What be the catch?
There is always a catch.
Hm I still don’t see why someone that downloaded a copy should care whether that copy is registered / watermarked to “John”, “Dick” or “Tracy” unless Valve will use information like the credit card number or something that makes it possible to link the leaked version back to the real life person that made the purchase.
In that case stolen credit card numbers will be used…
… and lots of Nigerian refugees will purchase them!
…and Mrs Applebee (55) from Cleveland, OH will have some explaining to do how her “copy” hit the torrent sites although she doesn’t even have a computer at home.
Being more expensive than retail is a pretty big catch for me and I hope many other Europeans (British too, if they insist).
As far as I can buy the physical copy using sweet, sweet cheap pounds, just like I did with Dawn 2, I have no problem.
I don’t see how this is any different than having a unique serial number for each owner. That binds the copy to the purchaser as well. It doesn’t seem to be stopping piracy at all.
From the way they say “complimentary” (sic), I assume that this really is going to be paired with other DRM. In which case there’s nothing nice about it, as it’s just another layer to their existing DRM scheme.
I think there’s some confusion over exactly what this is targeting. My reading was that this was aimed at letting people publish their own games outside of Steam’s store but with account-tied Steam authentication, not as a replacement for the existing authentication, since that seems redundant.
Edit: The link in the article is useless, but it looks like there’s some more info here.
- Can I sell my Steamed game to someone else?
If not, piss off.
sooo angry
I thought we already had unlimited installs on Steam. My understanding was that I could install it on whatever machines I wanted and install and uninstall as many times as I wanted but I had to be logged in to run. Is this incorrect?
You had me going for a couple of seconds there, but a one time pad won’t work – both encrypter and decrypter need a copy of the pad, i.e. would be copiers have easy access to the pad.
Having Valve servers “decrypt contents” also goes nowhere (at least for static/offline games). It’s effectively the same as not encrypting content and instead storing it on Valve’s servers; you could simply get the data once legitimately, save it, and hack the .exe to use that rather than ask the server for it.
I agree with whoever said this doesn’t strike them as an anti-piracy measure at all, but rather a means to make the modicum of insurance DRM provides not so painful to legitimate customers.
It can’t very well make DRM obsolete if it’s DRM.
How about the end of painful, face-stabbing DRM? I am cool with that.
Can Spies still face-stab?
And now Stardock has unveiled it’s own flexible DRM system, GOO: more details here. And it will allow you to de-activate your association with the program, so that you can sell it to someone else, allowing for a second-hand market too.
EDIT: I didn’t look in the Impulse thread, where this is already being discussed. My bad.
This was also brought up in the Impulse thread, in which Brad commented.