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Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

• politician 15y ago
  TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.
  • wccrawford 15y ago
    But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them. I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy. These companies understand hype and the way it drives sales, and then completely fail to use that knowledge when it comes to other countries. They won't wait! The hype has pushed them into getting it NOW, by hook or crook.
    • parfe 15y ago
      >But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... In regards to pre-lease, A bit of a stretch calling what Valve does DRM. The pre-release stuff is straight up encrypted. It's a convenience for the end-user to pre-load the data. Once the game gets released you don't need to contact valve's servers for decryption keys every time you want to play. Steam itself will install any game I own on any machine I log into. Steam competes directly with The Pirate Bay, and wins.
      • Cushman 15y ago
        That's Steam's secret right there, yeah? Use DRM to make the product more convenient, and pirates will pay you for the privilege.
        • aeturnum 15y ago
          I think this is one of the things that good DRM can provide the end-user that has been largely ignored by everyone. I mostly blame the industry for ignoring the possibilities, but they're exciting. You could "loan" games to people without physical contact, you can securely transfer ownership of the digital item, you can play your games from anywhere, etc. There's a lot of potential in having strong digital copy protection that protects the rights of all parties.
          • nene 15y ago
            Well... you can do all these things when there's no DRM at all. It's like counting up all the things you can do in a new modern prison, but it's still a prison.
            • aeturnum 15y ago
              You can do that sometimes...as long as your key isn't bound to a user account (Battle.net), and as long as you have the patience to get it working (mail the cds, give them your steam account password, find them a crack, etc). Some of those restrictions are reasonable and some aren't. My point is that good DRM can protect rights of both parties , but never does. Instead, if often restricts the consumer's rights in favor of the publisher. Steam comes closest to balancing interests, but falls short as well.
            • wmf 15y ago
              I'm skeptical that rental business models can work without DRM; the temptation is just too great.
              • te_chris 15y ago
                It doesn't need to though, the key thing with the rental business model is it needs to be easy and convenient enough. It's clear that it's a rental in the name, but people will get pissed off if it's not easy to get the content and outlandishly priced, and just go back to BT.
      • Maxious 15y ago
        They also just leave key .exe/.dll files out of the downloadable content until release day. With Dead Island, Steam accidentally distributed debug builds on release, leading to some hilarious misuse of cheats.
        • lreeves 15y ago
          I'm pretty sure Steam didn't do that; the developer and publisher are responsible for uploading the bundles to Valve for distribution.
    • DanielStraight 15y ago
      EDIT: It was rightly pointed out that I directed my comments to music whereas the topic was games. My thoughts drifted due to the more common association with piracy. Everything I said still applies though. To have a fair discussion, we need to be clear on who is screwing whom and how. And we need to be clear on how they can stop, and whether it is actually within their power to stop. Original post follows: Who should stop screwing the customer? And how should they stop? Any discussion of fixing the music (EDIT: or gaming) industry or stopping piracy needs answers to these questions. One of the advantages of piracy, one of its conveniences, is that you can get anything you want in one place. But no one is in a position to provide this legally. Spotify (and others (EDIT: such as Steam for games)) would like to, but they can only legally provide what record companies (EDIT: or gaming companies... I think I can stop with the line by line clarifying now; the point is that this applies to all pirated digital content) will provide to them. And they will only provide what it is cost-effective for them to acquire and license. They aren't going to have truly independent artists, because dealing with artists rather than labels isn't cost effective on such a large scale. The only way to overcome this I can think of is a compulsory license for distributing music, akin to the compulsory license for playing covers. But there's no way I can foresee the unintended consequences of such a fundamental change in how copyright is understood. But whether or not such a compulsory license is a good idea is not the point. The point is that "stop screwing the customer" is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
      • LarrySDonald 15y ago
        There is no law against making your catalog widely available. Yes, currently they seem unable to do so. That isn't the consumers problem (quite literally). Very few things are so awesome that you'll have people begging you to take their money (and root access on their box, the right to revoke the product at any time, etc), so few in fact that the publishers should firmly assume they are not it. If they can't sort that out between themselves, tough shit - customers/pirates/in-betweens will not care. The ball is not in their court and it will be extremely hard to put it there by force.
      • jamesgeck0 15y ago
        But we're not talking about music piracy. :) Steam is missing a few major titles (mostly from EA and Blizzard), but it's one of the most complete digital download services. It also seems to be rather indie friendly.
