Well, as you can see in my posts, I wasn't talking about "gamers". I was talking about people who usually aren't very interested in computer games, but do have a few games they do play and like. Or (in one case) someone who once was an avid gamer, but put this hobby on hiatus for a couple of years. And at least two of them (possibly more) simply have less and less time to play; we had just turned 20 when we were playing Civ2 and it sometimes becomes difficult to stay in touch with the gaming community when you are 40 and have a career, a spouse, and possibly kids.

I don't see from where you get your confidence that all people who may have liked a medieval/fantasy RPG developed by Bethesda, would automatically be interested in an apocalyptic scifi RPG developed by Obsidian, just because both are published by Bethesda. Out of the 4 people in my pen-and-paper roleplaying group, four have an interest in fantasy RPGs, but only one has any interest in Fallout:NV. You're imho (by far!) overestimating the traction that a developer name has among people who don't spend a lot of time with games.

Note that I was mostly talking about people who bought Civ5, not Skyrim, though the situation is very similar. But to answer your question: Why do you assume that these people were "following" anything? They of course weren't. They had bought a game that they liked, and a couple of years later they saw a successor to that game in an electronics shop and bought it. Some of them _had_ followed the Civ franchise up to about Civ3, but have spent much less time thinking about games since then, though they liked the franchise well enough to buy Civ4 and later Civ5 when they spotted them in shops. They probably don't even know which games Firaxis released in between, and therefore _can't_ be interested in those. I have trouble understanding why that's so difficult to grasp.

I don't understand what's your actual argument here. People who are used to disc checks in a series of games tend to assume that the next game of the series will also have a disc check, especially if they don't have much experience with games in general (and therefore less data to draw information from). I don't see what you're trying to say.

Oh yes. The reasons differ - some had bad experiences with online distribution (patch compatibility, mod compatibility), some object to anything that takes control over a product away from them, some may have just based their opinion on the bad reputation that Steam tends to have (especially among people who are concerned with customer rights). In one case I'm not sure if the person disliked Steam before, but he sure did after reading their terms of service.

First of all, I never claimed to talk about any majority approach. My point was that games like Civ5 and Skyrim trigger complaint waves about Steam because these games reach far beyond the usual customer groups, therefore they get bought by people who haven't yet noticed the recent trend of Steam-exclusives games, or at least not realized its full extent. And therefore one cannot, and should not, conclude that people who ask about these things, and complain about Steam, are dishonest, or trolling. I do believe that this is a valid point and I don't see why it would be relevant for this point whether this was a majority position.

Second, I am quite disappointed that I'm now the second person who is painted as being dishonest. All I did was trying to explain why there are still people to whom the Steamworks is new enough to (a) not expect it, (b) ask questions about it, and (c) be disappointed by its restrictions. I am particularly disappointed to receive such a response from you, based on other posts I've seen from you I wouldn't have expected this.

But I can obviously not "prove" to you that the people I'm talking about do really exist and that I did portray their thoughts and opinions correctly, so if you choose to not believe what I'm saying, then I'll just leave it at that.

The "great state of PC gaming" used to be copy protected disks. There has always been DRM with PC gaming, only the forms of it have changed over the years. I may need to run a client to play now but at least I don't need to fetch a disk for every game I want to play.

This was never my intention and if it came over that way, I sincerely apologize. It's just that I see things from a different angle, which I'm well aware, doesn't have to be the "right" one.

From what you're pointing out however, we actually talk about a handful, i.e. less then 10 individuals. Even with adding all those who dislike / avoid Steam (for whatever reason) up, the majority who bought Skyrim doesn't seem have a problem with the Steam-only part - otherwise Steam wouldn't be where it is now. And we all know, you can't do it right for everyone.

Yes, DRM-free would also be the option I'd prefer. But again and as much as we may dislike it, there's a reason Bethesda switched to SecuROM from Oblivion to the GOTY version, took GFWL for F3 and Steam since F:NV. Even CDProjekt who still went the no-DRM road with Witcher 2, took some doubts and went, at least briefly, legally against "presumed" pirates.
As much as I value my costumers rights, I do see the rights of devs / publishers to protect their work and Steam seems to be (at least currently) the best compromise for both sides.

