Blasphemy, thou shalt not miss - spell the Dragunov, such a beautiful piece of kit... Sorry, day dreaming again.
Hmmm, talking about GOG and Steam... Does anyone know where I can buy a copy of KOTOR2? Steam surely doesn't have it. GOG didn't...
How many other digital distribution sites have gone down? What's to stop Direct2Drive or Steam from offering the same re-download feature should either one close its doors? Steam could effectively run in offline mode forever once you've downloaded and activated your games. You're just a paranoid one aren't you? Steam has been growing exponentially in its current state and already provides an good deal of profit for Valve because it's free. It's completely against the Steam business model to charge a fee. One only has to look at Portal and Alien Swarm: games given away for free only to spread Steam because it's free! There's no downside to simply having a Steam account and not using it. It allows it to spread to all markets. Charging a fee means that very few additional accounts would be activated and many existing ones would cancel. It leaves Direct2Drive poised to take over. DRM's purpose is also to keep games from spreading across torrent sites like STDs at a frat house. It's no coincidence that DRM free games are as easy to pirate as typing "Age of Empires II torrent" into your search engine of choice and following the instructions on a simple text file. Compare that to the difficulty or impossibility of pirating games with DRM. One has to understand that just because good people like yourself buy these old games doesn't mean that someone else won't take it and throw it on a torrent site for the world to pirate. Shhh, we don't speak of offline mode. It implies that Steam isn't Ubisoft's always-on DRM. We can't have people thinking that now can we?
I just bought Duke Nukem 3D from there last week, my first purchase. Lets see if this is a stunt and it will return client based. By the way Duke is still a very fun game, really enjoyed playing through it...oh after installing Eduke. Seriously how did we ever play game with those controls back then?
There are a rare few. Or at least, ones which don't work correctly/entirely when pirated. And of course, many games with multiplayer features cannot be pirated at all, that's due to the nature of multiplayer games often requiring an account to connect to the publisher's servers. How many people play BFBC2 online with a pirated copy? Yet even that is a form of DRM. Stat tracking could be client side entirely and the game would still function the same, but aside from being full of hackers, there would also be pirates galore. And yes, the main server can go down and lock people out of playing. But of course, no one will complain about that as DRM. It's not as visible as Steam or Ubisoft's godawful method.
Had a little thought this morning. Maybe it's just a name change. Good OLD Games gives a limited variety of in-store content. A name change would broaden appeal and content.
In the case of D2D or Steam, they would have to remove their DRM first (which would mean at the very least recompiling every item in their catalogues) so if events forced them to close suddenly, users would very likely be left in the lurch. Um, no it can't. Doesn't the term "loss leader" mean anything? Giving away freebies makes sense to a business if the cost can be recouped later down the later - that makes the "giveaway" an "investment". That's why Steamworks is made available free also - Valve is a business, not a charity so they clearly see a longer-term benefit, which can be guaranteed by imposing a subscription charge on accounts in future. That isn't paranoia - that's plain business sense. If you don't believe this, then just look at the Steam Subscriber Agreement section 4B: "Valve reserves the right to change our fees or billing methods at any time and Valve will provide notice of any such change at least thirty (30) days advance." - for a system where you pay in advance for games, that section has no purpose other than to open the way for a future subscription. You'd see a reduction in new accounts I'd agree (so it won't happen until Valve feels Steam has reached near-maximum size) but existing users can't cancel without losing their existing collection. Now how likely do you think someone with £200+ tied up would be prepared to lose that over, say, a £20-30/year fee? That fee would give Valve an extra income of £500-600 million will little to no extra effort on their part. Except the same situation applies with them, they could impose a similar fee as could Gamersgate or Impulse. Any system where multiple games are tied to a single account is subject to that same possibility - whereas single-game/account systems like SecuROM online are not (if they tried imposing a fee they'd have almost no ability to stop users walking away). In addition, Valve could use the extra income generated from subscriptions to buy-in more "exclusives", marginalising their competitors further. Sounds like a games publisher speaking. No seriously, much time did you take to verify this? No torrents currently exist for GOG games whereas pretty much any DRM-ed offering (Spore, Empire - Total War, Half Life 2, even Civilization V) has multiple offerings listed. On that basis, DRM seems to encourage piracy because the pirated product offers a better user experience.
Greetings! You dont mind losing credibility, AstralWanderer? PS: All of the above games are available "elsewhere".
Try this if you really want to check - but you'll find the links going to unrelated webpages (like the 1954 sci-fi film Gog) or to sites advertising "private, high speed" downloads with no working torrents. This could change quickly if Gog stays down though. Of course! Before Gog, you would have had to use "unofficial" channels. But the GOG versions haven't been made available to the same extent.
Greetings! Because no freeloader cares about GOG versions. The game is available, thats all they want.
Still astonishing though, as the GOG variants are more hassle free. I liked the Idea, "here's the Installer that runs on modern OS, do with it what you like" but they don't turn up (too openly) on torrents?