    • Symmetry 15y ago
      Steam certainly does use DRM, but they use it to provide a service that ends up being providing a better user experience than their competitors. It lets them safely let you do things like download games ahead of the release date or re-download a game from their servers whenever you want onto as many computers as you want.
    • w1ntermute 15y ago
      > I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Localization isn't just bureaucratic nonsense that was conjured up to aggravate gamers in foreign countries - the games actually need to be translated to the local language. As for if you were living in one of those countries as an expat, as you suggest, that's a very small market and not worth pursuing.
      • kelnage 15y ago
        But yet they pirate the games anyway. My guess is that you'll find that a large percentage of "gamers" in non-English speaking countries speak English well enough to understand most games and don't want to wait the 6+ months required to translate the game to their local tongue when they could be playing online against US players. This was especially true a few years back, when some publishers wouldn't release games in the UK until the "European" translation was finished!
        • GreenNight 15y ago
          It depends. A shooter? Yeah, piece of cake. An RPG? Sorry, but depending on the country no that many people could understand it well enough to follow the story. TV Series do get around the moment they get on a torrent site, but many many people can follow them thanks to the subtitles provided by fellow viewers. If not they would have a harder time following them.
      • tjoff 15y ago
        the games actually need to be translated to the local language. Uh. No. Also, most games are not translated at all.
        • tjoff 15y ago
          When I said that most games are not translated I kind of focused on my country (Sweden). If you are from Germany or France you probably have another view of it. Point is that localization really isn't the only thing that delays a launch in, for instance, Sweden. I guess we have to wait for it to be localized to other parts of Europe before we get to play it in English (or German, but I'd guess that few Swedes prefer German over English). Which is just stupid. And if it really is translated to Swedish you'd pick English anyway (exception: if you are a group of friends it can be quite fun to laugh at the poor translation). In a country where you don't dub movies/TV you get quite good at understanding English at a young age and in such a country I don't really think gamers would prefer a localized version anyway.
    • forrestthewoods 15y ago
      "Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken" That's because it can't be broken. You can't break what isn't there. Pre-load only downloads 99% of the game. Let the user download the game sans a few important bits, say the entire executable, and upon release enable download for the last tiny bit. Most retail games release weeks early because it's impossible to stop once the disc hits manufacturing. Retail discs that require one-time Steam activation can be uncrackable because those important bits aren't on the physical disc. Once a Steam game is unlocked for play it's immediately cracked and released into the wild.
      • kornholi 15y ago
        I'm pretty sure that it downloads 100% of the game in an encrypted format, and the decryption keys get sent out on release.
    • polymatter 15y ago
      > But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that there's been no Steam game that has not been pirated before it was released, I know for a fact the recent game "Orcs Must Die" was pirated. I was impressed playing it at a friends place, tried to buy it on Steam when I got back home but it hadn't been released yet.
    • bluedanieru 15y ago
      >I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy. Well lucky you. Steam is no better in this regard than anyone else though; they do region lockouts. Valve doesn't with their games afaik, but Steam certainly does.
      • Tsagadai 15y ago
        They do and it is a pain. There is a way around it though. You can use Steams website to buy games. Use http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=XX http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=XX where XX is the two letter country code you have access to. They still check address and payment details match but this does allow you to use paypal. The sooner the content world gets rid of silly region restrictions the better we will all be. It is ridiculous that even with trade agreements North American companies insist on charging non-US customers more for a usually sub-par service.
        • jasonlotito 15y ago
          In many ways, the content world is also limited by local laws. For example, in Canada, media distribution is required to provide a certain amount of Canadian content (iirc). The point is, it's not just one sided.
          • sdm 15y ago
            This only covers radio and television. The CRTC has been very clear it can't/won't regulate online services. See it's decision a few months back about Netflix.
        • wnight 15y ago
          Watch it. If they find out you do that they'll disable the games and perhaps your whole account. Region coding should be illegal. Or rather, enforcing it.
    • dorian-graph 15y ago
      > .. creating pirates of them. People choose to become 'pirates' because no one is forcing them to play video games. They have choices—pay for a game, don't play a game (A horrible thing to suggest, I know) or get a game without paying for it (Often called pirating). It's always amused me that people seem to speak of playing videogames as some right that they have and how dare anyone take that away from them.
