DRM Tolerance

AlpsStranger said:

I'm shocked that CD-Check is so popular.

1) It is so easy to crack (in many cases) that it does nothing.

2) It is very inconvenient for paying customers.

I think someone didn't realize the 90's ended.

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All forms of Copyright protection can easily be made useless. For example, SacuRom just becomes an additional thing a Cracker needs to add in to make his crack, you can literally crack and pirate every game out there worth playing. Even internet based games.
CD-Checking is the only one that is outright damaging to your computer because of a constantly spinning CD, and SecuRom is just an underhand additional CD-Check.

Basically, anyone determined to get an illegal copy of the game will get what he wants, Steam only inconveniences the legitimate owners of the game and this bothers me.

Shurdus said:

And you can say impulse is ok because it is not 'forced' upon the user, but it practically is. GalCiv II is a meagre game that became good with a few patches. It was promising but not all-that out of the box. You may have not been forced to patch the game, but if you wanted to get all the bang for your bucks then you needed to register on impulse.

Now some people may see impulse as something you can choose to get or not, but it is almost as forced as steam is unless you want to own a copy of a game that is decent but not all that it can be.

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I have gripes about Impulse as well. It then throws the bar out there that the company will purposely leave big ole bugs abound in a game, to make the game-out-of-the-box near unplayable; and therefore any player is then forced to do the same thing in order to play a working version of the game.

With GalCiv2, this was one of the conspiracy theories early on from some. Most people threw that idea out the door. But once it was realized that even after the ToA expansion (which added additional bugs, and none of them were ever fixed, even after an email campaign from players to the company) the game was massively broken still, we concluded that Stardock just didn't do it's job completing the game (nothing new with games).

So, depending on the companies 'Plans', it is good if the company has good intentions, but if the company purposely screws the game's 0-Day release, to make it so people must get a patch (and create an account), then the consumer given choice of wanting to create an account or not is really just a false sense of choice; because they will do so to avoid a purposely broken game, making the Impulse method on-par (and in my mind, worse if this is the case) than the current Steam method.

eireksten said:

@LDiCesare: He wrote "inferior", so I think you two are agreeing...

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Damn I must relearn to read.

Originally Posted by AlpsStranger
I'm shocked that CD-Check is so popular.

1) It is so easy to crack (in many cases) that it does nothing.

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that's why I voted for it!

For me no DRM or (very grudgingly) one-time registration, and now I really want to withdraw the latter after reading frekk's comments.

DRM, ptui!

No further comments, as what I have to say will likely get the censors' undies in a bunch.

snowlyon said:

Where is the line then? Given many have no issues with having a 3rd party program needed to run a program that is primarily a solo experience I would then assume that they would also have issues if/when there are multiple 3rd programs needed to run? Or is this going to far? How long until such time that all games require us to be logged into the internet via multiple 3rd parties just to play a solo game? Given I am providing the extreme we actually do see this occuring to a small degree even now on a couple games out there (the need to be logged online to play a single person game). Is it really all that bad to ask that we as consumers be, at the very least, given the 'option' of whether we want to be online or not when attempting to enjoy the product we purchased?

To many, imo, are quick to jump on the corporate bandwagon that DRM is "required" and "needed" for things that surely are more 'guestimates' than pure facts. The current drive will not, and will never prevent piracy, but it will seriously kill the second hand market for games…which I suppose is the true purpose as the second market is a true loss to them in terms of dollars earned and represents a much larger threat than piracy itself.

So again I ask…how much is to much until you folks say…enough is enough? How much will it take for us as consumers to say "no"?~

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DRM IS all about preventing 2nd hand sales. Its only been parading around as a copy protection issue. The last week we have seen other gaming companies taking measures to ensure they sell new over used. They lose more money when something is sold used than pirated copies. Why? Because pirates never buy anything anyway. Your kidding yourself if you think DRM is used as a pirating deterrent.

Shurdus said:

This is something that applies to every single service that requires you to provide your credit card info, including impulse. Just like you can get pickpocketed if one is not careful, one may fall victim to thieves online. And even if one is careful, one may still be robbed by crafty and very clever thieves. This is by no means steam exclusive and it falls in the paranoids category in my filing cabinet.

Also after explaining why you think impulse is fine and steam is not, all the notable difference you noted was 'steam must run'. If you had to manually insert quarters to fire up steam each and every time, then I would get why it is a problem. But it happens to be so that steam is a passive program that is just there. If steam is too dangerous to use, then any webbrowser on your pc is certainly ten times as dangerous.

