such user doesn't have big impact).
From the player perspective, I'd choose a multiplayer game based on the community. Sometimes community can identify cheating just by observing something unnatural, and those users will quickly be boycotted. So GMs are needed to intervene when human decision is necessary. They not necessarily have to detect the issue themselves first.
Is that sarcasm? Steam is DRM. If Valve decides they don't like you, they can delete all your games. If Valve goes bankrupt, they can delete all your games. If Valve gets bought by another company, they can delete all your games. If you like paying full price for a game rental with a variable return date, then Steam is great.
If they have publicly promised it, and people have taken action upon it (for instance buying games that they wouldn't have bought otherwise), then if they fail carry through on it you have grounds to sue for promissory estoppel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel for more on that.
Winning said lawsuit is not a sure thing. But the pledge may wind up being more binding than it would appear on the surface.
"Unless there was some situation I don't understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available."
So, that's pretty clearly not a guarantee of anything. And furthermore, as another poster there said, the thing Valve employee doesn't understand is bankruptcy. Unless there is a legally binding agreement, they won't be allowed to just give away such a valuable asset. Bankruptcy doesn't mean they fire everyone, shut down everything, and burn down the buildings. It means they sell off the profitable parts and try to keep them running. And the ability to control tons of DRMed games people have installed is very valuable.
A real, legally binding promise would be something like KDE had with Trolltech. Trolltech explicitly (real contract, real lawyers, etc) guaranteed, even in bankruptcy or change of ownership, that if they stopped making open source releases, then Qt would become available under the BSD license. (This was more important back before Qt was already GPLed, as it is now)
Hell, one of the biggest reasons I patronize the Humble Indie Bundles is because I can get the games into my Steam account.