    • nickolai 15y ago
      >I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy. Add to this that the translations are often very badly broken - my eyes and ears bleed when I play French versions of games. I actually prefer to get the english version through Steam, and I am sure a sizeable fraction of players would agree. The only successful localization ive seen to date is stracraft2 - so good that I didnt even bother redownloading the english version from Blizzard. Admittedly i havent even been checking out most localized versions for a while - so it may have been improving lately without me noticing.
    • Derbasti 15y ago
      > I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy. Translations are often bad and delayed. This is as true for games as it is true for movies or books. I hate it. The obvious solution is to just get the english versions. But the worst thing is, there is often no legal or practical way to get the english version. Books are easy. You can get just about any english book through Amazon (.de, .fr, .etc). Movies are somewhat bad. DVDs usually include english language. iTunes doesn't feature (many) english movies, but Ebay sells US iTunes gift cards. Games are actually really hard. It is possible to order from Amazon UK or Amazon US, but shipping will be weeks and there is a good chance you will have to pay customs. Steam requires a VPN and a foreign account and a credit card proxy (Entropay works fine). Not what you would call convenient.
  • redthrowaway 15y ago
    It was a 250-word article; not sure a tl;dr is warranted. I certainly don't think it should be the top-voted comment.
    • mattgreenrocks 15y ago
      Yes, it is discouraging seeing willful ignorance (aka, tl;dr) voted up on HN. If people can't take the time to read the article, they shouldn't comment. Period.
      • tjoff 15y ago
        Who said anything about commenting? I often enjoy a tl;dr because a tl;dr will, with more accuracy than the title, tell me whether the article is worth reading. And yes, I almost always check the comments before reading the article (but I always read the article before commenting).
        • mattgreenrocks 15y ago
          Oops, my fault.
  • rick888 15y ago
    so, you need to give them everything for free at the fastest bandwidth possible. The only way to stop piracy is: 1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone will expect it for free). This is exactly what is starting to happen. Back in 1999, there was no antipiracy technology, yet piracy was just as rampant as it is today. We have: Last.fm, Pandora, Youtube, Grooveshark, etc,etc. Yet, people still pirate music. It's funny because back when Napster first started, everyone said that the artists weren't getting treated right, so that's why they were downloading music. Now that any artist can pretty music start a website with no record label, those reasons have changed. I don't think it has anything to do with any of those reasons. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money on something they can just as easily get for free. This parallels many of the people protesting wall street: Just as investing in an education doesn't mean you are guaranteed a good job, investing your time and effort in software, music, and movies doesn't mean you are guaranteed a profit.
    • towelrod 15y ago
      People have spent billions of dollars buying music on iTunes. Its pretty obvious that people will pay for things if its more convenient than pirating it.
      • rick888 15y ago
        But piracy hasn't stopped or slowed down.
      • tonio09 15y ago
        I wouldn't say it's more convenient. It's rather the case that most people have no clue about how to pirate music. It's an information asymmetry. You need to be at least minimally technically skilled to pirate. Once you install an extension to chrome, it's actually easier to just go to youtube, search for a song, and click the download link. In iTunes, you have to set up a credit card, you can't copy the songs to any device, only works with iPhone ... etc. There are lots of inconveniences.
  • contravert 15y ago
    The obvious question that I don't see anyone asking is what happens when pirates build a more convenient service than Steam? There is no way a legitimate digital distributor can offer more convenience when they are saddled with many business and legal limitations.
    • law_of_poe 15y ago
      The obvious question to your obvious question is that if it was possible, wouldn't there be one already?
      • contravert 15y ago
        Well it's not beyond the realm of imagination for pirates to create a platform like Steam but offer all games for free. Torrents are somewhat inaccessible to the average user and they they lack content management support.
    • alttag 15y ago
      PIrates are saddled with legal limitations too. One of the "features" that has allowed torrent sites to be a bit more difficult to challenge is that they're hosting trackers, not actual files. Legal issues affect both sides.
• rsanchez1 15y ago
  I know that I didn't buy games before Steam, or at least as much as I do now. But price is also a factor. I really have to think about it when a game costs more than $15, but Steam usually has good games on sale anyway. Steam and other digital distributors have made me more of a gamer.
  • DanBC 15y ago
    I buy, play, then sell games. Steam does not let me do this; thus those games are more expensive to me. I do not buy Steam games.