One final point I'd like to take though, is that SecuROM is a lot more then just disc ckeck. Which I'm sure you're aware of. But anyone disagreeing with Steam and not seeing behind SecuROM / just acknowledging the disc ckeck, is just not informed - and that is no excuse.

Apology accepted, no hard feelings.

Well, it's slightly more than 10 (as mentioned n one of my previous posts), but (as you can see from my posts) I was never even trying to enter a "Steam is good / bad / popular / unpopular / etc." discussion in this thread. And I'm not concerned about majorities at all (especially since it's impossible to know how many people really like Steam, or don't care about it, or put up with it teeth-gnashingly, etc.). My only point was to explain why there are still people who ask questions or complain about Steam, and that it is premature (to say the least) to assume that someone doing so is dishonest or trolling. To explain that, I pointed out that a substantial number of people exist who have good reasons to ask such questions (or make such complaints) even now. Whether or not they are in the majority is not relevant for making this point.

While I understand the reasons for publishing through Steam, I am convinced that it would be possible to protect the rights of devs and publishers equally well without taking so many rights away from customers. Steam is not a noble mediator between the interests of devs and customers, they are a revenue-oriented business that tries to grab all the profit it can get away with. I'm worried that due to its current quasi-monopolistic position, Steam gets away with far too much, and will (in the long run) continue to pursue its own interests at the cost of gamers _and_ developers. But, again, I really didn't (and still don't) intend to join this particular kind of discussion right now.

Yes, Securom is more than a disc check (at least in its later versions, it _was_ only a disc check when it started, but I don't know which components where active in Shivering Isles). However, the disc check was the one that would be noticeable to the people I described, and therefore the one they tend to expect in newer games as well.

And you're correct when you say that someone who's reducing (modern) Securom to the disc check is uninformed. But that's what the people I described mostly are with regard to copy protection. So I can understand why they would open a thread in a forum and ask "If we need copy protection, why do we need it in the form of Steam, disc checks worked so well in the past." And then other people can argue that disc checks did some pretty ugly things too. Which is absolutely correct. But the people who I described wouldn't know that, so they would still make a respective complaint first. Not because they were dishonest or trolling, but simply because they would lack information. And, again: My whole point was to demonstrate that it's perfectly possible to open such a thread without being dishonest.

In the case mentioned above, the complaint would be skewed due to incomplete information. In other cases, the complaint might be plain wrong (e.g. assuming they'd need to be always online to play any Steam game), or quite reasonable (e.g. asking why they are now forced to agree to a service that explicitly reserves the right to remove all their games from them whenever it deems that justified). But in all of these cases, the complaint (or question) would be totally honest. And since there were posts in this thread that instead accused the OP of dishonesty and of "clearly setting (the thread) up to bash Steam and nothing more", I felt a need to point that out.

What a juvenile comeback. I approve!

*high fives*

Just wanted to say I pretty much agree with most of what Siannah said. Skyrim is such a demanding game that most people that want it are serious gamers because it requires a gaming PC to run. And serious gamers know about Steam and hence me and others called to OP out on his rant. No, we can't know that his question wasn't honest but we also used language that would leave room for the fact that we could be wrong. Yes, people that play very special games like Civ5 or Football Manager may not know about Steam because these gamers don't play other games but I would still say that most people who buy Skyrim also knows what Steamworks means. But even if the OP is correct and I am wrong I don't see how that makes me rude? I questioned his motives and that is all - I did call him a scumbag but that was because he wanted to pirate the game instead.

I fail to see how I was rude for questioning something on a Internet forum? In RealLife I am one of the least confrontational guys around and I try to be nice to most (even if I don't always succeed) so being called rude by you is very weird to me. I see you are from Germany and I'm from Denmark so maybe there is a language barrier here but I don't think I was rude and I didn't intend it as such. People can bash Steam all they want but atleast be up front about it and don't hide behind questions you already know the answer for (if that is the case here). And given (like Siannah pointed out) then the OP was quite rude in his answers so...

Maybe the OP was honest and maybe he wasn't - I guess we will never really find out but atleast I enjoy the debate with you here since we can do it in a calm way.

