Will it be steam based?

[blade117]

I don;t use steam, and I don't intend to. Seeing as I have a reliable internet connection during classes, I can't exactly download games, even legally, from behind the massive firewall around the network.

 

[Chalks]

....Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a limited, terminable, non-exclusive license and right to use the Steam Software for your personal use in accordance with this Agreement and the Subscription Terms. The Steam Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Steam Software.....

If Steam is required to play Civ5, I won't buy it. I prefer a retail boxed copy that I own without the requirement for an internet connection to play.

The Steam Software is licensed, not sold.

The Steam client, that you didn't pay any money for, is not being sold. It is being licensed. For free. Because it is part of a service. Because this is the only workable system for a DRM enforcement framework. How else do you suggest you enforce the banning of pirates from software with an offline mode if you are not legally allowed to prevent them from using the software? Ah, yes, of course, you must be thinking of the way the magical ponies enforce copy protection. They really have thought of everything.

And I rather have the flu than the chicken pox, but most of all I'd prefer not to be sick at all. Programs designed to protect the copyright of the producer won't prevent illegal copying, it will only create obstacles for normal usage (again, I do not doubt the value for some with digital distribution).

Well, you keep on praying for the magical pony protection™ option.

Regardless of how much you want the game to come with some fictitious form of perfect copy protection, the rest of us here in reality are going to just have to make do with the fact that if they chose Steam as their distribution method, it would probably be the best option available to them.

And by "available to them" I'm only including options that actually exist. Sorry.

 

[Greybriar]

The Steam Software is licensed, not sold....

Then I can sell games I have purchased from Steam/Valve to another gamer?

 

[Ingvina Freyr]

You misunderstand me Chalks. I'm saying as there is no such thing as a perfect copy protection they should let this DRM-thing go altogether. It doesn't serve it's purpose. In fact it is proven to be contra productive if anything.

 

[Chalks]

Then I can sell games I have purchased from Steam/Valve to another gamer?

That has nothing to do with the licensing terms of the steam interface.

You won't be able to resell any game that uses modern DRM.

 

[Chalks]

You misunderstand me Chalks. I'm saying as there is no such thing as a perfect copy protection they should let this DRM-thing go altogether. It doesn't serve it's purpose. In fact it is proven to be contra productive if anything.

They're not going to, though, thus you're living in a fantasy land if you think the question is anything other than "should they use steam or another DRM provider".

You can argue that nobody will ever design an effective DRM system in the history of time (using your all seeing crystal ball) and that games bound to the steam platform or similar suffer worse piracy than popular games that have no copy protection at all (using the studies that you seem to have forgotten to cite) all you want.

That isn't going to change the fact that people in this thread are acting like the question is "would you like steam or complete absence of DRM?". That isn't the question. That would be a stupid question.

Nobody is asking "cake or death?"

 

[Greybriar]

That has nothing to do with the licensing terms of the steam interface.

You won't be able to resell any game that uses modern DRM.

That violates First-sale doctrine. What you really mean is that we gamers won't be able to resell any STEAM game.

 

[Chalks]

That violates First-sale doctrine. What you really mean is that we gamers won't be able to resell any STEAM game.

Steam is the only form of online registration DRM?

 

[Greybriar]

Steam is the only form of online registration DRM?

I don't speak for every gaming publisher and neither should you or anyone else.

 

[Ingvina Freyr]

Nobody is asking "cake or death?"

Eeehmm...cake, please.

Your references to crystal balls and magical ponies are somewhat amusing but completely without substance in terms of argument. If you want to point out that nobody can forsee the future then address those that have tried.

You can argue that nobody will ever design an effective DRM system in the history of time (using your all seeing crystal ball) and that games bound to the steam platform or similar suffer worse piracy than popular games that have no copy protection at all (using the studies that you seem to have forgotten to cite) all you want.

Spore's piracy problem. Note that this article was published shortly after Spore's release, and that the number of illegal downloads from there just went trough the roof.

Here are some excerpts from speeches given by Cory Doctorow on DRM in 2005 and 2008.

