Well, then it’s restrictive to me and to others, maybe less so to you. Obviously, the quality/quantity of restriction is a subjective call. It doesn’t change the fact that it is more restrictive than no DRM at all.
As I said, there is a significant trade off with Steam. I get DRM on my games, but I also get matchmaking, friends, achievements, anti-cheating measures, groups, no physical media convenience, weekend sales, etc. Valve gives me an incentive to put up with it. Impulse also offers features to get me to use it, not as many as Steam, but it’s getting there and I have no doubt that Brad and company will make it awesome.
When DRM comes with good incentives, I don’t think most people have an issue with it. Customers get dissatisfied when the value of a product is perceived to be lowered because of restrictions on ownership.
Sorry if it went over your head, but I pulled words out of your sentence just like you did mine to change their meaning. So please don’t hack up my posts and make them into bullshit, thanks.
Steam introduces external dependencies. It means that my ability to use something is contingent on an external organization continually allowing me to use it.
Things that only work as long as an external organization continually enables them are services, not products. So I don’t object to Rhapsody or World of Warcraft, which are services sold as services; but I do object to DRMed iTunes downloads or Steam games, which are services sold as products.
Now obviously this isn’t a bright line (what about Tivo, which is both a service and a product, but the product is useless without the service?), but as a general rule, I don’t like subscribing to services via up-front “purchases,” especialy when the people I’m buying from don’t seem to realize they’re selling a service.
You selectively omitted words from my quote without even the decency to use an ellipsis. You fabricated something and stuck my name on it. I took an exact quote from your post. I assume you think I distorted your meaning somehow. Care to explain?
How do you weigh in then, on the general issue of software licensing, trade, reselling and ip rights? In a pure purchase market, the consumer has the right to resell anything he has purchased… yet Ebay has found it necessary to append their legal policy so to restrict sellers of used software, such that the seller must agree they own the IP and distribution rights, Ebay removing violators.
Same for Windows, and EULAs exist for everything in general, which relegate software to a licensed and not purchased commodity. I don’t see how an external dependancy changes the legal footing, the external dependancy merely enforcing the same position that other software licensers enforce by removing resale copies.
To be clear, there are practical differences, but you seemed to be outlining a position based on the concept of legal ownership of software, which is not fundamentally altered by Steam. As a further disclaimer, note my objections mainly stem from the usage of the term “massively”, certainly Steam is restrictive.
You did distort my meaning. By quoting only the part you did, it looked like I was saying people were dumb for ever uninstalling stuff. The “on a regular basis” part that you left off completely changed the sentence. I didn’t fabricate anything from your post. I omitted words from an exact quote from your post same as you did. Had I realized you would get so bent out of shape about it, I would’ve just left it at a “please don’t twist my words, sir”.
Casual piracy is more like installing it on your mom’s computer, and then when she raves about it, your sister’s, and so on. And putting it on a CD for your sister, who’ll then give it to a handful of her friends.
Maybe there are 20 copies out in the wild, and only one paid for, and only a few activations a week.
I can see where they’d want to stop that; I just think that the method in question does more harm than good – installations must be revocable, at the very least.
But they say that nobody runs up against the activation limits, so apparently nobody is buying their games and trying to install on a large number of machines like this.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again if need be - I don’t care about number of activations (provided they’re refreshable, at least), or how often it activates, or any of that. My issue is and always has been that I want games to be a permanent, revisitable medium. Anything that artificially diminishes the likelihood of that outcome should be avoided. That includes any DRM scheme that relies on accessing an external server for purposes other than gameplay. (Obviously, server-based games are going to be transient by their very nature, but Peggle, for example, does not need to be such a game.)
What I love about this sort of DRM is it becomes more punitive the more games you buy from them. At the moment Mass Effect is taking up over 10 gigs of space on my hard drive. It more or less has become a permanent fixture on my hard disk because I’m afraid to use up an install for anything that’s non-hardware failure related. If I were to buy ME2, it would presumably be another 10gb, and ME3 yet another 10gb. Spore? I have no clue what it’s install size is, but we’ll assume it’s something on the order of 5GB or more. At some point I’m going to have to start uninstalling some of these games and my activations are going to dwindle out of sheer necessity. I’m already working on the presumption that no securom game that I enjoy playing occasionally can ever be uninstalled – fortunately for me, ME was the first and last I’ll be buying (why Warhead? why??)