    • jamesgeck0 15y ago
      In my area, the only reasonable way to buy and sell used games is online. But during the holidays, Steam sells a lot of games at a 75-90% discount. During those sales, I spend on Steam what I'd normally spend on postage. I also get a lot of titles by smaller developers that are only available digitally, too.
    • ryan-allen 15y ago
      Unfortunately for you, the game's industry is slowly and inevitably moving towards personal subscription based purchases. This is slowly driving down the price of games (which is a good thing), and hopefully it'll lead to higher revenues for publishers so (the good ones) can continue to make more and better games. More money for publishers and cheaper games for individuals? I think it's pretty win-win. The second hand game market really short changes the publishers, and it's very expensive to make a top title! Imagine how much Portal 2 cost Valve to make, was it worth it?
      • slowpoke 15y ago
        >Unfortunately for you, the game's industry is slowly and inevitably moving towards personal subscription based purchases. It's my guess that this model will work until the first major publisher, for whatever reason, collapses - or simply stops bothering with providing access to older games. Then people will realize how insane and retarded this entire system of "paying for access" is. Same goes for cloud computing, by the way. Besides, you are confusing publishers and developers. Valve is a rare case where both are one and the same, making them a very weird exception, but in general, direct distribution is bad for publishers (which is a good thing). It's really the same as with the (major) labels. >Imagine how much Portal 2 cost Valve to make, was it worth it? Valve is also a rare case in that they still make games worth playing. Most of the rest of the industry is a sea of bland, uncreative genericness with fancy graphics. I acknowledge Valve for this, but I still refuse to pay for access to games. I want a copy that plays where I want, whenever I want, and that still works three decades from now. Until this insanity stops, I hoist the black flag. Yarr.
• jakeonthemove 15y ago
  It's also interesting to see how piracy builds a market in third world countries without the companies even being present there. Like their example, Russians were pirating games and software long before Valve or other companies had a presence there, and as soon as they came in, they already had clients. It was the same with Microsoft's Windows and Office - people got so used to them, for example, in Poland, Latvia, Romania, that they just bought licensed versions when they became available (government orders alone must've made them hundreds of millions in revenue).
  • ryan-allen 15y ago
    I wonder how much of that was deliberate or a seized opportunity at a later date? It never was very difficult to pirate Windows and Office back in the day.
• aw3c2 15y ago
  Convenience of purchase or convenience of ownership/control? I am refusing to use Steam since I cannot be sure that I will be able to play when and however I like. In fact, I can be sure that at some point I would not be able to play my games because I lost internet access and Steam does not let me play (do not reply with "there is offline mode", that mode is a joke as you have to enable it whilst being online).
  • Pewpewarrows 15y ago
    Just FYI, they fixed not being able to start directly into offline mode about a month or so ago.
    • aw3c2 15y ago
      Nice! Does that mean I can purchase a game and then play it offline for all eternity?
  • TruthElixirX 15y ago
    Offline mode has been fixed since at least the start of August, if not longer.
  • ak217 15y ago
    To me it's the direct opposite. I can't imagine life without Steam anymore, because to have to track down the install media/images of all those games, go through their ridiculous install procedures, updates, etc. every time I have to reinstall Windows or switch the game to a different computer is a tremendous waste of time.
• deleted 15y ago
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  • ryan-allen 15y ago
    That is certainly has been known for centuries.
• omgtehlion 15y ago
  http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ky29p9QR161qzu090o1_500.jpg http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ky29p9QR161qzu090o1_500.jp...
• pixie_ 15y ago
  Nowadays if a game isn't on Steam I just won't buy it. Mainly because keeping game CDs around is too much a hassle. When I buy something on Steam, I know I have that game for life and can re-install it quickly on any computer.
  • getsat 15y ago
    > I have that game for life Not for life, but rather for the life of Steam as a platform. I don't see Valve going away anytime soon, but you never know...
    • nitrogen 15y ago
      Rumor has it that if Valve went under and Steam was shut down, they'd release a patch to allow their games to continue to function.
      • suivix 15y ago
        But how could you back the games up or move them to another computer?
        • sukuriant 15y ago
          Torrents. And I bet it would be legal because Valve would do something like releasing the games for free just before they tanked. I'm not so sure about some of the other labels that exist on Steam, though.