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No, it's not the case for Impulse, as Impulse service is not required once you have the game installed. You can even patch outside of Impulse.

They may ban you from using the service again, but unlike Steam, it won't brick all your games.

BTW what Twilight bugs are you talking about? I didn't consider Twilight buggy at all once the patches rolled around.

GC2 1.00 was no buggier then Civ 1.00 or EU3 1.00, so that conspiracy stuff is bunk. Besides, if they bugged up the unpatched version, reviews WOULD suffer, and then sales WOULD suffer. Stardock's a decent sized company, but not so big that they can get away with crapping the pot. They're not 2K...

LDiCesare said:

I also think CD-key is too different from CD check (physical) to be included in the same option. To me, CD in drive is no, CD key is yes.

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You're probably right, I didn't really consider it that way. I guess I'm so used to one following the other.

I'm not 100% sure where "CD-Key only" would fall. To be honest, I can't really think of any games that use a CD-key without a CD-check. I'd probably put it under "No DRM" if you don't have to register it anywhere, but it's slightly more annoying than "No DRM" because you can still lose the CD-key.

arstal said:

No, it's not the case for Impulse, as Impulse service is not required once you have the game installed. You can even patch outside of Impulse.

They may ban you from using the service again, but unlike Steam, it won't brick all your games.

BTW what Twilight bugs are you talking about? I didn't consider Twilight buggy at all once the patches rolled around.

GC2 1.00 was no buggier then Civ 1.00 or EU3 1.00, so that conspiracy stuff is bunk. Besides, if they bugged up the unpatched version, reviews WOULD suffer, and then sales WOULD suffer. Stardock's a decent sized company, but not so big that they can get away with crapping the pot. They're not 2K...

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After the first line the post seems to be not directed at me, so I will ignore that.

For games like Sins of a solar empire Stardock is not realeasing any patches outside impulse, so you do indeed need impulse to patch. It is like ensuring that people will use impulse. After that impulse can be uninstalled, sure, and steam needs to run. I could see steam running as a problem if god killed a kitten every time someone started steam - on a sidenote, my cat died today. The end user however will not even notice steam running, and as long as steam does not slow anything down and as long as it works fine and does what it needs to do, what is the problem?

We can be all dramatic about this, but I infinitely prefer to be pragmatic. If steam becomes an obstacle in the future, then I will deal with it then. The anti-steam sentiments on this board mostly revolve around some minor issues that get blown up to epic proportions. Calling steam bad because valve might close an account is pointless. It is like not buying a brand of cookies because those cookies might not be around over five years.

Seriously, get worked up when the horrors that steam may bestow upon you actually happen rather than getting worked up because they have a slight chance of happening - especially since it probably won't happen unless valve has a good reason.

Before to vote, I'll ask: what is login-based registration, comparatively to One Time Registration? Becaues i thought that Steam was One Time Registration and not login based... thx

Naokaukodem said:

Before to vote, I'll ask: what is login-based registration, comparatively to One Time Registration? Becaues i thought that Steam was One Time Registration and not login based... thx

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I guess it is that you need to login in order to play rather than logging in one time in order to register.

With one-time-registering, I can buy a game and register it, then everyone can play it on my pc. With login-based registration only I can play because others cannot login on my account.

Shurdus said:

I guess it is that you need to login in order to play rather than logging in one time in order to register.

With one-time-registering, I can buy a game and register it, then everyone can play it on my pc. With login-based registration only I can play because others cannot login on my account.

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That makes very little difference to me as you could as well communicate your account data to the other members of your family.

arstal said:

u talking about? I didn't consider Twilight buggy at all once the patches rolled around.

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Well, playing small maps on ToA weren't affected IIRC. I believe it was only large and the largest maps.

There were 2 I distinctly remember, and a large thread was put together in which we sent emails to the devs. We did receive responses, but they stated they have seen no such problems. I think some emailed saved games also, don't know what happened though, my frustration with the whole thing ended my beloved GalCiv2 days.

One was that evil civ's did not expand. On huge maps, they often would only expand within a certain small radius.

Other was civ's not building improvements on up to 30% + of their planets (I mean nothing, building of everything stops, and they just sit there). On a massive game I was playing on the 2nd hardest difficulty, the game was way to easy and I was wondering why. So on the same turn, I checked out every planet in the galaxy, and a huge number of them were like this.
- Most players won't realize it unless they look. I did the same 10 turns later, and those planets were the same way. 30 turns later, those planets were the same way.

