The funny thing is those code wheels went away because you could share them on the internet, but honestly finding a site that posts the actual answers and then printing them would be more of a hassle than downloading a torrent, so in a sense a code wheel is more effective than Steamworks.

Every DRM option has been worked around. Even Ubi's cloud [censored] has been cracked. DRM isn't here to completely eliminate piracy. It's here to make piracy more difficult so casual pirates won't pirate. Isn't the process of pirating a steam game rather more complex and involved than typical "torrent game, torrent crack, profit" too? I haven't looked too deeply into it because I'm a legit steam user, but I was under the impression it required you to set up a closed network to use the cracked steamgame.



How would googling "game name + codewheel" for five seconds be more of a hassle than hopping on the torrents and then waiting hours to download 6+ gigs of data?

Uh, yeah. Pardon me, with 29/84 degrees in the morning my brain is not in best working condition. :hehe:

It's really going to be a giant [censored] slap across the face the day Valve goes bankrupt or the something happens to the company and they have to shut down rendering all games unplayable.
As much as it annoys me this is being used for Fallout New Vegas I'm going to be twice as pissed off if they use Steamworks for Rage and Brink as well..

I absolutely despise steamworks. It ONLY punishes the consumer, it is unbelievably easy to crack (not that I ever have nor intend to or would ever remotely suggest to anyone else how to - I hate piracy) I'm just saying. Personally i think Oblivions DRM was some of the best I've seen. As in, I don't believe in DRM I believe in a standard disc check on game start and nothing more. This stands to prevent people literally lending out copies to install and return (well you can still do it but it's not as convenient). I just believe if people want to pirate they will.
Furthermore if they ever put steamworks in TES 5 I highly doubt I shall purchase it. Steam is a badly designed platform, it has many flaws. I also think the person quoted is actually understating and being misleading as to steamworks intrusiveness and negative impact.

Steam is alright, but I really don't use it to purchase games. I honesty prefer just to buy the disc. I did a digital download for fallout 3 through gamestop then out of no where it somehow got unregistered and was asking me to buy the game all over agian, had to log into my acount and re-register it. Digital downloads PERIOD are annoying whether its steam, GFWL, gamestop or any other website.

Steam isn't bad as it was I remember the days when friends list would never work and when it was in its infancy. It has greatly improved over time if you ask me. Steam is great for valve games, great for finding multiplayer games and joining games with friends that's about it. I'm not huge fan of digital downloads, and I really don't like 3rd unnecessary third party software just to buy a game.

I wasn't counting downloading, since a lot of people choose to download their games regardless, like on Steam. Finding a cracked copy is as easy as a search on a popular torrent site, where as the code wheel thing would take finding the proper answers on a forum or something, which might take some searching, and printing out the codes, as well as the actual inputting of them. Seems like more of a hassle to me.

True, as of now, I can still play games over ten years old, as long as I still have the disc, some games, if they're old enough, might have trouble running on modern computers, but if you can get them to work, you can still play them without problems, but with all this Steam and online registration certain games require, I fear that I won't be able to say the same for those games. The one comforting fact is that as of now, Valve doesn't seem to be in any danger of going bankrupt, but who can say how long that can last? I only hope that if Valve should go bankrupt or Steam should become unavailable for any other reason, I'll have lost interest in any games requiring it by then.



I refuse to buy any game through digital distribution, if game developers want my money, they need to give me a physical copy of the disc, even for games that require Steam, I still buy them on disc rather than through Steam, and if any game is only available through Steam, than I'm not touching it, no matter how good it is.



That's just it, no matter what type of DRM scheme you use for your game, it's going to get cracked, if it hasn't been already. Now, maybe with a bit of copy protection, you might succeed in making it harder to pirate the game, thus discouraging some pirated (This, of course, assumes that it actually makes it harder for people who aren't willing to buy the game to just download a torrent of it and use that. It's not going to do any good if pirates can just upload a cracked copy of the game that will no longer have any difficulties due to DRM usage.) but DRM has also repeatedly proven to be able to make users very, very angry, so much so that they might refuse to play the game because of it, and that's not something you want. In the end, if you provide a certain commercial service or product, video games included, customers are where your money comes from, and they can stop giving you there money if they don't like what they're doing. Now, customers may be able to take some degree of abuse if it means getting the product they want, but it's probably a wise business practice not to test just how far that can last if it's not necessary, and intrusive DRM does just that. Even if it does succeed in reducing some piracy, it has also caused some gamers to refuse to buy certain games over it, and there's no guarentee that those potential pirates who did not pirate it because of DRM will actually buy it, they might just go play some other game. So have any extra sales any company might have at any point gained from requiring online registration for their game or limied installs or anything like that actually offseted the customers who were driven away by it? Somehow, I doubt it. But even if it has, there's no guarentee that you can just increase how strict the DRM is and expect your sales to steadily increase. In the end, there needs to be a limit to how far companies will punish legitimate customers in the hopes of stopping piracy. because if you take it too far, even if you succeed in stopping piracy, it will be because no one is playing your game, whether pirates or paying customers.