Spoiler :

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a member-supported
charitable organization that works to uphold the public interest in
technology law, policy and standards. For nearly four years, I've
spent my time attending DRM standards meetings, consortia, and treaty
meetings at the United Nations. In that time, again and again, I've
seen tech giants like HP take suicidal measures to voluntarily cripple
their products to make them more palatable to a few entertainment
companies, even though this measure makes them less palatable to
virtually all of your paying customers.
Nothing epitomized this more than Carly Florina's inaugural CES
address in which she promised to put DRM in every HP product. Reading
that in my office in San Francisco (I live in London now), I thought,
well, hell, I guess I'm not buying any more HP products. I'm pretty
sure I'm not the only one.

I've had innumerable conversations with engineers, lawyers and execs
about DRM, but it's rare that I get the chance to systematically
explain how DRM fails as a technology, as a moral proposition, and as
a commercial initiative. I'm grateful that HP has given me that chance
today. I'm looking forward to your questions after my talk.

Now, onto the talk, in which I will try to address the security, moral
and commercial aspects of DRM.

THREAT MODELS

There is no such thing as "security" in the abstract. You can't be
made "secure." You can only be made "secure" *against a specific
attack*. All security discussions must begin with an analysis of a
threat and a proceed to address that threat with countermeasures.

In discussions of DRM, radically different threat-models are usually
conflated to sow confusion and to disguise the implausibility of DRM.
In the paper at hand (as in many other cases), privacy-protection is
conflated with use-restriction. But these have totally different
threat-models:

* Privacy

In privacy scenarios, there is a sender, a receiver and an attacker.
For example, you want to send your credit-card to an online store. An
attacker wants to capture the number. Your security here concerns
itself with protecting the integrity and secrecy of a message in
transit. It makes no attempt to restrict the disposition of your
credit-card number after it is received by the store.

* Use-restriction

In DRM use-restriction scenarios, there is only a sender and an
attacker, *who is also the intended recipient of the message*. I
transmit a song to you so that you can listen to it, but try to stop
you from copying it. This requires that your terminal obey my
commands, even when you want it to obey *your* commands.

Understood this way, use-restriction and privacy are antithetical. As
is often the case in security, increasing the security on one axis
weakens the security on another. A terminal that is capable of being
remotely controlled by a third party who is adversarial to its owner
is a terminal that is capable of betraying its owner's privacy in
numerous ways without the owner's consent or knowledge. A terminal
that can *never* be used to override its owner's wishes is by
definition a terminal that is better at protecting its owner's
privacy.

THE DRM THREAT MODEL

<snip>

The presence of DRM *cannot* entice a user to make use of the
conditional access system to acquire his media. Indeed, DRM acts as a
disincentive (there is no user who woke up this morning crying out for
a way to do less with her music). Where users buy DRM-locked files, it
is *in spite of* the DRM, or in ignorance of the DRM, but never
*because* of the DRM.

<snip>

Big Champagne, a company that monitors P2P networks, says that iTunes-only
tracks (e.g. assets that are only released within DRM wrappers)
typically appear on P2P networks less than three minutes after they
are released to the iTunes Music Store.
To succeed in an attack against a DRM system, a user need not know how
to break DRM, she only needs to know how to search Google or another
general-purpose search tool for a copy that someone else has already
rendered in the clear.

<snip>

DRM AND NON-COPYRIGHT POLICY ENFORCEMENT

Many of the restrictions that DRM is used to enforce are unrelated to
copyright, and no DRM system can accurately model copyright, which is
highly fact-specific.

Copyright is a limited monopoly over the public copying, performance,
display and adaptation of original works. Copyright governs the
ability of commercial entities and a few noncommercial entities to
make copies, display them, etc.

Copyright does *not* confer the right to control "remote viewing" --
the ability to store a show in one place and watch it in another. It
does *not* confer the right to control timeshifting. It doesn't confer
the right to control regional playback, as with DVDs that can only be
viewed on a US player or a European players. Copyright does *not*
confer the right to control re-sale or lending of lawfully acquired
works.
Copyright is used to extend the creator's monopoly into all kinds of
realms, though. Take the so-called "Authorized Domain", a trendy DRM
concept that confers on rightsholders the right to define valid
familial arrangements, something so far remote from copyright as to be
in an entirely different universe.

