STEAM/Internet vs RL

Ive seen alot of posts lately about people "leaving steam forever" and saying "PC Games are awful" you'll, "Never buy them again".

And it got me thinking and wanting to share my POV. First Id like to mention the story on this forum about that guy who bought a steam game off ebay and got his account disabled and lost all his hundreds of dollars worth of games, is truly a sad story. Even though it IS his fault, steam should have some common sense. Id recommend you don't hit the panic button so quick, first email steam or phone and explain what happened. If they still leave your account disabled, well then we will know what their real priority's are. I'm sure if they look and see you have bought 100$+ of games and then by accident had 1 screw up with a freak accident on ebay they should understand.

Now on to my splur of text, I've been very fond of PC gaming from the start, steam is a pretty good application in my opinion, I've bought my share of Steam/Valve games (CSS, HL2, HL1, Portal). However I would personally take a boxed/store bought game any day over that steam garbage, even if I have to pay a bit more.

Why? well its my own personal quirk, I like having the box and the manual. And being able to have the thought that 30-40 years down the line I still will have all the boxes and CDs, and memories (aww) lol.

Over the years I've seen something take over the gaming, greed. Many game companies now day have really shown that they truly don't care about their customers. However they will soon suffer because most gamers (especially PC gamers) won't put up with much crap.

EA I believe was one of them, everything they touch turns to crap. They are slowly making their up into a better company. But I can name endless amounts of their games that showed they really don't care. For one, LOTR RTS that they made, I was so excited for it. I bought it, came home, installed it. And what do ya know, its a identical version of AOE3 with just different models/textures. It was extremely disappointing.

Many people were distraught over the DRM/SECUROM controversy, this is a BIG issue. Honestly, I didn't think it was anything bad at the start, I bought Mass Effect which had it and really it didn't do too much harm. But slowly you start to see the effects in other games and just general problems associated with it. Many people started to refuse to buy games because of it, in the long run I think it hurt PC Gaming more than it helped.

Securom isn't free. Game companies dish literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for this poor software which really has no efficiency in doing what it should, and no program ever will. Game companies are stupid for not realizing that majority of the piracy going on out there is done by people who know plenty more about reverse engineering/software hacking than the people who made securom or any of the programmers at any most game companies.

Its not the programmers/employees at the game companies I blame, its the guy at the top who is the problem. In some game companies the person in the highest power is the most under qualified for 1 reason, they don't know gaming, all they care about is profit. Then securom comes in with their sales pitch saying how much $ is lost to piracy and that securom stops that and think how much extra money you would get. But the fact is, no matter what they do, people will find a way around it. And its turning off the people who want to buy the game. Lemme ask you this.

What does a pirate have to loose? Nothing but some time.
What does a customer have to loose? 50$

Exactly. If the anti piracy makes it miserable for a pirate to copy the game, he may take a long time or give up. OMG IT WORKED!, But hold on, how about the long time customers, if they are also miserable with the complicated activation mess or long verification or other more serious problems they are gonna think why the hell did I pay 50$ dollars for this good for nothing time vampire.

The way to make money is to sell a good product. No matter how much piracy goes on, if you have a good product people will buy. I will, and many others. If they are that worried then they should just incorporate unique and addicting multi-player.

If you don't have a good product you have nothing, you'd have the same chance of selling a box full of animal droppings labeled chocolate, with its ingredients listed as, Modified Crap. as you do selling a poor game once multiple bad reviews have came out.

And im not making PC gaming look bad, console gaming has gotten pretty upsetting too. I was shocked to see console games are ranging into the $60 & $70 marks. Like common, games should always be 30-60$. Maybe more if its like a special edition or some neat packaged collectors thing. If they are having to charge more money because it cost them so much to produce because of the graphics or whatnot, then cut back on the graphics a bit and spend more time on the quality of game play.

The economy hasn't helped either, all of a sudden out of no were. And even more stupid, the news says "Oh ya needa keep spending to help the economy out" and then ever day they mention how the economy is going to and that just scares everyone and makes it worse.

As for me, I just graduated from hi school, I live at home. I'm working full time for a year to save some money either for school or just to keep, I'm going into the game industry for 3D modeling. I'm not afraid to spend money, well at least right now. I'm one of those people who don't give a crap and just go with the flow and with that attitude I get lucky. I'm logical unlike most of the people now days, If everything goes well, in the future I would like to start my own game company. And I promise never to use any anti'piracy software because it only hurts you more than it helps.

I think ID Software and a couple other companies are still respectable, they haven't used any drastic anti piracy measures that effect people, well at least not yet.

Well thats my 2 cents, ok, 2 dollars. I typed a bit more than 2 cents worth.

 

A) Game companies don't really care about making their product fully securable, as in impossible to crack, they know this is impossible. They just try to secure it and prevent it from being cracked for 2-3 months, approximately the lifeime of most games. Some games have achieved this.

B) The prices are based on what people will pay. Apparently, it's working well.

 

This is not always legal, and its certainly not always morally right.

 

TL;DR

I love STEAM, I've had no problems with the games that I've bought directly from STEAM or from legit retailers.

 

My dog loves licking his own . Whats your point? Whatever works for ya right?

 

Stardock

A gaming developer/publisher that gets it...in fact, now that I have a break from shift work, I'm off to buy Entrenchment from Best Buy, and it it ain't there, then download it from Impulse...

