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greenmedic88 on 14 March 2010
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dobby985 said:
Reasonable said:
He's completely right. I simply don't buy anything that so restricts me, the paying consumer.

It's a pity even on Steam DRM is there for certain games (non-Valve) as I guess the publishers insist. Really though, it clearly doesn't limit piracy much and it for sure puts of potential customers.

Publishers need to realise DRM really is a lose/lose and be more in sync with consumer.

I think the Steam DRM is fantastic. You get features like Achievements, Anti-Cheat, Auto-Updating, and Steam Cloud. I play all my favorite games like CSS & TF2 on Steam anyway. So why not have all my games on Steam?

For the most part, Steam as a form of DRM is relatively invisible, but as it is essentially an "outer shell" service/program loader encompassing separate pieces of software, each individual piece still retains whatever DRM has been written into each program's code.

Case in point; GTAIV still has it's separate online service requiring players to sign in to confirm a legitimate Rockstar account and play online. Most Games for Windows programs (including GTAIV; meaning you have to sign in to Rockstar servers AND MS servers) require players to sign in for the purpose of tracking changes to your MS account.

From what I can tell, some games like Arkham Asylum won't allow you to save games without signing in to XBL. This is essentially the same form of DRM being used in AC2. Don't sign in; you can't save progress, and the game essentially becomes unplayable for anything but demo purposes, even with a purchased license of the game. 

So the convenience of having all games accessible through one loader/service arguably remains the best feature of Steam, but it does not eliminate many of the negatives.

If you play on multiple systems, the ability to access and load any of your games to any system through your account is probably one of the other best features of the service along with Steam Cloud (great idea in theory but doesn't seem to work for me for any of my games).