No. Never ever ever ever pirate a video game. Every time you do, you make DRM worse. Downloading copies of games that are still being sold, even ones you already own, is piracy in the eyes of the publisher. Behaviour like that is what led to the creation of UbiDRM.

If you want DRM to go away, uninstall your torrent clients and always get your games legally. Always. If you don't want to buy a game because of the DRM, then don't play it. Tell the publisher it's not worth your time by completely ignoring it.

There's plenty of other games to play while you're waiting for DRM to be patched out. I mean, GOG just got Thief. Why do you need Skyrim?

You do know that DRM has almost nothing to do with piracy but with second hand sales? Sure, the publishers always like to play the "anti-piracy" song whenever they bring a new DRM to the market. Ever wondered why they call it digitial rights management nowadays and no longer "copy protection"? You can make a gazillion copies of your Steam games, because they are all connected to your account.

Steam/Ubi DRM etc or online activation in general had nothing over the usual CDkey in fighting piracy. If you create a crack, you don't care what the DRM is, as you crack it out. But it killed the used games on the PC.

How excactly would e.g. limited activations concern a pirate?

DRM isn't ineffective, it's just useless against piracy.

Yes I do know that. But I'm not a publisher so there's no point in telling me.

But then there is no point in not to pirate (well, apart from obvious moral questions. But this is something everybody has to decide on his own).

In my opinion, if somebody can't stand Steam, he is free to pirate the game. Of course, he could still buy a copy anyway, to give a little something to publishers and developers. Honestly, with such good selling games (Skyrim, CoD, Fifa etc. ) I couldn't care less if somebody buys a copy or not. If it would be e.g. Psychonauts however, that would be a whole dfferent matter.

Erm ... no, it actually doesn't. I don't see how the requirements matter (see below), but Skyrim actually surprised many people with its rather low requirements. The target platform for Skyrim was an Xbox 360. People with gaming PCs are _complaining_ that the game doesn't look as good as it could, and are hoping for a HD graphics pack. Actually these "consolized graphics" were among the bigger complaints in the official forums.

The game runs on a 2GHz Core Duo CPU. It even runs on non-gamer laptops, and even on Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics - and you can even set it to medium quality on the latter.

You are also underestimating the PCs that many "sometimes-gamers" have, specifically because they don't spend so much time to get informed. Just last month someone asked me how he should make backups of three important Excel tables; he had bought an 8 GB USB stick and wanted to know if that would be big enough ... it's an extreme example of course. But just do an experiment, go to a regular electronics store, say that you want an office PC that will also be able to run Civ4 or Oblivion well, and marvel at the recommendations you get ... ;)

But as I said above, I don't see how that matters for this particular discussion, that (much to my surprise) still hasn't ended. I even agree with the point that _most_ people who bought Skyrim are gamers. My point (that, somewhat surprisingly, seems to continually get lost and overlooked even though I mention it in every single post) was that games like Skyrim are interesting for a particularly large proportion of non-regular gamers as well, and that they therefore tend to trigger complaint waves by people who, when they buy that game, learn about Steam-exclusiveness of AAA titles for the the first time. And that it is therefore quite rude to assume that someone who opens such a thread is dishonest and just trolling.

No. I really don't understand why we keep debating this, but your post reads:

"This was clearly set up to bash Steam and nothing more."

You haven't left "room for the fact that you could be wrong". With your statement, you (a) claimed that the OP's intention was not to ask his question, but to set up a Steam-bashing thread, (b) you claim that there can be no doubt about that ("clearly"), (c) you thereby accused the OP of dishonesty (because he had just in the post you replied to _denied_ exactly the thing that you accused him of). You then repeated some of these accusations in your next post.

I really don't understand how you can repeatedly claim that you haven't been rude. And I'm not even talking about the namecalling in your post because that (while still pretty hefty) was at least preceded by a qualificatory remark.

Read your post again - you didn't "question his motives", you outright accused him of setting up a bash thread without leaving any room for doubts.

If you had only "questioned his motives", then I still would have written a remark questioning the usefulness of bringing the discussion down to such a personal level (instead of focusing on the facts), but my response would have been a bit different.