It seems to me that companies often fail to consider a few factors as well, if they would, maybe they'd realize that draconian DRM might not be the way to go.

Not every gamer is a pirate, companies seem to assume that everyone will pirate games if they can and the only way to prevent piracy is to make it so no one can pirate the game, some customers are perfectly willing to support the games they want to play, and would choose to buy their games even when they can pirate them.
Not every potential customer the game doesn't get sold to did not buy it because they decided to pirate it instead. There are other reasons someone might not buy a game, like say... maybe it isn't available in their area, or they can't afford it (Not everyone has infinate money to pour into gaming, after all.) or (gasp) they actually don't want to play the game! I know that's hard to believe, but not everyone in the world who plays games necessarily wants to buy a specific game.
Not everyone who would pirate the game will buy it if they can't pirate it. Some might have chosen to pirate the game because they can't or don'5t want to buy it, and if they can't pirate it, they might just not buy it.

Instead of trying to come up with new ways to prevent piracy while screwing over paying customers, developers should perhaps instead consider how to ensure that the paying customers still want to buy their game.



Probably not enough of a hassle to make people want to pay for the game if they wouldn't be willing to do it before. And in any case, I would say code wheels and other such nonsense is a terrible idea to begin with even before the internet killed any chance of it actually stoping piracy, I shouldn't have to answer some silly trivia question or go through some other boring and stupid excercize just to play the game, that's even more intrusive than needing to activate the game online or through some third party program.

Besides, why are you assuming the information wouldn't be available on popular gaming sites? It would probably not be long before it makes its way onto Gamefaqs or something if the game is popular.

Well said Selbeth... Speaking of finding the disc for 10 year old games, steam is pretty useful in that aspect. All my counter strike, team fortress, half life, disc are scattered around and I've lost a few manuals due to junk piles of papers. Steam is useful in that aspect if you lose the disc and CD-Key you can just download the game from the steam client without any hassle of finding disc and CD-key's once they're registered with steam. I do like that about steam. Steam is a decent program if you ask me sure it has its glitches but it has its uses. Trust me I used to be the biggest steam hater when they got rid of WON and switched to steam, but steam is great for when you loose your disc and CD-Keys and want to re-install a game.

As far as pirating goes, well its still going to happen people are always going to figure out a way to pirate software. I mean there's already a bunch of loopholes in place like where the server is located in the world. You know they tried to stop pirating from putting a rim on a disc and people figured out to write over it with a felt pen. As many measures they put forth to stop pirating somebody is going to find a way around it. I really don't see how steam stops pirating, or any program that requires you to connect to the internet to play a game stops pirating. Really its honesty people like me who pays money for games who suffer from pirating, we practically have to jump through fire flamed hoops just to get a game installed anymore. If they really want to stop pirating, they'd have to convince IEEE to change its standards for CD-Rom drives, if they really want to stop prating then they need to make CD-Roms and copying computer data illegal, which I don't see happening in the near future, till then we have to put up with anti-pirating methods.

Yeah, I can buy the game on STEAM, but it's not the same experience. I prefer the game to be INTEGRATED into it, using STEAMworks.
I'm gonna buy the game in retail and play it on STEAM, for me is a WIN.

I have 123 games on my STEAM account. I don't feel restricted in any way. I'm also a xFire, GFWL, raptr, 360, PS3, Wii, iPhone and PSP user, and STEAM has given to me the best gaming experience, much user friendly than any other.


Maybe some people should give it a try before complain.




Yeah, of course.
Let the user choose is always the best option. But that require double job for the developers, because any patch should be on STEAM (for STEAM version) and standalone (for people who don't want to use STEAM).

The same thing happened with Fallout 3. Like it or not, I had to play it with GFWL, no other choice was given.

