Tell me about Steam...

[Angilion]

I'll nail my colours to the mast straight away - I dislike modern DRM. I'd even prefer crappy old DRM solutions such as Lenslok from the 1980s (yes, I'm old - my first computer was a ZX-81). The only place I've bought any games in years is gog.com, precisely because they don't have any DRM at all.

So I've completely avoided Steam, but that's becoming more and more restrictive. The potential tipping point is Fallout: New Vegas, which I really want to buy and is yet another Steam-only game.

Steam ticks the two major boxes of why I dislike modern DRM - it's spyware because it takes information from your computer and sends it to the publisher and it makes all game "purchases" game rentals because it leaves the publisher in control of when or if you are allowed to play the game you've paid for. Nobody would accept that crap if it wasn't imposed on them.

I've looked around online for details and all I've found is ~85% fans saying everything is fine regardless of anything because Gabe Newell and Steam are heroes beyond reproach, something like Father Christmas and Superman, ~10% opposition saying that it's utterly terrible under any circumstances and the remainder saying that this sort of DRM is unavoidable, Steam works well enough and Valve haven't got a history of being incompetent or malicious. It seems to be rather polarised and rather short of actual information.


So...does anyone know what information Steam spies from you? Not what is written in the typically vague EULA (I've read that), but what it actually takes and sends to Valve. As far as I can tell, nobody knows or cares apart from me - people either won't use it regardless of what it spies or they'll use it regardless of what it spies as an act of trust and faith in Gabe Newell and Valve. If it's just something like some hardware specs and how many hours I've spent playing a game, I don't really care...as long as somebody is checking that's all they take and that they haven't started taking more.

I wouldn't bother with Steam at all, but I'd really like to buy Fallout: New Vegas.

 

[pingu666]

drm wise its pretty invisible, its not like the horrible drm mp3s and movies from the past where it would be a utter pain 99% of the time, honestly you wont even know its drm most of the time, its just a handy client for you games.

you could try it out with some demos, or if someone gives you a game, the free 2 play stuff has there own system aswell as steam, which are normaly pretty bad btw

 

[dave_beast]

You don't have to buy games through Steam, buy the disc and activate through Steam if you don't want to give your real details.

 

[kthula666]

Only thing I hate about steam is the bandwidth hogging speed of the downloads, there is no capping option. Cant do anything online unless i pause steam D/L. Apart from that never notice the DRM.

 

[Stoner81]

http://store.steampowered.com/privacy_agreement/

Hope it helps.

Stoner81.

 

[npjnpj]

I know exactly what you mean, because (although I was from the C64 corner) I feel exactly the same way about Steam. But I got my account a while back, having the same trepidations and I've come to terms with it, although even now I'm still slightly reluctant using it. For the same reasons I would never touch Electronic Art's Origin.

A few points perhaps:

- Steam only seems to access the games on your PC that are registered with it, all other sections of any hard drives you have seem to remain untouched. I verified this by monitoring the hard drive and network activity, but even so it doesn't mean it's technically impossible. If they wanted, they could start any time. One unread und agreed to 'terms and conditions' customer agreement, and it's done.

- Just as other games require a one-time net verification on installation, so does steam. It does not require you to stay in on-line mode after activation. (To be clear, you also run this risk with any non-Steam game that requires on-line activiation, so it would be unfair to just apply this consideration to Steam alone.) I play Steam (and any other) games exclusively in off-line mode, but:

- You are then restricted to the single-player portions of any Steam game. It's still your choice though, you can activate the on-line mode any time.

- For any patch application you have to go back to Steam on-line mode, theoretically making your PC vulnerable again. After patching you can go back to off-line mode. It is not possible to manually patch Steam games using downloaded patch files.

- You have the possibility of configuring all patch application settings, so that you can disable this feature, but:

- Installing any new Steam game requires you to activate the on-line mode again for the duration of that process.

- You cannot utilize the achievements features. Depending on how significant this would be to you, it could be considered a factor, depending on your to instant gratification requirements. (I find it very difficult avoiding any nasty side-swipes at this point).

- Joining and participating in any on-line community requires on-line mode, of course, but I imagine this becomes less interesting the older you get. Personally, I find the on-line gaming community generally pretty obnoxious.

-The advertising factor is massive, and although in the past focusing exclusively on the Steam catalogue, there's no telling when this might not be extended to broader advertising.