<snip>

DRM AS A NEGOTIATION

DRM is often characterized as the outcome of a negotiation: "You may
have access to my song if you accept my restrictions." But DRM always
gives rightsholders the ability to unilaterally renegotiate the terms
of the deal to take away rights you acquired when you got your device
and media.

<snip>

The right to store your music and movies, the right to watch your
movies in any country you find yourself in, the right to timeshift and
space-shift, the right to re-sell, the right to loan, the right to
share your media with your family regardless of your familial
arrangements -- these rights all belong to the public. Copyright law
reserves these rights from control by rightsholders.
DRM is a mechanism for unbalancing copyright, for betraying the
statutory limitations on copyright, for undermining the law itself. By
granting rightsholders the ability to unilaterally confiscate public
rights under copyright, DRM takes value out of the public's pocket and
delivers it to rightsholders.

<snip>

The gradual tightening of DRM screws will alienate ever-larger groups
of customers. There are some who believe that if you turn the heat up
gradually enough, the customer will never notice that she has been
boiled. History suggests otherwise. The repeated disastrous attempts
to introduce DRMed CDs into the marketplace tells us once a customer
is accustomed to a use, she is unlikely to accept a product that
restricts it.

<snip>

CONCLUSIONS

I can hardly fault HP for embracing the received wisdom on DRM.
However, the received wisdom is rarely a path to commercial success.
In the global marketplace, HP has numerous competitors, from giants to
smaller, nimbler firms -- and if any company has an appreciation of
the potential of two guys in a garage, it should be this one.

The question isn't *whether* one of these companies will defect from
the DRM game, but *when*. The first to market with better, more
powerful, more capable devices will emerge the clear winner.

<snip>

Spoiler :

<snip>

The first one is something called Digital Rights Management technology, which is
predicated on the idea that you can give someone material and then control how
they use it, and stop them from copying it: that you can deliver it to their
computer but then stop them from using it, and this fails some fairly elementary
logical examination. If you know a little about cryptography, it just all kind
of falls to bits.

The historic model for cryptography involves an attacker, a receiver and a
sender. And the attacker, the receiver and the sender are in this triad where
the sender and the receiver want to get a message to each other without the
attacker receiving it, or decrypting it - knowing what the message is. So
everybody is assumed to know what the message is in its scrambled form. This
dates back to the Bletchley Park era in WWII when we went from delivering
messages on paper, or in the era of the Caesar we deliver the messages by
shaving the head of the messenger and tattooing it on their scalp, and waiting
for their hair to grow back and then sending them off. So the message was a
secret back then. After the advent of radio it was kind of a non-starter to
assume that the message itself was secret. So we presume that everyone is in
possession of the message - the attacker, the sender and the receiver - in its
scrambled form.

We also presume that everybody knows the system by which the message was
scrambled, the 'cypher' - and this again dates back to the Bletchley Park era -
the WWII era of codebreaking where it was discovered that the mathematicians who
developed the German cipher, the 'Enigma' cypher, had made some flaws in their
maths that allowed the Polish and British cryptographers working on this to
uncover those flaws and silently decrypt all of their messages, and chortle as
they read about what Hitler was having for breakfast that morning.

At the end of the war, the cryptographers who figured this stuff out gave
themselves a long hard look, and realised that anyone could design a security
system that was so fiendishly clever that they themselves couldn't break it, but
unless they were the smartest person in the world, all they'd determined was
that they had built a security system that people dumber than them would be
foiled by, and it would do them no good if anyone smarter than them happened to
come along. So they hit on the strategy of disclosing the system by which the
messages were scrambled, the cypher, sending them out to as many mathematicians
and smart people as they could find, in the hopes that those people would
discover the flaws in it, so that they could be fixed.

This is standard operating procedure today. If you use a cypher, chances are
that you use a cypher that everyone else uses, it's publicly known, it's
publicly disclosed. The MI5, the CIA, Bin Laden, Amazon.com, your bank and
child pornographers all use the same cypher, because to use your own cypher that
you haven't subjected to this kind of rigorous, long-term attack by smart
mathematicians is to invite the fate of the axis powers during WWII.