Consumers have more power than anyone in the corporation. If consumers don't consume, corporations go broke. It's people that accept it because they think they can't live without their games that let companies get away with crazy (Ubisoft) DRM systems. I have passed on several games because it has unacceptable DRM in it. If enough people get fed up with it and quit buying, they're going to have to change. A couple of those games I passed on were later patched to remove the DRM, and then I bought it, at a much cheaper price too.



I live in a small city where broadband options are limited. We have DSL from the phone co. in certain areas and cable. There is only the one locally owned cable company, so there is no competition. DSL isn't available in my neighborhood, so I have cable. I pay almost $100 a month for it too, and for that price I get a blazing fast 256k upload and 4Mbit download, on a good day and if it's working at all. DSL, if you're in the small coverage area is cheaper, not by much, and it's slower too. The majority of people here still have dial-up or just use the internet at work.

I have a friend that plays games, and doesn't have internet at home. He lives just outside of the city where his only option is dial-up. He doesn't need internet access at home because he has a fast connection at work where he downloads patches, mods, etc. and takes them home. He loves Fallout 3, and he is not happy at all about this.



Did you try to play any games, or just launch Steam to see if it would go offline? Some games won't run unless you are online first and use the option to go offline. I know this from first hand experience at LAN parties when people don't prepare and set Steam offline before packing up. They get setup at the LAN party only to find out that the game won't launch even though Steam started in offline mode.

The last LAN party I went to, some local guy went home and got the USB cable for his phone and went around tethering it to peoples computers so they could log in to Steam, then set it to offline. The only problem was that Valve had put out an update for TF2 that day, so when those people connected it updated their game. That pretty much kept us from playing TF2 that weekend.

Even though you can put it in offline mode, you can't leave it offline forever. I have Steam on my notebook too so I can play a few time waster games that I bought when I'm out of town, and I leave it in offline mode. I went out of town once and I didn't have internet access where I was staying, and it wanted to go online before letting me play my games. I read somewhere that after a certain amount of time passes after setting it offline, it forces you to go online to verify that your account is still valid or something.

I do like Steam, I own over 50 games on Steam, and I don't much care for GFWL. I still prefer to buy a hard copy of the game. Lately I only buy games on Steam if they are a good deal. If I'm going to pay the same price on Steam vs. retail, I'm going to buy the box with the disk in it.

For a single player only game, I'd rather have GFWL than Steam. At least with GFWL you had the option to create an offline profile and not have to be connected, unless you want the achievements. I don't give a crap about achievements, so I used an offline account and never noticed GFWL was there unless I accidentally hit the HOME key.

Lets compare Fallout 3 with GFWL to Fallout: NV with Steam:

Fallout 3:
-GFWL (only needed for achievements)
+No need for activation
+No internet connection required (unless you want achievements)
+No disk needed to be in the drive if you ran the Fallout3.exe because the disk check was only on the FalloutLauncher.exe.

Fallout: NV:
-Online activation
-Steam required to be running
-Need to be online to play, or at least connect periodically
+No disk needed since it's tied to your Steam account

In this case, for a single player only game, GFWL is less intrusive than Steam. This won't stop me from buying Fallout: NV since I already have a Steam account and own games on Steam. I'm still going to buy the retail disk because it will probably be quicker than downloading on Steam, unless we can pre-load it a week from release since that's about how long it will probably take me on my unreliable connection.

There's another possibility: making DLC sales easier. The troubles people had getting Fallout 3's DLC is http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/01/27/fallout-3-new-content-adventures-in-gfwl/. With Steam, it's a simple matter of going to game page in client, putting DLC in basket, paying for it and watching it download. Plus, you don't have to track down the DLC download when you're reinstalling.

True I always wait for them to be released on disc if they are any good. But since most dlc's are coming out as small downloads its not always the best case to do so.
But if they plan more of an expansion then I will buy on disc. If its a small dlc I will wait and see if its my cup of tea.

Joy.

Oh I was not proposing the return of code wheels or saying they would be effective, I was only trying to highlight the futile nature of online activation in attempts to thwart piracy by saying a code wheel does just as good a job if not better.

I have had similar experiences... I know I tried to boot up Portal once when I was on vacation with no internet and it would not launch the game, even though I had "gone offline" on that PC before.

Steam fans will tell you this NEVER happens though, they totally swear.

+1


You won't like the answer, but because they can. And I think they should. It's to protect their work. No, of course publishers and writers don't get anything if you resell a book, there's no way to protect a physical item like that. Same as anything else of that nature. Everytime you resell something, that is a potential sale that the author is losing, in a sense, you're gaining profits of somebody elses work. Yes there are plenty of used book/CD/DVD's available. But software can be protected, although a lot of users disagree with the methods used, it's the way things are now. If you want to complain to somebody, complain to the people who've made publishers introduce DRM in the first place.