I would advise not to buy any Steam games on-line, but to obtain the installation media. This of course reduces the network traffic and possible Steam Cloud related complications. Also, if games would at some point in the future lose their support for some reason, I imagine there would be the usual off-line patch to enable the transition to non-Steam playability. Ubisoft has used this process with titles such as Anno 1404 (non-Steam, of course, just an example) in the past. In this case it would be only in your interest to have the installation media on-hand.

So I've come to terms with Steam, and as a hub for games the GUI is extremely well done and functional. In fact, were it not for the possible intrusion factor, I would be tempted to have all my games registered under Steam. In effect, my decision to register there was exactly as yours, to be able to play games I am very keen on and that require Steam. I haven't regretted it yet, but the time may come.

Oh, and for Fallout: New Vegas - it's worth it.

 

[pingu666]

couldnt a stand alone game snoop on your actions too, potentialy?

i doubt they would extend to outside advertisers, cos the high value ones are related to the content your viewing, or quite dodgy dating and poker sites etc :/. they wouldnt advertise compertion, so really theres only joystick and hardware and gaming related physical things potentialy.

its not perfect, but its better than everything else by far at the moment

 

[RedMogg]

I find Steam to make the gaming experience better, with Achievements, Auto-Patches & Updates, extra DLC and being able to join a gaming community... Whilst the price for this is DRM and actually paying for the game, the last time I installed a non-Steam game for free, said game was very unreliable and unstable... Doesn't seem worth it these days, especially considering the discounts available if you just wait a couple of months...

Oh, good choice on New Vegas, if you played Fallout 3, you'll love the little extras in NV!

 

[Angilion]

couldnt a stand alone game snoop on your actions too, potentialy?

Yes, but it wouldn't have access to the net through my firewall. I suppose it could abuse something that requires internet access to function, but I don't think that's likely.

its not perfect, but its better than everything else by far at the moment

About half of my games have no DRM at all (gog.com). The rest have offline DRM, old style, and no internet access. So no, Steam is not better than everything else by far. It might well be less bad than other rent-a-game-and-call-it-buying spyware, but that's far from a stellar recommendation for it.

 

[doofer]

As long as you lock down the 'Social' side of STEAM and make sure everything is private, are careful about what you allow the client to do (It will ask to snoop, just don't allow it) then you can pay via PayPal and give it any name and address you want, the only thing they'll really have on you is your IP address and your email. The only thing it tracks is how long you have played for (No way to turn this off that I can see) and some games have achievements, but you can lock those down so only you can see them.

A lot of it is bloat to me, I have zero interest in joining groups or recommending/sharing/friending players online, it's a shame you can't opt out of it completely and the only thing you can do is disable it all. I guess it's down to you whether it's worth it for putting up with a disc in an optical drive to play a game or not.

 

[Angilion]

I find Steam to make the gaming experience better, with Achievements, Auto-Patches & Updates, extra DLC and being able to join a gaming community...

None of which I care about.

Whilst the price for this is DRM and actually paying for the game,

Wrong. The price for it is not being able to buy a game (you rent Steam games for an unspecified period, terminated by Valve at their discretion) and spyware.

the last time I installed a non-Steam game for free, said game was very unreliable and unstable... Doesn't seem worth it these days, especially considering the discounts available if you just wait a couple of months...

If you're making an oblique reference to piracy, you're way off mark. The last time I pirated a game was the mid 1980s when I was a schoolboy swapping Spectrum games on audio cassettes in the playground and I hadn't even heard the word "piracy".

The last few hundred times I installed a non-Steam game, it worked fine in almost all cases (which is as good as it gets with PC games, as we all know). Apart from Test Drive Unlimited 2, which shipped as an early beta version (0.6.2 IIRC). Since I pre-ordered it, I of course got the shipping version. Which didn't work. At all.

Have I mentioned that I buy a lot of games? My slim boxes alone fill about 7 feet of space and I've got another few dozen games I bought without physical media.

Oh, good choice on New Vegas, if you played Fallout 3, you'll love the little extras in NV!

I'm still playing Fallout 3. I got it a while back in a "bargain bin" for older games. Cost me about a fiver. I didn't install it for ages, then did so on a whim (I have ~100 games I've never played, which is silly). Then I bought 2 DLC modules and installed a user mod to improve the graphics. I considered buying the GOTY addition as well as the release version, to get all the official DLC, but decided I only really wanted Broken Steel and Point Lookout anyway. The childhood tutorial was meh, but as soon as I left the vault I was absorbed. "I'll just give this one a go before going to bed" turned into "Aarrgh, crap, it's 06:00!" Possibly the best game I've ever played.