I consider those near- game breaking for larger maps. Small maps don't seem to suffer these bugs. Not sure if a very late patch fixed these things up or not though (if one was released?). But I played ToA for a good year+ after it's release.

But it wasn't buggy in the overall sense, in fact quite the opposite.. more of a very limited but big AI bugged thing.

Naokaukodem said:

That makes very little difference to me as you could as well communicate your account data to the other members of your family.

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Could, yes. Would you also give it to a person who happens to share your house? I would lend a physical copy of a disc that only requires a key to install to pretty much anyone if I can re-use the key later, like was the case with older games. WOuld you also give that person your account info?

I lived with my best friend for 8 years, and when he installed team fortress 2 I asked for his account info so I could try it out too when he was at work. He did not like that and did not give me the info. He gives me his credit card info when I ask, not his steam account info. Obviously steam does it's job.

tom2050 said:

Who in the world has been voting for Starforce...???? it's like voting to have your computer destroyed by a nuclear explosion.

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I admit I have been one of them. What's wrong with Starforce? I personally had never any problem with it. My computer didn't explode and everything worked fine. I frankly don't care what problems others had with it, most of those probably exist only between customer's chair and keyboard. I prefer Starforce over Steam any day.

2K Games, you should listen to your customers. Trash that deal with Valve and release Civ5 with Starforce. Please!

I think this poll is asking the wrong question. I don't care how DRM is implemented per se. I can tolerate any form of DRM that doesn't prevent me from playing the game after I've purchased it.

Naokaukodem said:

That makes very little difference to me as you could as well communicate your account data to the other members of your family.

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They allow no simultaneous logins (GameTap may still allow 2, but none allow "unlimited" I should say) is the main difference.

duckstab said:

I think this poll is asking the wrong question. I don't care how DRM is implemented per se. I can tolerate any form of DRM that doesn't prevent me from playing the game after I've purchased it.

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Every form of DRM on that list (except "No DRM" and, unless there's a small case I can't think of right now, the Registry-based DRMs, but they tend to be attached to CD-checks as well) can affect your ability to play it after purchasing. CD-checks could prevent you from reinstalling or playing if you lose or damage the CD or the CD-key. Registration could prevent you from reinstalling if you lose the account. Login could prevent you from reinstalling or playing in the same case.

shurdus said:

We can be all dramatic about this, but I infinitely prefer to be pragmatic. If steam becomes an obstacle in the future, then I will deal with it then.

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The problem is…it is an obstacle NOW for some people.~

Shurdus said:

After the first line the post seems to be not directed at me, so I will ignore that.

For games like Sins of a solar empire Stardock is not realeasing any patches outside impulse, so you do indeed need impulse to patch. It is like ensuring that people will use impulse. After that impulse can be uninstalled, sure, and steam needs to run. I could see steam running as a problem if god killed a kitten every time someone started steam - on a sidenote, my cat died today. The end user however will not even notice steam running, and as long as steam does not slow anything down and as long as it works fine and does what it needs to do, what is the problem?

We can be all dramatic about this, but I infinitely prefer to be pragmatic. If steam becomes an obstacle in the future, then I will deal with it then. The anti-steam sentiments on this board mostly revolve around some minor issues that get blown up to epic proportions. Calling steam bad because valve might close an account is pointless. It is like not buying a brand of cookies because those cookies might not be around over five years.

Seriously, get worked up when the horrors that steam may bestow upon you actually happen rather than getting worked up because they have a slight chance of happening - especially since it probably won't happen unless valve has a good reason.

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I know what Steam is. As for your cat, since you're a Steam fanboy, how did it taste? ^_^

The fact is, the mere possibility of Valve being able to brick things you paid for in full, is enough for me to distrust the service. Also, if you are online, as I usually am, Steam can keep games from running.

To use your cookie example, Impulse may ban you from buying more cookies, but Valve will make you puke up the cookies you paid for.

Needing a service to patch I find acceptable. It's when you need it to run the game that I consider it bad. (Not necessarily a deal-killer if it's a cheap MP game I paid $5 for, I do own TF2, but yes to a SP game)

This may sound nuanced, and it is. I'm not the zealot some anti-DRM people are. However, I do have my line, and Steam is barely over that line, which is having the capability to brick what I paid for. Impulse cannot do that. (you don't pay for patches, they're bonuses to me). Steam can.

arstal said:

I know what Steam is. As for your cat, since you're a Steam fanboy, how did it taste? ^_^

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Not only is that in poor taste, it is not needed. Shame. What makes it worse is that you are good with words, and that you could have chosen a tasteful way - no pun intended - of poking me.