 

Well no, it's not always legal, but I sorta doubt price collusion by the largest publishers (though it's possible).

And since we don't live in a communist society, technically it forms the moral foundation for our entire economic system.

 

That is a very nice post you wrote, it is just awful what the game industry has come to be (especially the PC Games Industry), I have pretty much nothing else to say since you have already shown my feelings about the situation more or less.

I do not like where this ship is headed to, PC Gaming is suffering.

 

Theres some confidence you can take to the bank.

And what is that exactly?
Also, what does the first part of that sentence have to do the the second?
There are no true communist states nor are any there true capitialists states in this world so there's no reason why you should even have mentioned communism. There is nothing in this thread that suggests anything remotely related to communism. For it to be anything even close to communism, the games would have to be state funded (which I'm all for actually). What the Op suggested was a price scheme which he thought would be a bit more fair to him, which is the true "foundation for our entire economic system" COMMUNISM???


About stardock and impulse, its great in its current form, but its still young and their policies aren't written in stone. Steam didn't always have the restrictions it does today.

 

I agree...after two IPs (Galactic Civilizations and Sins) that sold quite well, there are probably quite a few suits ready to take over from Brad Wardell...we'll see what Frogboy does with his company...

Electronic Arts wasn't originally evil...some of the most innovative computer games ever developed were published by Electronic Arts in the 80's...as a growing business though, it became more interested in the money than the quality...which is the purpose of a business...

The consumer determines whether they will allow it...if millions of us rush to the store every year to pick up the latest Madden or NCAA Football, EA will gladly continue to churn them out...

And if millions of us are willing to pay $60 for a crappy game based on a movie license, the publishers will continue to ask the developers to make them...

 

Just buy your games from real stores for the time being. It is much easier to protect your rights when you have disk in hand.

 

i like this post
security software will never get rid of pirates and will just annoy legit buyers
i think the best way to keep customers legit is to come out with really good quality games that may or amy not have a multiplayer component.
i believe that most game players will be willing to shell out money for a top quality game even if they have a pirated copy if they believe the game quality is excellent...

+1 rep to poster

 

I just made a post at that "other" thread MonkeyMHz is talking about and said about the same thing he did.

I like Steam. I was skeptical at first because I used to buy games new at full retail and sell them on eBay when I was done, at least the ones I knew I didn't care much for.

Then when Steam started offering some awesome deals I started gobbling up games left and right. Now that I have a few PC's I like having Steam. It's easier and much quicker to just copy the files from a USB HDD than install from a CD or DVD. And I can always download again if my backups every get damaged or lost for some reason (I have a USB HDD dedicated to my Steam backups).

My biggest concern is Steam's "uber power" they have over your account. I'm concerned that if there is a snafu down the road, for whatever reason, that my account of games worth several hundreds of dollars is gone with no recourse. That, IMHO is completely illegal.

 

Well I wish this would fix the problems, but now retail games are requiring STEAM, other forms of restrictive DRM, and/or GFW Live. Saints Row 2, FEAR 2 etc require steam for example, even when you buy the CD.

And I wouldn't jump on the game devs for requiring DRM. This entire fiasco is over stock values, if they don't churn out an expected profit every year on a timely basis, their entire company is at risk. BIG game companies don't have room for failure, or time to experiment with different sales methods. Instead, they'll go with any quick fix that's pitched to them.

awhile back most game companies were independantly funded and weren't a part of a multi billion dollar corperation, the people who put out the games, knew about them, and made games that THEY thought were fun, now game companies are run by CEO's that don't know much about their own industry, they only care about what's profitable. Which means making games based on statistics rather than what the actual devs find entertaining.

One thing that I find upsetting, and that proves that game companies don't care, is when a game that sells over a million is said to be a sales flop, in the case of Crysis, you may not know,but back in the 1990's most developers were satisfied that their game sold in the 10's of thousands, and if they sold in the 100's of thousands that would be considered a HUGE success because it meant people liked the game, and that's all they cared about. But now games that sell millions are failures? Ok yea compared to the tens of millions that blockbuster console games sell, but that's only because the advertising for them is extremely forced, while PC games, and the PC as a gaming platform is not advertised AT ALL to the mainstream consumers. In fact the only PC game that is mainstream advertised is World of Warcraft, and I bet that's why it sells so well.

The solution to the dying blockbuster PC games? More advertising! Someone needs to step up and market a $300-$400 gaming PC. It's not like that's asking too much, since you can already build one yourself with an HD4830, Althon X2, 4GB of ram and all the other nessicary parts for around that much. Some company needs to just do it! And agressively market it to the mainstream instead of just at PC events like current PC hardware companies do. Also, don't market it as a PC, market it as a gaming machine and show games running on it and what it can do. On top of that, make an interface that auto loads on start up that can launch any of your installed games, and has a quick button to go to the main OS, basically like the Xbox dashboard or the XMB.

As it's been said, game companies are businesses, it's all about making money, they don't care about you, they only care about what makes money.

 

I would disagree with your argument on piracy. You see, the pirtate/cracker community thrives on have difficult challenges and puzles to solve when it comes to software. The harder it gets, the more groups will compete with each other to see who cracks it first. If you've ever downloaded an .nfo file, you will see that they mostly do it for fun and that they support the software companies and encourage people to buy stuff they like.