If Fallout New Vegas wasn't steam-only, I'd have bought the ultimate edition shortly after starting Fallout 3. I'd also have bought Borderlands 2, which looks like fun.

 

[Murray]

You could always buy it and then pirate it since you have paid for the game and do own it.

 

[npjnpj]

I don't know where all this renting/buying software comes from, in fact I don't think the English language has a word for it.

Consider this: You write a book and publish it. There is only one owner, and that is the person holding the copyright. The OWNER (usually the author or publisher).

Now copies of the book are made, and people buy this copy; they OWN their COPY, but they don't own the book, only a COPY of it. All copyright restrictions apply, including any additional restrictions mutually agreed upon through purchase agreement, if within the given law.

Now, people might have bought and OWN their COPY, but they're also not RENTING it. You RENT a book from a public library.

There is no single word to describe the distinction between owning a book and owning a copy of it, the terminology is only agreed upon by convention, and in the sense of the commonly used words, they are used incorrectly.

The same applies to software. The programmer(s) or publishers own the software, buyers own a copy, under copyright laws and agreements. Nobody rents anything.

Registration method or not is not a factor here.

 

[Angilion]

As long as you lock down the 'Social' side of STEAM and make sure everything is private, are careful about what you allow the client to do (It will ask to snoop, just don't allow it) then you can pay via PayPal and give it any name and address you want, the only thing they'll really have on you is your IP address and your email.

I'll be buying physical media anyway (someone sent me an Amazon gift voucher, so I'll buy it from there).

So...Valve requires your real name and physical address? Why? How do they determine it's genuine? Comparison with card company records?

The only thing it tracks is how long you have played for (No way to turn this off that I can see) and some games have achievements, but you can lock those down so only you can see them.

I walked a step! Yay, achievement! I completed the whole game naked using only a teaspoon as a weapon, which took me 6 months IRL and 8 million quicksaves/quickloads. Yay, achievement!

I'm not hugely bothered about achievements I'd make them private and ignore them.

A lot of it is bloat to me, I have zero interest in joining groups or recommending/sharing/friending players online, it's a shame you can't opt out of it completely and the only thing you can do is disable it all. I guess it's down to you whether it's worth it for putting up with a disc in an optical drive to play a game or not.

I go back to when loading a game meant finding the right cassette, rewinding it if you hadn't done so the last time you played the game, waiting 6 minutes for it to load and, very often, adjusting the head alignment with a tiny screwdriver to get the game to load at all (after you spent 6 minutes only to see it crash after loading, sometimes more than once). I can tolerate putting a disc in a drive

 

[npjnpj]

Basically you either buy a game under a mutual agreement or you don't. It's your choice.

That's how your free to decide you like the agreement you have with GOG, for instance, and buy there, and you don't like the Steam agreement, so you don't buy.

You might complain about it, but you can't get around purchase agreements, not legally anyway. It's your decision to either barter or decline if that's not possible. That's just how it works, and I don't see anything wrong or unfair there, although you might feel aggrieved about it. But, to be honest: so what!

 

[Angilion]

I don't know where all this renting/buying software comes from, in fact I don't think the English language has a word for it.

Consider this: You write a book and publish it. There is only one owner, and that is the person holding the copyright. The OWNER (usually the author or publisher).

Now copies of the book are made, and people buy this copy; they OWN their COPY, but they don't own the book, only a COPY of it. All copyright restrictions apply, including any additional restrictions mutually agreed upon through purchase agreement, if within the given law.

Now, people might have bought and OWN their COPY, but they're also not RENTING it. You RENT a book from a public library.

There is no single word to describe the distinction between owning a book and owning a copy of it, the terminology is only agreed upon by convention, and in the sense of the commonly used words, they are used incorrectly.

The same applies to software. The programmer(s) or publishers own the software, buyers own a copy, under copyright laws and agreements. Nobody rents anything.

Registration method or not is not a factor here.

You're barking up the wrong tree. In the wrong forest.

I've already said why it's renting and it has nothing to do with the difference between owning the rights to a book (or anything else) and owning a copy of it.

I'll quote myself:

it leaves the publisher in control of when or if you are allowed to play the game you've paid for.

and that's why it's renting. If you buy something, you have control over your use of it, for as long as you want or it becomes broken in some way. If someone else has control over your use of the item, they own it and you are renting it off them. It doesn't matter whether it's the copyright on a product or a copy of that product - the point is who controls your use of it.

To continue with your analogy of a book:

If you buy a copy of a book from a publisher (directly or through a bookseller), then you can read the book when you want (unless you lose it or it's damaged too badly or stolen, but that's not the point). You can read that book 50 years later if you like - that particular copy of the book is your property. You own it.