I’m more than happy to activate online, and even connect to their servers periodically to confirm I paid for the game. Steam doesn’t bother me, nor do DVD checks or the like. If there were EA gaming centers I could visit once and say HEY I PAID FOR THIS while waving the box in their face that would be fine, too. Dare I say even enjoyable. But having to deal with the looming install limit is just crap from my point of view and I personally can’t wait till they come up with a more user-friendly system.
Oh and it’d be perfectly tolerable if I could reset my activations via their website. Until that day comes, no sale.
A good way to protest this sort of thing if you could actually get people to participate is to get many gamers to buy the game and then (perhaps on a spare computer) have them just uninstall and reinstall the game until they use up their tokens and then have them call customer service for EA or whoever and ask for a reset, say they are having problems with their system that requires reinstalls. If enough people did this say once a week, the customer service costs would quickly skyrocket and they’d be forced to either remove the DRM or stop refreshing the install counters and deal with the bad PR associated with the iron clad confirmation that you’re just renting the game when you buy it.
Those things aren’t easy to do. Killing any code that shows up on a download site in particular is impossible, not to mention friends that email it to each other or burn it on a cd for their friends.
Allowing X activations per week is an interesting idea. I think it has its own problems, but I think thats the sort of creative solutions that balance customer conveinance with the copyrights owners protection of their property.
What makes killing codes that show up on download sites impossible? Sure, you can’t monitor every download site that exists in the world, but you don’t need to, you just need to log the activations. If X number of people attempt to activate with the same code in Y amount of time, the code is out in the wild and should be shut down. Given the way information spreads on these sites it wouldn’t be that hard to make X/Y sufficiently large enough that it never impacts legitimate users but catches any download site that you need to worry about.
Allowing X activations per week is an interesting idea.
IMO a better one is to make the activations like tokens tied to the machine you’re running on. You can create a new token whenever you like but it overrides the old token, so if it is just you playing on a desktop, laptop, whatever, there’s no problem as long as you’ve got a net connection any time you reactivate (which you need under any DRM activation scheme anyway). If you share your activation code with friends, you’ve got problems because maybe they’ll try to play when you’re playing and coordinating will be such a pain as to not make it worth the $50 or whatever you’re trying to save.
This system doesn’t help the people who are just completely anti-DRM because of the “what if they shut off the server in 5 years” argument or the “what if I don’t have a network connection to get new tokens when I need them” argument, but I think for most people it would work much better than having a set number of activations… in practice it would be somewhat like Steam, but with your activation code acting as your username/password.
As Coca Cola Zero says, this is extremely easy to do.
“Hey, three hundred people just tried to activate using this code. (Of which, only the first three worked before the weekly limit was hit.) Code disabled.”
Ahh, I see. I assumed he was talking about killing the code by going and removing the downlaods, not deactivating that activation code. That makes much more sense.
From an exploit perspective the only thing it exposes the vendor to is someone that plays for a week, then gives a copy to their friend. they play for a week and give a copy to a friend, etc etc. 3 times a week may be a bit much, 3 times a month may be better. The exploit would still exist but I agree with you guys that its a pretty small hole and it makes the customers life much better.
I like the concept. Seems fair to the customers and the vendor. What about non-internet connected machines? How does the activation limit DRM effect Peggle now on non-internet computers? Is it not possible to install? Do I need to call in to get an activation code?
Codes are useless as well.
Most of the times the groups release a key generator or will give you 4-5 codes to be able to install multiple copies for LAN play.
Do you think a code ending with 2RLD is by chance?
(RLD = RELOADED). They decrypted the key algorithm and they show it that way.
If that doesn’t work they will remove the whole code key calling function from the *.exe or set it to always “valid”.
Codes may not stop the hackers or those downloading hacked versions. But they do stop the “casual pirates” who are just directly trading games with their friends, burning copies, etc. Copy protection doesn’t have to be 100% to provide value.