So you assume that the attacker, the sender and the receiver have the scrambled
message and the cypher, so how do you keep the message secret from the attacker?
Well, the way that you keep it secret is by having a secret key - a very short
piece of information that, when combined with the cypher and the cyphertext,
pops out the cleartext. So you have the message in cyphertext, you have the
cypher, and you have the key - and if you have all three of those, you can make
the message pop out, but if you are lacking one of them then the message is kept
a secret. So the key is known to the sender and the receiver and kept a secret
from the attacker.

Well, that works in regular cryptography. It's how you do your online banking,
it's how Al-Qaeda does its online stuff, its how MI5 communicates, its how we
all do our thing.

In DRM, though, the idea is that you can take the attacker (that's you, the
person who owns the DVD, or owns the iPhone app, or owns the iTune download or
owns the Zune song, or owns the game on your Xbox) - you can take the attacker,
and give the attacker the cyphertext (that's the scrambled message on the DVD,
or the game, or the iTune), let that attacker know what the cypher is (because
that's published), and then embed the key for decrypting the message on the
attacker's device. So in your iPhone, in your PC, on your Xbox, is the key
that's used to decrypt the message, and then what you can do is pretend that the
attacker who has the key sat there in his sitting room, where he has access to
every conceivable piece of equipment without any oversight or surveillance, will
never, ever, ever get the key out of the device. That no-one will ever extract
the key from the device and publish it on the Internet, and fifty million other
people will get access to it, and then everyone will sit around decoding your
messages, and you'll be Hitler in a bunker, and they'll be Bletchley Park. This
turns out not to work very well.

There's a reason that giant IT companies and entertainment companies spend a
decade and a billion dollars developing these fiendishly clever DRM schemes that
are then broken by teenagers in a morning for fun. It's not because the people
who work for these companies are stupid, it's because they're trying to keep
something a secret after telling you what it is, and it's very hard to keep
something a secret when you actually tell millions of people this bit of
information in the form of a little hidden bit on their Xbox, or what have you.

So to show you how vulnerable this is, a guy (I assume it's a guy) named
Muesli64 - a person of such fearsome ability that he named himself after a
breakfast cereal - extracted a key from the DVDHD player. And it's worth noting
here, that where you have a DRM that's across multiple devices like a DVD player
where you've got hundreds of DVD vendors, each of which embed the key in their
device, all you need to do is break the weakest of those DVD players - the worst
implemented one - and they all fall down. You can now extract the keys from all
the DVDs. So he found a software DVDHD player, extracted the keys and published
them online. It was hilarious, the entertainment industry argued that this long
number - 128 bit number - was a trade secret and that no-one was allowed to
publish it, and there were like fourteen million copies on the Internet, and
they were still saying no-one's allowed to publish it because it's still secret,
and it was kind of ridiculous and funny for a couple of days.

And then someone sent an email to Muesli64 or on a message board said, "You
know, I don't have a DVDHD player, I've got a Blu-Ray player. Do you think you
could break that?" And he said, "I don't actually have a Blu-Ray player, so I
don't know, but tell you what; if you just send me the contents of RAM while
you're playing a Blu-Ray movie on your computer - just send me the RAM dump, the
two gigabytes out of your computer's RAM - I'll just have a look and see what I
can do." And what he did was he reasoned that somewhere in this two gigabytes
was the 128 bit key that was decrypting the video on the screen, so he started
at position one, and took the first 128 bits and tried to decrypt the rest of
memory to see if a DVD fell out, and none did, so then he moved to position two,
position three... It took him about two hours. He'd never actually seen or
touched a Blu-Ray player and like Mycroft Holmes sitting in his cellar he
managed to undo the workings of half a decade's worth of security research in
the seriousness and gravitas that accompanies a man who names himself after a
breakfast cereal.

<snip>

 

[Chalks]

Eeehmm...cake, please.
[...]

You can argue that some DRM methods do not work - I would completely agree.

But you cannot argue that a DRM game will be pirated MORE because it has DRM. Spore was massively hyped, if it had no DRM it would have been pirated up to the eyeballs. I guarantee that more copies were sold purely due to the fact that 12 year old kids weren't able to just lend the CDs to all their friends so they all had the game instantly like we used to do back in the days before all of this.