        • shuzchen 15y ago
          Same way that you do it now - copy the relevant files out of ~/Steam/steamapps/ to wherever you need. I've gotten around re-downloading huge games because everything you need is in there (when I've already done it once before on a different machine, or when I'm getting a game a local friend of mine already downloaded). The only thing stopping you from playing it is the DRM on the executable, but the mythical Steam-is-dead-here-you-go-patch will solve that.
        • 15y ago
• afterburner 15y ago
  >"We don’t understand what’s going on," he admitted. "All we know is we’re going to keep running these experiments to try and understand better what it is that our customers are telling us." That's refreshingly honest, I like that. No bluster about how it must have happened because they're so awesome and made such brilliant calculated decisions.
• ethank 15y ago
  http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2008/08/23/the-frustration-of-wanting-something-you-cant-buy/ http://www.blackrimglasses.com/2008/08/23/the-frustration-of... I worked in an industry (still do sort of) that took a huge hit from piracy, and reacted by making it more difficult to do things rather than respond to what piracy exposed. While I still worked at a major I wrote this. TL;DR summary: I heard a song on the radio, and used Shazam to look it up. The song was "Forgotten Years" by Midnight Oil, and it was 2008. I tried in vain to buy this song legally before having to finally get it through illegal means (torrents). To offset this, I donated directly to the lead singers political campaign in Australia. As I stated then and I still believe: "I believe that the ultimate challenge for media providers is to make systems of actualization which narrow the gap from desire to the fulfillment of said desire. The only true way to fight one form of ubiquity is with another form of ubiquity." PS: Ironically the video embedded in my blog post is now blocked because it was uploaded by the band's non-US label.
• axefrog 15y ago
  If only broadcast media organisations would take this on board. If a movie or an episode of a popular show is released even one day later via convenient streaming media channels than it is through other traditional mediums, it'll be pirated. Piracy is an international issue and will never ever be solved, or at least reduced significantly, until these companies accept the internet for what it is -- a ubiquitous global distribution channel -- and release content everywhere simultaneously.
• jcscott81 15y ago
  Of course. From games to music to movies, when you limit the utility of a legitimately purchased product you will only serve to make the pirated version that much more appealing. Case in point: I can buy a movie from a Hollywood studio in Japan, but I play it on my US DVD player. If I were to pirate that same movie - I can save $20 and watch it anywhere! Localization and DRM = terrible concepts.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• fourk 15y ago
  There are plenty of people who pay between $10 and $100 a month to have access to a dedicated seedbox in order to maintain ratio requirements on private torrent trackers. These people are a clear example of existing willingness to pay for access to content. Whenever content providers figure this out and can provide a service that has similar selection, availability, portability, and quality, they'll be sitting on a goldmine. Resistance to change can be blinding. I have my doubts that such a service will exist anytime soon, however much sense it might make for their bottom line. EDIT: this is in reference to TV/Movie industries, where this is much less of a solved problem than games and music.
  • Anti-Ratfish 15y ago
    Very good point. Here in NZ much of what I want is literally years away from coming out and paying for it through legal means isn't an option. But paying in the form you suggest is an option. It's annoying to have to resort to illegal measures which actually cost money to get something.
• watty 15y ago
  Piracy has never been more convenient in gaming than the traditional route, even with DRM. How convenient is it to download 4GB, follow cryptic instructions, apply a crack, be banned from online play, be unable to update patches, etc. I'm sure a small few pirate games due to DRM reasons but price is the main reason.
  • mappu 15y ago
    Hmm? Piracy is incredibly convenient. Cracks are consistent and easy to use, updates generally appear regularly, you can pass the installer to your friends offline, and you can happily play without internet connection long after the official servers die out. Online play is a different matter, since you might have centralised server-side authentication. Online multiplayer is a definite advantage to going legit. Otherwise, piracy is nothing if not convenient.
• DrStalker 15y ago
  Steam used to be a great way to get games at the same time as the USA for the same price. Now it allows access at the same time but with significantly higher prices in Australia. In this case it is about price. I don't like being ripped off, even if the amount I'm being ripped off is slightly less than if I went into a physical store to buy the game. So far this behavior is limited to AAA titles from publishers other than Valve, so I'm happy playing indie games and waiting for Half Life 2: Episode 3.
