Retailers threaten to ban Steam games!

[Scoobes]

Antabus said:

Scoobes said:

I'll support it as long as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. To me, having saved game backups, the ability to play anywhere without having to take my disks, not having to worry about finding disks when I get new hardware and the new cross platform ownership if I decide to buy a Mac, outweigh the disadvantage of second hand sale. That's not including all the extra community features.

Essentially, it's DRM which whilst in one hand takes away one ability, but gives a lot of benefits to the customer with the other. In other words, it's the only DRM I've seen that's actually doing something right.

On the second hand sale of DD products you have to remember that the laws were originally written for physical products that undergo degradation with use. With digital download the area is very grey. With a digital download there is not degradation, hence if you sell a DD product onto another party, they will essentially receive exactly the same product as one from brand new/full price.

For physical media, the equivalent would be if you purchased a DVD, made a perfect replica, then sold it on. It bascially equates to a form of piracy. These are really some pretty insane issues for law makers to sort out, because on one hand you have the right to sell, but on the other, they have to protect the content holders/distributors.

I don't get it. Would it be bad if you could sell the games you bought on steam or that you would not have to put up with steam or any other drm crap if you buy a retail game? I guess you like the EA online passes too. Oh wait, that is not a valve thing...

So let me get this straight...

If you would sell a game which you have bought from steam to another steam user... that would be like making a pirate copy of the game? Even though you would lose the game from your steam games.

I think I am starting to see the reason for your drm supporting.

I never said it was logical, lol.

It's an issue with the laws for protecting copyright holders. Basically, the reason you're allowed to sell your content is because the value decreases with use (like a car for instance). With digital download, as their is no decrease in value due to the user; it remains identical from the day you purchased it. Due to this, a digital resale becomes an issue for content holders as their is no distinct advantage to buying something new, the quality of the digital product remains constant and therefore, for the content provider, is the equivalent of piracy. 

Even selling second hand games has the disadvantage that the disk is worn, the case may be damaged, manual missing, etc.

You can however, sell an entire account because when you buy a game across Steam, that is technically what you own... yeah, the laws are fuzzy.

Anyway, I never said I supported DRM as a whole. I said I support a service (that has DRM) when there are much greater advantages to the end user that outweigh the negatives. The only service that has done this (in games) is Steam. The positives of Steam as a service include physical damge of disks becomes a non-issue, auto-patching, cross-platform play, cross-platform ownership, saved game backups, community features (acheivements, chat, profiles etc.) and being playable on multiple hardware units no matter where you are. If I have to stay with family for a few months and have to use a seperate PC, I don't need to take my games with me, just my account details.

Which other services (with DRM) offer all of this? As far as I'm aware, none of them (including the EA online thing). Valve and Steam have fans because the service is good. It wasn't all plain sailing as I'm sure you know. When Steam was first launched it was a terrible service, but people don't mind anymore because it's greatly improved over the years. You must see that right?