Spore's DRM was really really bad, too. Fundamentally broken, and undermining the rights of the user to play the damn game they paid for.

But that's the sort of thing people are encouraging by saying they won't buy the game if it uses Steam. Steam does DRM well. Infinite, convenient installs without the need for disks, offline mode... it's more convenient for the end user than having to worry about CDs.

But by saying "I hate steam, don't use steam" - all you're saying is "use a different form of DRM that is probably going to be worse". They'll have a meeting about what DRM they want to use in the game, they'll see the big anti steam thread and they'll say - "well, not steam, lets see what else is on the market". Or they will ignore you. I hope they ignore you, I hope to god they do.

By all means, rant about how much you hate DRM in general if you have the overwhelming desire to resell your games. But picking on the best main stream modern DRM system out there, when there are so many utterly terrible ones, is crazy.

 

[cspyr0]

DRM is pretty ineffective against piracy. I actually wrote a paper for a computer ethics class about DRM and how the public is distracted from its real purpose - to limit the second-hand market. While profits lost from piracy are always kinda fuzzy, losses due to your selling your game to a friend for $10 are huge in comparison (especially if we're talking about consoles) since these are people that are willing to spend money for the game, but now the publisher isn't getting any of it.

There would be a giant backlash if they came out and said that DRM was there to keep you from selling the stuff you own, though, so instead they wave their hands and scream "PIRATES!!". So when you hear about a new scheme (such as the limited number of installs), think about how it limits resale. IMO this is the main goal of DRM.

I never resell my games, so Steam doesn't bother me in that sense, but I can see why it might bother someone else. I have lent games to friends on Steam before though - to do that I just give them access to my account and they can play whatever games I have on there.

 

[Ingvina Freyr]

But you cannot argue that a DRM game will be pirated MORE because it has DRM.

When people are saying they downloaded a crack to circumvent the DRM that greatly disturbed them then I can and will argue that a DRM game will be pirated more because it has DRM.

But by saying "I hate steam, don't use steam" - all you're saying is "use a different form of DRM that is probably going to be worse".

Please don't make up comments and suggest they are mine. Feel free to quote me, though.

Steam might very well be a convenient option for those who prefer digital distribution. But I and many others would prefer a hard back copy and without any programs that messes with our usage. That is what I've been saying all along.

They'll have a meeting about what DRM they want to use in the game, they'll see the big anti steam thread and they'll say - "well, not steam, lets see what else is on the market

[...]people in this thread are acting like the question is "would you like steam or complete absence of DRM?". That isn't the question. That would be a stupid question.

How would you know what questions the people at Firaxis and 2K are asking themselves? Maybe they aren't contemplating the absence of DRM. But they should. It would not be a stupid question. Judging from what Cory Doctorow (an expert on the matter) says, it would be a very wise consideration.

By all means, rant about how much you hate DRM in general if you have the overwhelming desire to resell your games

When did I say something about reselling games?
Chalks, not only is a great deal of what you're posting without substance, seemingly with the only intent of throwing in a punchline, but it also comes off as slightly aggressive, so if anyone here is ranting it is you.

 

[Afforess]

Do they provide the full install of Steam on the game disc? If not, it most certainly does not make my entire point moot.

Yes, you can back up steam games to a disc or harddrive. I do it. Thus, your entire post IS moot.

 

[Chose]

I have boxed versions of the Orange Box, and Half Life 2 GotY edition, which require steam to be activated. Being able to buy a game in store is irrelevant to whether it requires steam or not.

That's not what I said and that is not my point. The person I quoted was saying that because you could buy Civ 5 on steam that means you must have steam to play it, and I'm saying that is not the case. Some games you can buy on steam, but you are not required to log on to steam to play them if you buy it from a different source than steam, such as a store.

 

[azzaman333]

To azzaman333; Some posters did provide an substantial description of how well Steam works for them in the beginning of this thread, and I started by saying that I understood and respected the arguments given, but reasonable arguments against Steam and other DRMs can be made as well. When I told about how the release of Empire-Total War turned into a nightmare for a great number of fans/gamers, not only with the installment but also when trying to play the game, and how some of the problems was a direct result of the inclusion of Steam, you responded "then you're doing it wrong" and Badesmofu suggested that I was under some false conceptions as if none of you had actually read what I said. Granted, those installment errors are most probably fixed by now, but I am sure the producers (the CA's) loss of fans/customers is not easily repaired and the story gives a (more than just anecdotal) example of problems that can arise when involving a third party software.