  • vacri 15y ago
    Lifelong game pirater here, back to the Amiga 500 games bought on floppies from a software cracker (yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me! went the into screens) Australia has always been shafted in price - a AAA game for $110-$120? Total nonsense, even when our dollar was very low. Steam is largely what's turned my behaviour around. I've always bought a few, pirated a few, but the convenience of Steam is hard to beat. I mostly wait for specials or bundles, and have a lot of indie games (my catalog is up around 200 games, slightly less than half are unplayed bundle-fodder). Mid-year and new year sales are great times for bargains. But a AAA game at a ridiculous price? Hello pirate bay. Duke Nukem Forever at $80? Good luck with that (not that it's a AAA title... but it theoretically occupies that space). I've found that over the years, with few exceptions, once a game is played, it's done and I don't go back. If I do go back... it's pretty dated and I realise it was better off in the realm of nostalgia. For me the issue of "but what if Steam dies / goes offline - you'll lose all your games!" is a non-issue - I have a couple of racks of dusty game CDs behind me that haven't been opened in years. Long story short: it's mostly about the convenience, but partly about the price.
  • bluedanieru 15y ago
    Do yourself a favor and get a (preferably pro-rated) host based in the US and set up squid on it.
    • mambodog 15y ago
      Not much use without a US billing address.
  • 15y ago
• brc 15y ago
  The only 'piracy' I've done recently is to purchase a Kindle book using convulted means (fake US account, Proxy service, using gift card) then crack the DRM on the books so I can read it on my Kindle. I'm sure the publishers and licensing people think they are very clever restricting content to people in other countries, but in reality, they are shooting both feet off. The old ways are gone. There is now one global IP market, whether they like it or not. They either get with the program or they lose money and die. Sucks to be them, but that's creative destruction at work. You can't differential price, you can't licence in one market but not another. You either release the content for sale to everyone, or you will be worked around.
  • beseku 15y ago
    This is a massive sticking point for me as an Englishman living in Japan. The huge delay in getting films and, especially, TV over here coupled with the IP address and other restrictions in place by certain providers is a huge encouragement to me to Bittorrent instead. Luckily I now have a UK and US iTunes account that serves me well for most things. My biggest gripe is with the UK sports companies - a lot of American friends can legally stream NBA, MFL and baseball via a global site that charges for high quality content. The English Premier League and cricket bodies are absolutely blind to this - there is no way for me to legally watch these sports via the web (and cable TV here isn;t possible in my apartment), even though I'd happily pay through the nose to get a fix. Because of this, I'm endlessly looking for ways to catch games via means that they spend huge amounts trying to chase and shut down. Now that language and communication face such a low barrier, staggered releases and restrictions by market make no sense.
    • peng 15y ago
      Have you tried using UK and US-based VPNs to get through to the region-locked content? I've spent a couple months in China with a California-based VPS, and I'm able to SSH tunnel to watch everything I want on Hulu.
      • beseku 15y ago
        I;ve tried, with some success. This kinda makes my point though, using shady means to download content because I am of one nationality and living abroad - not exactly an edge case.
• zemanel 15y ago
  he's totally right. I have almost bought more games in a year of having a Steam account than in the last 10 years and i prefer to buy them on Steam for the "convenience" of it's "cloud based" service.
• stcredzero 15y ago
  What people don't realize about DRM, is that it's asymmetric warfare, and the corporation is in the role of the guerrilla! If you have a popular product and everyone in the universe wants to play your game, then your few development groups (formed against bureaucratic friction) are going up against the vast resources and nearly frictionless meritocracy of the internet. Don't take the pirates on head-on! Be sneaky. For example, err strongly on the side of false negatives (be forgiving) and greatly separate in time pirate detection from any consequences. Never set up a situation where one crack gives the pirate the keys to the kingdom. That's like facing a huge army in a set-piece battle with your guerrillas. Only depend on a given detection scheme for a short while.
  • bluedanieru 15y ago
    Sounds like a great way to give your game a reputation as a bug-ridden piece of shit. This happened to The Witcher. How about a delivery mechanism that uses technology in a sane manner and doesn't punch paying customers in the face with stupid bullshit?