If the publisher says "Give us some money and you can read the book when we allow you to and we can take it back at any time", that copy of the book is not your property. It's still the property of the publisher. Not just the rights to the book, but that particular copy of the book. Since it isn't your property, you have not bought it. You are renting it from the publisher. They are allowing you the temporary use of it in return for money - that's rental.

 

[Angilion]

Basically you either buy a game under a mutual agreement or you don't. It's your choice.

That's how your free to decide you like the agreement you have with GOG, for instance, and buy there, and you don't like the Steam agreement, so you don't buy.

You might complain about it, but you can't get around purchase agreements, not legally anyway. It's your decision to either barter or decline if that's not possible. That's just how it works, and I don't see anything wrong or unfair there, although you might feel aggrieved about it. But, to be honest: so what!

So you managed to utterly miss the point again. You never even read my original post, did you? It's not just that you don't know the answer to my question. You don't even know what the question was.

EDIT: I see from an earlier post that you did read my original post and even went a considerable way towards answering the question. So why did you go off onto the irrelevant tangents aftewards, none of which are connected to anything I've written?

 

[BuffetSlayer]

Can you gift your Steam games to other accounts if you have already installed/played them?

Just wondering as I have a few I don't really want anymore that could be put to better use by others - New Vegas being one of them!

Cheers

 

[orderoftheflame]

Tin foil corner.

A few points perhaps:

- Steam only seems to access the games on your PC that are registered with it, all other sections of any hard drives you have seem to remain untouched. I verified this by monitoring the hard drive and network activity, but even so it doesn't mean it's technically impossible. If they wanted, they could start any time. One unread und agreed to 'terms and conditions' customer agreement, and it's done.

# Same for any single application you could install

- Just as other games require a one-time net verification on installation, so does steam. It does not require you to stay in on-line mode after activation. (To be clear, you also run this risk with any non-Steam game that requires on-line activiation, so it would be unfair to just apply this consideration to Steam alone.) I play Steam (and any other) games exclusively in off-line mode, but:

- You are then restricted to the single-player portions of any Steam game. It's still your choice though, you can activate the on-line mode any time.

# Only if the game uses Steam works, which uses Steam servers and the community for multiplayer. The vast majority of games you can play multiplayer on without the client in online mode.

- For any patch application you have to go back to Steam on-line mode, theoretically making your PC vulnerable again. After patching you can go back to off-line mode. It is not possible to manually patch Steam games using downloaded patch files.

# Vulnerable to what?

- You have the possibility of configuring all patch application settings, so that you can disable this feature, but:

- Installing any new Steam game requires you to activate the on-line mode again for the duration of that process.

- You cannot utilize the achievements features. Depending on how significant this would be to you, it could be considered a factor, depending on your to instant gratification requirements. (I find it very difficult avoiding any nasty side-swipes at this point).

- Joining and participating in any on-line community requires on-line mode, of course, but I imagine this becomes less interesting the older you get. Personally, I find the on-line gaming community generally pretty obnoxious.

-The advertising factor is massive, and although in the past focusing exclusively on the Steam catalogue, there's no telling when this might not be extended to broader advertising.

# You can disable the advertising pop-ups with one setting. Then you'll only see them in the store.

I would advise not to buy any Steam games on-line, but to obtain the installation media. This of course reduces the network traffic and possible Steam Cloud related complications. Also, if games would at some point in the future lose their support for some reason, I imagine there would be the usual off-line patch to enable the transition to non-Steam playability. Ubisoft has used this process with titles such as Anno 1404 (non-Steam, of course, just an example) in the past. In this case it would be only in your interest to have the installation media on-hand.

# Anno 1404 being removed (and Crysis 2, which is now back) was a very rare case which resulted from Ubisoft being douchebags and not wanting to distribute the patch to Steam users.

So I've come to terms with Steam, and as a hub for games the GUI is extremely well done and functional. In fact, were it not for the possible intrusion factor, I would be tempted to have all my games registered under Steam. In effect, my decision to register there was exactly as yours, to be able to play games I am very keen on and that require Steam. I haven't regretted it yet, but the time may come.

Oh, and for Fallout: New Vegas - it's worth it.

 

[Angilion]

You could always buy it and then pirate it since you have paid for the game and do own it.

That's a point, assuming there is an unsteamed ( ) pirated version of it and I find it and how to download it. I've never pirated a PC game, but I'm sure it requires more than two tape recorders and a lead