I don't know exactly what the problems with E:TW were. I would definitively say that it wasn't steam's fault, because no other game has had those problems.

I guess you missed the fact that the "something similar" as you quaintly phrase it is not legal in the United States.

Considering Valve are based in the US, I highly doubt it is.

Then I can sell games I have purchased from Steam/Valve to another gamer?

Reselling used games hurts devs more than piracy, and most EULAs will say that you can't resell them anyway, steam or not.

 

[Chalks]

When people are saying they downloaded a crack to circumvent the DRM that greatly disturbed them then I can and will argue that a DRM game will be pirated more because it has DRM.

A) Downloading a crack to circumvent DRM != pirating a game.
B) How many people download cracks to circumvent steam? And continue to play the game online? And don't end up getting their steam accounts locked?
C) Even if this quote made sense in the way you probably intended it to (ie, people have told you that they pirated the game because they didn't want DRM), it still doesn't follow that more people will pirate the game for this reason than would pirate it because it's free that way. There is a massive, baseless leap of logic there.

Additionally, games that have online play via steam cannot be pirated with these features intact. That means that anyone who wants to play with online features cannot pirate the game, thus reducing piracy even if the DRM is cracked.

Steam might very well be a convenient option for those who prefer digital distribution. But I and many others would prefer a hard back copy and without any programs that messes with our usage. That is what I've been saying all along.

On my shelf to my right is my boxed copy of half life 2. It is a steam powered game. I have a hardback copy of it. Having a hard copy of a game has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it is seam powered. Nothing what so ever.

You may want no DRM on your games, but you're not going to get it. Civ 5 will have DRM and they've already got a contract to distribute the game via steam.

Looking at the options we have:
A) 2k games buck the trend, becoming pretty much the only publisher to release a recent big name title without DRM
B) 2k go to a third party DRM provider and get a DRM solution from them. This solution will probably be worse than steam - and even if it is as good as steam, it still means you'll have to have some crappy program that only supports one game running in your system. They will also have to rework the DRM for steam distribution, which we know is going to happen.
C) 2k write their own DRM. As above, but less likely because they probably have better things to do with their time
D) 2k get steam to handle the DRM, since they've already got a contract to distribute via steam, so getting a DRM tie in would be very simple indeed. Then all their updates will be automated too for every distribution of the game.

What do you think is going to happen? Not what you wish would happen, but what you think is actually going to be the reality.

I would love them to not use DRM at all - simply to appease guys like you - if I thought it would mean that the game still did really well and not be plagued by piracy. I just don't think this is a realistic idea. (I would still buy the game via steam even if this was the case, because I don't intend to give it assist any one in pirating it and I am in possession of an internet connection)

 

[PPQ_Purple]

I have a laptop that is my primary CIV playing PC.
My laptop does not support an internet connection.
I want to play CIV5 on my laptop.

How do I do that if the game requires steam?

Case closed.

 

[Arakhor]

Most EULAs already breach the US Doctrine of First Sale anyway and that's the least of their legal worries.

 

[deanej]

The ignorance of some people about the way piracy works appalls me. The professional pirates aren't circumvented by DRM and even if they were, it wouldn't do anyone any good. Those pirates WOULD NOT PAY FOR A GAME EVEN IF THEY COULD NOT GET A PIRATED VERSION; they would simply go without. Also, did you know that many people who bought a legitimate copy of Spore installed a pirated copy just so the DRM wouldn't get installed on their computers (my solution for that problem is to install the game in a sandbox so the DRM won't corrupt my Windows installation). Piracy only very rarely (if ever) results in lost sales. It's a shame few people realize this.

And to those of you who keep pointing out that steam can be required even on a boxed copy completely miss the point - there are those of us who want a boxed copy THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE STEAM; there's more to this debate than digital download vs. hardcopy, or even Internet access. I want to go without steam simply because I want to manage my games myself; I don't want another application running in the background, and I don't want to have to launch through another application.