Try talking to somebody about political issues, try raising an actual problem to think about in this society and you will earn nothing but ignorance either. Go ask some people why they vote liberals/democrats if they are not going with their political agenda, the answer might probably be "because I always did" or maybe "I do not go voting".
Really? In my experience it was because the copy protection on the CDs was so good that even original CDs were not played properly in your normal CD player. At least my only purchased DRM protected audio CD did never work properly on any CD player. Only the rip-off worked!Slashman wrote: You keep talking about the music industry learning it the hard way, but that happened because people cared about moving music between devices. Steam doesn't stop you from having your game on a hundred PCs or from making a backup. For most people, that's fine.
The account binding that came with iTunes for example should not have been more inconvenient for the customer as games are with Steam now. The music industry would have just needed to tell everyone to be always online and lock into their iTunes account to listen to their music. I wonder why they did not do so ...
For Steam it is also not true that you can install and play a game without being online once. You need a Steam account and verify the game online every time you want to install it, even from a backup.
See and there comes the shut down of Steam in handy. Switch it off for a month or two and let us see if the people care? If not, it could at least help to bring them to other maybe more healthier free-time activities. Maybe they can put the time into doing something more important? It won't happen? Of course it won't happen, but it would be the only way that the people would even remotely care about account binding and DRM (in form of Steam for example).Slashman wrote: The problem is that you're telling other people what they should think is 'better'. If they don't actually have a problem with something, you can't convince them that they do until there is an actual issue.
You read about the upcoming Sim City 5 and its always-online feature? I won't even talk about Diablo 3 and the Battle.net as I have given up on Blizzard years ago. Still the people buy it like mad because they are blinded by a marketing campaign and will never care about the implications of the DRM system a game comes with.
Look after all it is business. I could not care less, if companies that offer solely through Steam close their doors or not. They can sell wherever they want, but if they want my money, they will have to offer an account free alternative. That means I have an installer that does not need to be online to activate. Even if Deep Silver will be successful with their Steam-only-way which I still doubt, they could have been even more successful doing it Steam-free as well.
The thing you mentioned with the sales is proven to be spread quite differently for CD Projekts Witcher 2 again. If offered a choice, more than 70% of the people will still choose a hard copy from retail without Steam being involved. The only market where it differs is the USA again with something about 70% of overall numbers through Steam, so quite the opposite of the rest of the world. Seeing that the USA is surely a big market and important I fail to see a reason why the rest of the world should get the same bad conditions that the Americans obviously love for the reason that they have no functioning retail market any more. Blame the consolisation of the US market for the death of PC retailers I would say.