I played around with steam games a little and the ones that dont need or use GCF files have an interesting option. I can launch them from the EXE inside the steam apps folder. It ran just like any game, im slowly warming up to the idea. If the offline mode works with the new GUI interface stam has rolled out..... and if Beth keeps to there promise of ease of use "EG: exe in install folder" then im solid.

FOSE and all Script extenders need that ability.... unless FNV has that built in... then again FOSE is updated to whats needed in the community so in effect FNV Must be able to be launched from a modified EXE ala FOSE's launcher. Without this ability the mod community CAN NOT flourish. I highly highly doubt that Beth or Obsidian would not allow a script extender or a launcher to work... EG: FOMM,FOSE...

If Obsidian is that obtuse then they deserve to have the game flop.

And you can't do that without Steam? Of course you can.

I did. I've tried both HL2, as well as Braid, plus several steam-bought games that aren't fully integrated. All worked fine. HL2 Deathmatch didn't work fine, because that's an online game using the steam infrastructure to find servers.

Of course, Team Fortress 2 didn't work for much the same reason... Because it's an online game.

None of that should apply to NV though, since NV is wholly single player.



I have not experienced that. Then again the longest I've ever gone in offline mode is about four months.



And DLC. Don't forget having to use GFWL to aquire DLC.

Oh, and don't forget the achievement tracking threads were terribly coded and ate up a large number of CPU cycles just to run.



GFWL required you to buy into Microsoft's monoply money. ME2's DLC as well as DAO's DLC needs you to buy into Bioware's monoply mony. It seems like most of the RPG DLC released these days introduces the extra step of buying worthless points rather than actual money. At least steam takes real dough rather than ValvePoints.

I did not spend a dime in GFWL. Matter of fact, I didn't even know what the hell GFWL was until I saw the LIVE thing in the FO3 main menu, and went looking for an answer.
Further, for the PC implementation of GFWL in FO3, the practical purpose/"benefit" was to be able to purchase DLC a few weeks before the DVDs hit the retail stores.
You don't need a GFWL account to play FO3 in a PC.
You don't need to activate FO3 through GFWL. for a PC.
You don't need GFWL to start the game.
GFWL doesn't need to be running while you play FO3.
You don't need GFWL to obtain DLC.

Heck, I was put off when, after buying the game and installing it, I found out I had installed yet again another worthless bit of MS software. Now, I almost wish they would've kept GFWL as it was implemented in FO3.

If you wanted DLC before several months had passed and they released the DLCs on disk, you would have had to.



A few weeks? Try almost a year.



You did for a long time. That only changed when they released the retail disks once the GFWL exclusivity contract expired.

A year? Dude, what calendar are you looking at?
FO3 was released Oct 28, 2008
GOTY DVD was released Oct 13, 2009
By the time GOTY was released, about 4-5 months had passed since the release of the last DLC (mothership zeta) on DVD.
Unless of course you are counting GOTY as THE release for all DLCs on DVD? If you didn't know it, DLCs were released on DVDs before GOTY.

No, it was a few weeks between the release of DLC through GFWL and the release of the DVD DLC; and again, no one NEEDED GWFL to obtain the DLCs.

Hence why I said almost a year.



Mothership Zeta was never released on DVD pre GOTY. It was always Anchorage/Pitt and BS/PL.



I was well aware of that. However, those releases didn't happen until several months after the GFWL release. Anchorage was, what, January 09? With the Anchorage/Pitt DVD being released in May?



No. We didn't even have word of the Anchorage/Pitt DVD until BS was almost released. And we didn't get confirmation until after BS was released. We didn't get BS/PL until several months after PL was released.

As the thread I started was locked, and this one pointed out, I am reposting the post here.


steam unintrusive? that pice of crap? Impulse:Reactor far exceeds steam and steamworks in every part, and its LOTS less intrusive, and if you want less intrusive DRM to go whit the framework, go for GOO as DRM..
Impulse:Reactor do not require Impulse client, witch mean you can sell the game on ALL digital distributors, bringing it out to a wider audience. Using steamworks makes it a steam exclusive (+Retail) steam also use rights elevation, making it a huge security risk. as any malicious code that are written to take use of steam can use steams rights elevation and get full rights to mess up your machine.