Round 4 of Would you use Steam for Rebirth thread

[Slashman]

[David Howland]

The way people keep going on about license small print is absurd because:-
1. Unlike DRM where you play the game through the system and therefore the DRM company can enforce the playing physically by withdrawing membership. With a disk you pay your money for ownership, once the owner has had the chance to check proper ownership through activation the game can be played any time, any way the owner wishes. There is no way Deep Silver are going to send shock troops around to a private house to retrieve the disk and there is no way in any civilised country they would be allowed to do it. No Mightysword that is NOT comparable with driving a lethal motor vehicle on public roads at night at stupid speeds where one has a continuing legal duty of care on the roads.
2. Intellectual Property laws are there to protect the property from being stolen not being sold. Therefore courts will uphold publishers rights to establish ownership before use ie. verification. Also they will uphold prevention of illegal copying for selling on. No court in civilised country is going to enforce the publisher telling someone who has paid up to £50 for a game disk where, when and how they may play the game, no matter what idiotic conditions the megalomaniac publisher may have put in the small print. Since the late 1970s small print has to be reasonable for courts to uphold and case law has support rights of the owner as long as it is for 'PERSONAL USE'.
So can we have less of this claptrap about license small print that no buyer has put their name to and no court would take seriously.

[Gavrushka]

You know, I am always going to regret the fact that the trend will henceforth be towards Steam based gaming. - I use Steam, but I will always prefer a disk version... I'm of an age that my first Computer was bought in the 1970s and BASIC was loaded from a tape (Sharp MZ80K)... Then the next thing I knew, computer's game with disk drives... I was shocked when the first computers came out with CD drives, as it only seemed like a year or two before I'd seen them on Tomorrow's World... I mean - a laser reading a lump of plastic.... It seemed incredible...

In 1996 I had my first internet access, using some tatty old modem...

There is a point to this... Steam is just symbolic of how things are moving forward and, although I embrace it, I will still regret the inevitable decline of disk based gaming... BUT likewise I miss computers with 3.5" floppy drives -AND I miss cameras with film... But they go... We kick up a fuss and complain (and rightly so) but they still go... We feel indignant and protest, lose sleep and get angry, but our voices slowly fade into the background.

I shake my fist at lovefilm and Skystore, as I LOVE my Blurays / DVDs, but I wonder how long before films are bought on a Steam like app.

And I wonder what the next step beyond Steam and Sky store is going to be; I am sure someone, somewhere is planning it.


I don't like it but, as Darwin would put it, it's all just evolution.

[Slashman]

[fox jumps]

[David Howland]

Yes Gavrushka,
BUT; Your parallels are mis-aligned. You compare Steam and disk games with film being on disk and moving to steam, maybe.
Forget it, films have already progressed through the stage of restricted viewing, Cinema shows and disks to open viewing on tv. This was handled well because choice was always allowed and films have survived so well that there is no danger of Steam getting its GREEDY, CONTROLLING RESTRICTIVE, claws on them.
PC games however, namely X games have moved from dual marketing, Steam and disk - a little restricted, to Steam only - NO CHOICE AT ALL. This has locked about a third of old X fans from the future of X games. No! DRM may be on the rise now and may survive in a reduced form but it is too restrictive to go on as it is. Modern society marketing is all about offering choice, DRM cannot expect to completely hold the sale of the whole gaming market with no competition, sooner or later the retail world is going to insist choice be allowed, and if Deep Silver and Steam expect courts around the world to uphold their restrictive practices, they are living in a fools paradise!

[quase]

[NUKLEAR-SLUG]

[Jumee]

One thing, for people who don't want to use Steam cause it is game lending (NOTE: this will not work if you don't want to use it out of principle, or if you decided to boycott it all together):

step 1: wait till Rebirth goes on a sale
step 2: buy Rebirth
step 3: ???
step 4: profit

Stupid jokes aside, buying Steam games on sale could be a viable compromise, even in the unlikely event that, in say 2 years after release both Steam and Egosoft go bankrupt and you loose access to your game, you will have gotten many hours of enjoyment for only a part of the full price?

[EmperorJon]

[ConCorDian]

honestly is this ever going to end?

what people have to remember is that this is EGOSOFTS decision, if they decide to go with steam then its their choice to do so... griping about it isn't going to change that fact, EGO wouldn't make the move to steam if it didn't benifit them financially... they know people aint happy about it, they know they could potentially lose some older loyal fans, but they obviously believe that its in the best interests of the company, and the X series to make the move...

i dont like the idea of steam, but ive been running it now for a good bit, and ive had 0 problems with it, infact its probably made some aspects of the game better, if something goes wrong i just have to verify the files and before you know it problem solved!! i still dont like the concept and the possible downsides to them but right now thats all they are.. possibilities, imo its as simple as the band wagon is boarding, get your ticket and get on or walk....

just think this debate has went on long enough, every point thats going to be made will have been made... EGO will know the feelings of people, and will make the choices accordingly

[Mightysword]

[pjknibbs]

[quase]

Don't you think, Mightysword, that the engineering is included in the price of a car as well or the construction of the assembly line, the designers, the engineers and their software licenses they use on top, testing, developing and building the car.

You cannot compare the budget of a game development to the budget of a new car design. It is at least ten times more expansive and the building of the physical object comes on top. I work in this branch and I can assure you that even the basic body in white production lines alone, are more expansive than most game development budgets.
The car is not only more expansive because of the sum of its physical parts, but also because of the money spent to develop it. The difference is that a car will always cost its price when produced because it is a physical object of course, while a game when finished can be copied without any further investment.

This does not change the problem that when a copy is sold once, the ownership for this particular copy is no longer in the hands of the producer, but the copy right remains in the hands of the developer of course. Just like the original car design is still intellectual property of the car producer.

After all, bad example Mightysword!

[Slashman]