Comment by scrollaway
3 months ago
“Not having drm” is also a “for now” thing. Everything is “for now”. A person being good, a corporation being bad, everything can be appended with “for now”. It’s not an argument. You look at historical actions and willingness to change. Valve has been doing business this way forever.
> “Not having drm” is also a “for now” thing
What do you mean? My GOG offline installers should work fine with or without internet or GOG services for as long as the binaries can be executed. I can pass them on to my grandkids, if they'll ever be interested. You can own games, music, videos. You can do what you want with them, sell them, give them to family or friends. Any non-dystopian interpretation of DRM means you get to keep what you own. Changes don't apply to already owned things. When "renting" changes can apply retroactively to everything.
> everything can be appended with “for now”
Only if you're looking to be unreasonable and make any argument irrelevant. But we're trying to have a constructive conversation not shoot down everything with generic, nihilistic arguments.
You wan to look at history but so selectively that it only supports your argument. Few companies stayed faithful to the customer without fault especially when the visionary leader and owner retired, or they hit hard times. The norm is for them to pull a bait and switch as soon as the profits looked too good to pass. When Gabe is out it could go either way, slowly or all at once.
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The difference is that "Not having DRM" means the games I bought with no DRM is still there once they enable it. For example, with GOG I download the games I buy and there's no way they can enable DRM on the copies I made.
On the other hand, if the games already have DRM and it gets worse or for whatever reason Valve goes under and you can't play your games anymore, well... you can't play any DRMed game without using whatever DRM mechanism they'll choose next.
In other words "No DRM -> DRM" and "DRM -> Worse DRM" have different outcomes.
> Valve has been doing business this way forever.
And Google's motto was "Don't be evil" and for a good chunk of their life they weren't. That worked out well, did it? I'm not saying Valve will do a 180 and squander all the good faith it acquired. I'm just saying it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
>And Google's motto was "Don't be evil"
People here like to pretend google wasn't evil from the start.
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
But you are right there is always the possibility they turn to shit. The advantage is that compared to other DRMs it is trivial to break even by yourself and all steam games are already freely available cracked so if they do just torrent them.
>>For example, with GOG I download the games I buy and there's no way they can enable DRM on the copies I made.
There is no way for Steam to enable DRM on a copy of a game you made after you downloaded it from Steam. It's a weird argument to use really - once you copied the data elsewhere neither platform can do anything with it.
There are a few DRM-free Steam games but most devs on Steam enable the DRM. This isn't Steam's fault but Steam is holding the reins of that access. It works great now, so smooth you can't tell there's DRM. But at the end of the day most of my collection is at the whims of Valve.
I'm personally concerned about what happens when Gabe retires or shuffles off this mortal coil, and his replacement comes with a "fresh" revenue idea. He's a one of a kind visionary leader, it's not a sure thing that his successor is the same. I've been baited and switched so many times in the past few decades that it's hard to blindly trust any company for more than the very immediate future.
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I'm not sure I'm understanding how Steam DRM works then. Does it phone home? Or is it tied to a particular device? How is this verified?
In the first case they can just refuse to let you use your copy when you ask for permission.
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