I can't really see how the sentence I quoted could have been meant in any other way that was then somehow distorted by a language barrier, but if you _did_ mean it differently, then it might be appropriate to take it back.

Well, you _are_ acknowledging now (for the first time) that the OP may have been honest, which is good. I also agree that we cannot _know_ his intentions with certainty. I still think that it isn't useful to pull the discussion down to a personal level and speculate about his sincerity in the first place. But I appreciate the acknowledgement that you may have wrongly accused him.

Publishers cannot make the distinction between downloading a backup copy and pirating the game. Publishers are also businesses and not politicians, so it's useless to try and teach them what the distinction is.

If you pirate, they will try to make it harder to pirate. If you buy it, they will make it easier to buy. Either way you're still accessing the product and making them react.

If you do not access the product at all, they'll start to wonder "why is nobody playing this game? does it suck? does it have bad reviews? does the DRM make it too hard to play?" and will actually try to improve on their methods. They might even get PR guys in to come and ask you why you won't touch their game. "It's because of the DRM, it makes it worthless to me."

I make this argument fairly frequently, so I'll point you to a fairly whimsicle hypothetical situation I came up with earlier.

I can see where you are going. But I firmly believe that those who actually make the important decisions in big publishing studios know the truth about piracy and DRM. EA never went after pirates CDP style, neither did Steam. For them, piracy is an excuse to insert DRM and kill the second hand market. Therefore it is irrelevant for the publisher (one that knows what he is doing) what the situation with piracy is. And before you say, those publishers have no clue. Remember, their target isn't good games, it's profit. And EA is doing pretty well last time I checked. So does Ubi or Valve.

Hence my believe that piracy wont make a difference in what publishers do about DRM. Of course if you don't buy a game, that gives them something to think about. But "ignoring" or not playing it is only "problematic" in that you could make free adverstisement if the game is good and then people with less rigid DRM standards will buy it.

Maybe it's because I'm getting real tired (not of this discussion, but behind the keyboard) my ramblings seem incoherent. So I'll try to finish it (for today at least) with a closing statement.

Piracy has less an effect on the gaming industry than the publishers want to make you believe.

Edit: An important distinction, I'm talking about games. Music and videos are a whole different matter. There piracy is a whole different animal.

Not only that but for the vast majority of games there is no need to re-download the entire game in pirated form--adding the cracked EXE(s) to the legitimate disc/download is all that's needed.

Those downloading the crack on its own obviously already have the game files (whether legally or illegally), and since pirated versions already include them there's a strong chance that those downloading them in this form are legitimate customers. Publishers probably don't care much or at all about statistics for crack-only downloads since they aren't usable on their own.

That's just wrong. Yes, it added as an additional argument and probably came over as to swat two flys with one strike.
Copy protection / SecuROM / DRM didn't came in because of the second market, but as a measure against piracy. Yes, they all proved more or less ineffective, but playing the second hand sales is just yet another feeble attempt to "justify" piracy, sry.

In fact if you follow the road that's been taken to protect their work from illegal copying back to the beginning, you can clearly see the escalation it took. And only recently (within the last 5-7 years or so) those measures had the additional effect on the second market. Almost all before Steam (released 2002, first third-party games 2005) had absolutely none (disc check) with Bioshock starting the online activation without any ties to an account in 2007.
The second market wasn't an argument 5 years ago. It is now, but not the reason why we have DRM in the first, second or third place. That was and still is, piracy.


No he's not. He's free to vote with his wallet (which would make an actual impact). If I can't stand the speed limits, I'm not free to drive as fast as I like. If I do, I risk getting caught and having to pay a fee.
And THERE is the difference - with the current technology and (thankfully) privacy rights we have, it's very difficult if not impossible to get caught as a software pirate. That's the reason WHY the companies try to secure themselves otherwise, i.e. with DRM.

Yes, anybody who does pirate games, is supporting more and harder DRM-schemes, no matter how much and loud they protest against it. Or do you really believe it was the ineffectiveness that seemed to change Ubisofts standpoint on their DRM recently? The amount of pirated games? The effect they had on the second market? Or maybe, just maybe it was because they actually sold less and lesser PC games with it?