Greetings! "Heres is the installer of an old game that runs on modern OS..." Who is the potential buyer of an old game? Someone who played the game years ago, and should now have no financial problem in purchasing it again, and collectors who usually also dont have a problem buying games. The majority of freeloaders jump from AAA game to AAA game like a plague of locusts in crop fields, they just dont care about old games. The "Heres is the installer of a AAA current game that runs on modern OS..." would make this the star version to pop up in torrents sites.
There has been a minor update with a Youtube video. That doesn't seem like the kind of video they'd make for a site that's shutting down for good or going into financial administration etc. Here's the frame of the video that really caught my eye: It looks more and more like a publicity stunt to me, hopefully with the release of some major titles like Baldur's Gate & Planescape Torment.
If Valve suddenly went out of business (about as likely as Ubisoft releasing a good DRM sytem, it seems), I doubt they'd be bothering to update their Steam platform any more and/or would make allowances that would remove the need to be connected to the Steam servers. That, or someone else would do it. Valve really aren't like other companies. What you've said here would make complete sense if we were talking about Ubisoft or Activision, but we're not. For a start they're raking in enough from Steam sales to easily cover the development of a small game and release it for free, and then some. The benefit of releasing it for free is two-fold: 1) You please your current customers, making them more likely to buy your games in the future 2) It almost guarantees a huge number of new sign-ups of people who just want to play that game. Steam already have huge market share but it could never hurt to have more, and the game sales from these new sign-ups would probably cover the development costs. I would say these are the two reasons they are releasing it for free. Valve is a business for sure, but they're no more interested in making money other than to keep the business going and growing. Gabe was rich even before he founded Valve. What makes Valve different is that they're still a privately owned company, and the fact they've resisted floating their company on the stock market to be at the mercy of shareholders tells you as much as you need to know about how much profits and money mean to them compared to their products and customers. So they're essentially answering to their customers and not making decisions based on how it will profit their shareholders. Whenever you read an interview with Gabe or one of the developers, they're always talking about 'giving gamers value', so if (BIG if) they ever charged a subscription for Steam, I would think that a) it would be optional, and b) they would think of a way of making it worthwhile and attractive for their customers.
Fallout 1 & 2, both were available on GOG right? Both could easily be torrented as non-GOG versions long before. As you say, there's no need for GOG version torrents since most games available through GOG are already quite easy to get. Most of them just need a quick no-CD/CD key crack. Notice, Astral, that I said games were available as torrents, nothing more specific. Though I applaud your clever way of making it seem like I implied GOG spreads piracy. Also spot on. There's not as huge of a demand for old games, even before you get into the discussion of whether a person wants to get the GOG version or not. Look for modern games on a torrent site and it's easy to see why publishers wont let new games be out on GOG. People try, and they try hard (see Dragunov's LOL at impossible to pirate games) to pirate new games. But while it may be possible to play Assassin's Creed 2 without Ubisoft's DRM, how easy is it? More difficult than running a nice and easy GOG installer. GOG is a surefire way to find your new game that you spend years developing ends up being whored out on /v/. For reference, see: Borderlands. A quick crack and you can play online with all the legitimate players. All sorts of less-than-legal gaming communities had fun with that one. +1. They are quite unique in that they are both publisher and developer. Steam is not just a store, it is also Valve's only way of propagating their own games. It serves Valve quite well to get word out about it so they can more potential players for their games. To incur a required fee for Steam would effectively make every single Valve game a pay to play game. Would you play a single player game like Portal if it had a subscription fee? Certainly not. Valve would be shooting itself in the foot. As a break-off discussion, what grounds would Valve even have for charging a fee? A subscription for the right to later buy more things? That's laughable at best, even Bobby Kotick would be chuckling at you (while planning to later implement his own version). A subscription fee for the client perhaps, with the friends list and overlay being locked unless paid for? Possible I suppose, but with free services like Xfire and every new game trying to be its own social network, unecessary. I can only see what smc hints at, a premium service with an optional fee, not unlike some brick and mortar stores with premium membership fees and discounted products.
Valve may well be making a healthy profit from Steam, but what company wouldn't want to make more? And even if Gabe has a verifiable halo and light shining from every orifice, he's not going to be running the show forever - at some point a more "bean-counter" orientated person will take over and change company policy accordingly. The danger for Steam subscribers is that changes can be made and enforced at Valve's whim. Of course, there are plenty of ways a subscription charge could be justified or made more palatable - making it cheap to start with (ramping up in later years), adding a low-value freebie ("account insurance" or a free game) and even waiving the fee for those whose purchases exceed a certain level (they are, after all, simply digging themselves deeper into the system). If I misunderstood your previous statement then I apologise unreservedly - it did seem to suggest that DRM-free products were pirated more, when if anything, the reverse has been the case. GOG products though do have added value in including, where needed, appropriate emulators (DOSBox, ScummVM) preconfigured and extras like soundtracks and PDF manuals. And while GOG has focused on older games, they have also a number of more recent releases (e.g. Emipre Earth III or Two Worlds from 2007) so it is overstating the point to say that they'd be of no interest to the warez crowd, even if their focus would be on the newest shiny things.