    • stcredzero 15y ago
      Sounds like a great way to give your game a reputation as a bug-ridden piece of shit. Sounds like the same knee-jerk reaction. (Which usually shows you haven't really understood what I'm proposing.) If the consequences are greatly separated in time from detection, and there is strong bias towards false negatives, then the result will be to give the cracked copies a reputation as an incomplete, half-baked piece of crap. In any case, DRM should never manifest as anything resembling a bug in the game. It should only manifest as a failure of the pirates to do their job and reduced access to online and downloadable content. Remember, guerrilla warfare is about the long term and not the short term. In the short term, there are defeats and retreats for the smaller force, but in the long term, the larger force is persuaded that the effort is no longer worth the reward. Absolute containment is the essential failed strategy of regular armies taking on the guerrillas. It's also the source of everything you find objectionable about DRM. (Analogy: the armed force that's unpopular with the local population.)
• nhangen 15y ago
  I pay for DirectTV, Verizion FIOS, Netflix, and have an Apple TV, yet I still can't get content delivered how I want it. The only thing the big networks get right is sports. If I forget to record something, I have to go to Hulu, where I can't stream it to my TV in HD unless I buy another device. My alternative is to pay 99 cents (or more) on iTunes. I also have to buy a switch so I don't run out of HDMI ports, and it's a pain in the ass to switch between all of my boxes. Yeah, piracy is starting to sound good. Oh...forgot to mention that Netflix's selection currently sucks big time.
  • zbisch 15y ago
    I don't mean to sound critical but why do you think networks get sports right? I actually feel like this is one of the worst offenders. Say I want to watch every Chicago Blackhawks game this season (or any other hockey team). Well, then I need to sign up for Versus. In order to get that I need to sign up for a Cable/satellite service. But I don't want all the channels, I watch what I want on broadcast or rent/stream. I just want to be able to watch a game when I have the time. I don't like watching normal shows TV on cable (can't stand commercials), so I rent DVDs or stream it on Netflix. Now there really aren't any options for me to just get sports, without paying way extra for a bunch of crap I don't want. I can sign up for NHL Center Ice (Internet streaming), but then I don't really get to watch every game online, most are subject to blackouts, playoff games are spotty, Stanley Cup games are nonexistent. And since I don't have cable, I miss local games because it's subject to black out in my team's region. Maybe it's better with other sports, but I really wish there was an easier way to select a team I want to follow or pay to watch games as I watch them, and only pay for that. The only station that I thought got things right was Telemundo during the world cup, even though I don't know any more spanish than "no hablo espanol". I watched all the games there since I didn't want to sign up for cable to get ESPN for two months. Basically I'd just like a way to pay for season passes (and actually get all the games) or get a decent sports channel without paying for a bunch I don't want. Edit: Sorry if this seemed nonsensical, my frustration with finding an easy way to watch certain sports has gone on for a couple years now.
    • corin_ 15y ago
• kbatten 15y ago
  When I can get a game for free that has fewer restrictions than something I pay for then the system is broken. Looking at you Ubisoft.
• noarchy 15y ago
  I think that people are still willing to pay for PC games as a service. That's what massively multiplayer games are effectively doing. These days, you can often download the game client at the cost of the bandwidth to do it ("free" in the eyes of many), but you pay for access to the servers that are maintained for the players, and you may also pay for expansions. There are pirate servers, of course, but those suffer from instability, as well as the high probability of disappearing once Big Company X goes after them. That's not a risk that many players want to take, given the time investment that is often made in such games; so they pay to play.
• sdfjkl 15y ago
  In the olden days, pirating was hard. Hard to get the pirated game, hard to install the crack, hard to get it working again when a new patch came out and often the cracks didn't quite work and you had to find another one in the middle of your playthrough or even restart from the beginning because it broke something in your savegame. Just buying the game meant installing and playing, no hassle. Today, installing a game you bought is harder than pirating it. You have to activate it, type in a 25 digit code you found on the box (wait, is that a B or a 3? Damnit.). It'll need an internet connection to activate, but the activation server is usually overloaded and doesn't work on launch day. Then it wants to patch itself before letting you play, because the stuff you got on the DVD you bought is actually out of date by the time you get home. You also have to sign up for some stupid web service that you never wanted, and have another login and password that you must not forget (or else you can't play anymore and your savegames are gone with it). Except if it's GFWL (Microsoft's Games for Windows Live). Then you also have to figure out why that damn thing gets stuck in an update loop and makes you log into things just to play an entirely offline, single player game (then you have to install xliveless, which avoids that). Pirating is so much easier. You torrent the thing, unpack it and play, just the way it should be. I'm glad Gabe Newell gets this, and it's apparent in Valve's Steam (except for some reason they permit GFWL infested games, but at least they warn you about it).