Lol cant play a game I bought because of piracy protection (Pirates ALWAYS win)

[kpxgq]

It's an imperfect system in an imperfect world. The honest people ALWAYS get F'd in the A....

sounds like you have 2 choices then:

- be honest and get f'ed in the a
- be a pirate and have fun

[Timman_24]

sounds like you have 2 choices then:

- be honest and get f'ed in the a
- be a pirate and have fun

That is TOTALLY not true though. For every stupid DRM laden game that a mega-corp puts out there are 50 quality titles with little to no copyright protection on them. There may be one or two games a year that cause me trouble with DRM such as the extreme case of D3 and Simcity.

[kpxgq]

That is TOTALLY not true though. For every stupid DRM laden game that a mega-corp puts out there are 50 quality titles with little to no copyright protection on them. There may be one or two games a year that cause me trouble with DRM such as the extreme case of D3 and Simcity.

obviously thats not true, my reply was in response to a simplistic view of the situation

[kujoe2002]

That is TOTALLY not true though. For every stupid DRM laden game that a mega-corp puts out there are 50 quality titles with little to no copyright protection on them. There may be one or two games a year that cause me trouble with DRM such as the extreme case of D3 and Simcity.

hence why I play a lot of the free to play games like hawken and warface. There I know I'm getting something free so shouldn't expect much. The only PAID game I will continue to put up with is BF3 and even that's starting to test my patience...

[monroeski]

I don't think D3 has even been pirated. They'd have to set up private servers, so you'd still have to connect. There is a "server emulator," but it doesn't work. A lot of the core logic is done server side. Pirate certainly aren't winning with D3.

Monroeski, Steam is great but if you forget your username/password and used a bogus email address and personal info like the OP did with Blizzard he'd be in the same boat.

Steam gives you incentive to stay fairly active with it, though. If I ever need my Battle.net password again it will probably be years from now; I use Steam every day.

Again, I think that's the beauty of Steam; when I set up an account with Battle.net or GFWL I think to myself "here's some other new crap I need to sign up for. I'll use my standard dump email address." I log in to Steam all the time even when I'm not going to play a game. The worry about not using my account often enough to keep the email address active is basically non-existent.

[Timman_24]

I agree, I dislike having to sign up for services to play games that I will hardly use. With Uplay, Torchlight II, Minecraft, Steam, Origin, Battle.net, Guild Wars, and on and on, it gets hard to keep track of them. I wish more companies would use Google universal login.

[ImaNihilist]

I agree, I dislike having to sign up for services to play games that I will hardly use. With Uplay, Torchlight II, Minecraft, Steam, Origin, Battle.net, Guild Wars, and on and on, it gets hard to keep track of them. I wish more companies would use Google universal login.

SSO is great… until you get banned from that service and everything dies with it. I try to use Facebook/Google/Twitter OAuth as little as possible, because if for some reason your account gets banned/locked/hacked then you are seriously screwed.

I've actually been meaning to change the primary email account on a lot of sites I use to a domain that I own to prevent just this thing. The only way to sure that you will always be able to login is to bind something to an email address on a domain that you own. You can always move your email service or roll your own. You can always be banned/locked out from Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo.

[Johnmcl7]

I find Steam one of the worst DRM clients out there, it was a terribly coded piece of software when it came out and it's not got any better since then - the concepts of error handling and any form of recovery are clearly completely alien to Valve. Either that or they have a competition to see who can put the most destructive bug and get away with it, I lost most of my Steam library recently when Steam randomly decided that my games were installed on the H drive even though they never have been, it even correctly verified the cache of the non-existent files. If I deleted the entry and re-installed it would work but in another impressively stupid step, the client refused to recognise existing files and downloaded the files right on top of the existing ones. I followed the steps Valve recommend to resolve this and ended up with my games library completely obliterated, the games are all still in the same place but Steam refuses to acknowledge them and insists there are no games available and when I try to install any it downloads them back on top of the existing files. So it's completely screwed and as I don't have that fast a connection it's going to be a long time before I can even restore a portion of the library, the backups are useless as Steam is ignoring all the existing files.

It's not the first time Steam has managed to keep me out of my games as it's failed it many different ways before but this is the most terminal and I don't know if I have the patience to resolve it. With so many games forcing you to use Steam these days that basically knocks out my main gaming PC for gaming, just an utterly shambolic piece of software borne of pure incompetence.

John

[sublim21]

so with these constant online drm games, what will happen in the future? will your game be unplayable in the future because the authentication servers are down?

[kujoe2002]

so with these constant online drm games, what will happen in the future? will your game be unplayable in the future because the authentication servers are down?

Good point..Then will people sue because they didn't get the "game time" they paid for? lol

[ImaNihilist]

There is a difference between DRM and online games, unless you subscribe to the Stallman definition of DRM.

I don't consider something like Steam to be DRM laden. Most games can be played offline.

DRM, to me, is an arbitrary restriction that ads no value whatsoever. CSS on DVDs, Fairplay on iTunes content, Adobe's revocable "product activation", etc..

If it provides more utility than it does restrictions, I just consider that an architecture decision.

[Johnmcl7]

Most games can only be played offline after authenticating with Steam and it's not a one off, it has to be done relatively recently and even then it's a gamble whether it works or not. So I find in practice, games can rarely be played offline due to Steam wanting to authenticate - it is a DRM system otherwise the games could be played regardless of Steam once activated and to me it's far more a restriction rather what it provides particularly given right now I've lost access to all my games on Steam and even the small indie ones like Super Hexagon are refusing to launch without it.

John

[ImaNihilist]

In the era of online gaming I just don't see it being that clear cut.
If a single player game has to be "activated", and that activation is non-transferable and can be revoked, yeah I'd call that DRM. It serves no purpose.
If it's a multiplayer game it is, more often than not, about game integrity and ease of patching/maintenance than anything else. The DRM that comes with it is kind of a bonus.

IMO, Diablo 3 is the perfect example. If they wanted to "remove" the Battle.net component they'd have to reengineer large parts of the game and/or bundle the game with some kind of local server. That's just not the way we do multiplayer anymore. Piracy really wasn't a problem with Diablo 2. What was a problem was the decade of game crippling, character corrupting hacks.

People are all up in arms about the DRM in Sim City, but I don't really see it that way either. The reality is that "single player" games are over. In the post-Facebook era everything is connected. The mass market doesn't want to buy a game where you play in total isolation. The only real exception to this is adventure games and deep RPGs like Skyrim. Pretty much everything else is connected, and developers aren't wasting resources to include an offline mode/server bundle for the <5% of people who would ever use it.

[Timman_24]

SSO is great… until you get banned from that service and everything dies with it. I try to use Facebook/Google/Twitter OAuth as little as possible, because if for some reason your account gets banned/locked/hacked then you are seriously screwed.

I've actually been meaning to change the primary email account on a lot of sites I use to a domain that I own to prevent just this thing. The only way to sure that you will always be able to login is to bind something to an email address on a domain that you own. You can always move your email service or roll your own. You can always be banned/locked out from Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo.

I use my own domain, so maybe that's why I didn't see that problem. People actually get banned from google?

[ImaNihilist]

I use my own domain, so maybe that's why I didn't see that problem. People actually get banned from google?

A Google Account can be banned for any number of reasons. At least if you are using Google Apps you can move to something else.