DRM Damages a Game's Value, Says Valve Boss

Agree 100%

As far as I'm concerned, Steam has demonstrated a perfectly appropriate way of incorporating DRM into its titles. Ubisoft has not.

drm is a constant spike in your side whenever its involved .

if there wasnt so much pirating going on they wouldnt have to do it. steam is great and they should do away with disks.. the only people that are gonna cry about it are ones that want it the illegal way and not buy it.

Let say you get laid off and have to really cut back. Okay I can have lights and pay the rent but I can't have lights pay the rent and have a high speed internet connection for the time being. Now that game you bought with DMR seems like the most stupid purchase you ever made. At least with a steam powered game you can still play it in offline mode. Don't laugh because it happened to me. I'd go to the local library to use the internet and at home I just played COD, Crysis, etc. single player until my economic situation improved. I'd never buy a game that required a constant internet connection because you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Steam may be better than Ubisoft's DRM, but it still doesn't beat a simple disk check - or nothing at all. Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 only require disc checks. Oblivion and Civilization IV are two games that did quite well, and they don't require a disc to play* or even a product key!

*Civ IV Complete Edition doesn't require a disc, but the original does

Valve has nothing on Stardock. Brad Wardell is blunt, to the point, and transparent about his company. He is the best thing for PC gamers.

I hope Impulse dethrones Steam.

I do like steam a lot, and I think it is the best form of DRM except for one problem: You can't resell steam games.

I am personally annoyed by both disk checks and DRM. When I want to play a game I haven't played in a few months I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of trying to find a disk to play it. It is even slightly bothersome to have to open up your disk drive every time you want to play a new game and while that isn't a deal breaker it is annoying.

There is also the issue of wanting to game while you're away from home and an internet connection, people that travel constantly or the soldiers deployed over seas quite often are left without an internet connection. Pirates are always going to pirate games, people the purchase them legit will probably continue to purchase them in a legal fashion.

The ideal situation for me would be to limit online activity via a CD key and move on. Leave single player alone, you're never going to be able to stop pirates, save money by moving away from DRM and hopefully the gaming community will continue to support the developers by buying games legit.

My biggest concern is what if you try to play the game 8-10 years from now? Will it work?

a message to ubisoft: do something as good as Modern Warfare 2 and u will make lotsa money even if it will be pirated... that fact was proven.

why DRM... don't u have enough confidence in the games u make??!?!

I love steam's DRM policy. No activation keys, nothing (well...). Simply double click on the game you want to install, and bam, it's on it's way. No need to hassle with Ubisoft's DRM crap.

Steam is not the perfect solution. Bull. I use it, but when my internet goes funky, it still has issues. Offline mode isn't 100%.

I like the steam and impulse type systems. I have no problems with it. Even Blizzard's system is good.

DRM that causes the disc to break my optical drive, installs root kits, or requires constant internet connection to play I do have a problem with and usually boycott those types of systems regardless the game.

Meh, He's just saying that so we all buy Steam games.

Stop Negging me. You know it's true....

Ubi and other publishers that are escalating their DRM should hear the man, he tells the truth. Activation limits are one of the most annoying things that the industry created, but Ubi's DRM is worse that that.

Only problem I have with buying games through Steam is what happens when they go out of business (or another system comes along to replace them that is cheaper\better\whatever) if they ever decide that keeping those servers up is too much of a cost you all of a sudden can not verify your install and thus can not play the game you bought. (plus the time it takes to download a game from them is really a pain for some people that are still on slow internet connections or limited bandwidth per month.)

Another worthy word of the wise from the fat man we all love, cherish, and enjoy! I love you Gabe XD

Like others have mentioned, what happens when you want to play your game in 15 years? Will Steam be around then? Who knows. I rather not have to be tied to a service. And worse, I can't sell my Steam games. This is a pretty bad one.

I love games that can use steam, since you can just put your key in and then no matter what that game is connected to your acconunt, but for some reason it sucks when you are required to use steam. Guess I'm torn. But really pirates ALWAYS find a way. Quite sad actually. Smart enough to hack a game, to cheap to buy the game.

I have been using steam for quite some time and I have 0 complaints. Specially when you purchase the game online, no CD's, no errors, no messing with cd-keys, no 3 installations only gimmick, nada..Just load steam and choose your game.

if Gabe Newell says it, then it is LAW.

DINGDINGDING!
We have a winner!

Funny is that the DRM should hurt the pirates but instead all this security measures only hurt the legit game users since the pirates don`t have to deal with drm

By all the references to the word "pirate" and use of the the phrase can't sell Steam games, I can clearly see you people just aren't getting it... I don't wish to sound rude here, but it seems apparent some of you don't understand. In a roughly $6 billion annual retail industry, 1/3 of that is from the used gaming sector. Pirates will always pirate the game that is not what DRM is intended to stop.

Previously when you finished a game you filed it away and maybe came back to again once in a blue moon. Now you take it to your local chain used game store and resell it. A game publisher used to be guaranteed that everyone that wanted to pay for their game would buy it from them. However in an effort to see a return on investments we used to file away, you take that unwanted game to a resale store. Now there is another copy of that game on the market and the publisher is going to make no money on it.
Some may argue but they did make money on the initial purchase... True, however now publishers are competing for business on their own product. This process cuts into the initial sales the publisher would be making, and therefor the final profit on the multi-million dollar invest they made.

I dislike DRM as much as the next gamer, but I understand what publishers are trying to do. This is why I am taking my own steps to battle the the real "pirates" in the industry and refuse to buy or sale used games. Perhaps if we all took this step we could see the disappearance of DRM procedures.

Correct so I don't buy steam either after The Orange Box. Plus when you buy a boxed version of a Steam game (The Orange Box) it takes forever to install the game even though you have the game DVD right in the drive. To much control over what I paid for.
I have to give the consoles credit. After I finish FF XIII I can sell it and recoup most of my money.

You can watch the GDC awards (where he made the comments) here

http://gdc.gamespot.com/video/6253 [...] ot;thumb;5

it starts about sixty minutes in.

Have you tried to play any of your 15 year old games lately? Also, if your so concerned about being able to sell a game, then probably, you shouldnt even buy it to begin with. I my self dont have a lot of disposable income, so if I want a game bad enough, Ill wait till the price drops on it, or steam has a sale. Christmas time is the gamers happy place at Steam. The deals they have are incredible, not to mention the regular sales they have on a regular basis

I think that when steam goes down and you can't even play single player on your games,, that's causing more headaches for your customers then is needed as well... I haven't seen any one mention this, yet this has happened every week for the last four weeks now once a week with Steam.... I don't like DRM at all because of this.....

steam is crap also.

they show that you never own the content you buy by showing off their power to mess your games up.

when ever they release a game demo, they will often deactivate the demo after a short while (it just disappears from their site and the game refuses to launch and they tell you nothing about it or give any warning, which sucks especially if you are unlucky to download a demo of a game then the company disabling it the next day.

they can do this with paid games also.

you need a internet connection for the most part, if not you get very limited functionality, much less than many securom DRMed single player games (before securom started using the online checks crap)

what happens when steam goes out of business, what happens to your games?
(if you install a single player game on stean and never allow it to connect to the internet again, it kills the game (the reason behind this is they don't want users buying games then having 10000 other friends loging into the account to install the game on their system, then preventing the game from connecting online that way everyone can enjoy a single player game off line with just 1 user paying for it)

while that prevents this trick, it also causes another problem, when steam dies, so will your games that you paid for

Steam has a lot of DRM, it just seems less annoying than services like securom and the other really bad ones because it is more transparent to the user when things are going correctly but if theres ever a problem with the connection or the company, the DRM will quickly become more annoying than than almost every other DRM that ever came out.

has DRM ever stopped a game from being pirated?
at most it causes a 1-7 day delay in getting a pirated copy. and most people are patient enough for that. and once the game is cracked, the pirates never have to worry or notice the DRM

but the legit users have to struggle with the game for as long as they own it. this means that the pirates are getting a better product. No DRM at all

with very basic DRM, just a simple short cd key like in old PC games, it can stop novice users from pirating and doesn't really annoying any of the gamers. This type of DRM will still get cracked but so with all others, so making a stronger DRM will not effect piracy but it will annoy the legit customers more.

Bravo to you, Mr. Newell. However, could you PLEASE remove the Tages DRM that is in the Chronicles of Riddick on Steam then? You get 3 activations. If you use all 3, then a 30-day wait kicks in and then you can activate it again 3 more times. That's just plain bull!