Were you drunk when you wrote this? I know what you're trying to say, but comon. My 8 year old can write with better grammar than that.

I went to a local GameStop to buy Left 4 Dead for my sisters birthday present. They tried to give me an opened copy, priced as brand new. I was disgusted, since last time I went to a game store their opened display boxes went for a discount (never played, but box was opened). I told them heck no I'm not paying full price for something already opened (just disk was inside... not even any inserts!) and said I'll go to another game store, to which they responded "What game store is he talking about..."
I went across town to Game Crazy. They didn't even have the game and told me they only got copies for the preorder. This game came out middle of November and it was the middle of February. I was furious. I'd heard about steam from Toms and other people, giving it good reviews and hearing about DRM removal on most games, so I checked it out. I found left 4 dead but also other "packs" that L4D comes with. I bought the Valve Complete Pack, which comes with L4D and 20 other games (Some of which my old friend played and I figured I should check them out too) for $99, all rootkit free.
I am VERY happy with that decision. Though I miss purchasing something physical, I have spent a bit of change buying games, especially since they have sales and deals all the time, most of the games I wouldn't have even considered (World of Goo is a gem, and at only $5 at the time) if it wasn't for Steam. Get Steam if you want access to all of your games, you will not be disappointed.

I love Steam more and more everyday. Although I'd be great if we saw some competition. As great as some of the prices are at the moment, if it takes a large percentage of the gaming marketshare it may become a bit more imposing.

Steams packaging system, ease of use, and overall solid pricing is a perfect example of when I have no problem spending my money on games.

I think every solid game released I've retrieved from steam and paid for. Bioshock, Half Life Series, Orange Box, Burnout(s), Fallout 3 etc.

Valve is unfair.They are charging for one game in USA 30$ but in Europe it's 30€.

Can someone who went to 4th grade please re-write this article?

Valve's L4D matchmaking system is very buggy. They should work on fixing it before the add it to Steamworks.

+1

CEG sounds stupid. Sounds like a fancy word for binary patching. Hackers have been doing this for decades to crack games.

They're PRETENDING it'll stop piracy, that does not mean it's anywhere near true.

Once it's live, we'll see.

Ditto these remarks. I bought the Orange Box game set in a physical store, which required me to install the Steam client to play. I have bought a total of 2 games physically since then, and everything else on Steam. Loved Sam & Max, World of Goo, etc... and I purchased these only because of Steam's weekend discounts. Its just a much better content distribution system, plus it allows you to make physical backups in case you need to format your harddrive but don't want to re-download a few GB of games.

Now, if Steam ever shuts down its authentication servers and I end up with worthless copies of 20+ games, that will definately upset me.

I agree, we have to see it live to make sure it works as intended. If the game you download from steam is completely unique to the user account, then it would be interesting how someone would pirate it without getting the original source.

Steam is awesome! I use them for all my gaming needs mostly. They have a very good system and they have a very good selection of games to choose from and some of the games you cant find anymore.

Valve is terrible. At least for people who are trying to open up Cyber Cafes. They don't let you just buy a copy of a game and let people play it on your computers, they require that you pay monthly fees on that game (per computer). Why? I already purchased the game, its mine, i can do whatever I want with it. I know some of you will say that I make money off of their games, but comon, this way I would have to pay a cut to Nvidia for their gpu, intel for their cpu, and office max for their comfortable gaming chairs. Gaming cafes already pay huge rents, and more expensive internet fees. I agree that I would have to buy a seperate copy of a game for each computer, but monthly fees?? F*** you. Here is an open letter to valve by someone else.


Dear Valve Software:

For a number of years I have been a big fan of the software which your company produces. The quality of your products is incredible. Unfortuantely, I have learnt something about Steam which is not incredible, and I am sure that it will disappoint and displease many of your customers.

From time to time I play games at a local cyber cafe. Recently, while speaking to one of the employees, I was surprised to find out that if a cyber cafe wishes to carry Half Life 2, Valve requires them to buy per seat subscription licences through Steam for the entire Valve software library. The subscription is charged up front on a quarterly or yearly basis, and the cost of a one year subscription is more than double the price an end user pays for Half Life 2 at retail. Due to this higher cost, the local cyber cafes cannot afford to carry your game.

Firstly, the only game most cyber cafes want from Valve at this time is Half Life 2. By charging more for a package which contains extraneous software you are only succumbing to Microsoft fever. The desired product offered at a reasonable price is always better than an overpriced product which contains a large number of things which aren't wanted by the customer. Unlike Microsoft, you do not have a monopoly in your market. You will lose sales if you stick to this strategy.

Secondly, you are failing to recognize the cyber cafe operating model. While a cafe may have 20 seats which need to be licenced, the majority of those seats sit idle most of the time. They need 20 licences to meet peak demand, but on average less than half of the licences will actually be used. Considering this, Valve is charging cyber cafes four times the amount that an end user would pay. Consider, too, that most of the customers who play Half Life 2 at a cyber cafe will also have purchased it for use at home. Valve is taking double charging to new levels of greed!

I decided to see for myself how much Valve is charging cyber cafes to carry Half Life 2. I went to the Steam website and requested a quote for licencing 16 seats. I was automatically quoted $30 USD per seat for a three month subscription. I wanted to see if there were volume discounts so I entered in 32 seats. It came up as $12 USD per seat per quarter. At first, I could not understand this discrepancy, but then I realized that I had entered my country of origin as Afganistan instead of Canada. At first, I thought that you are playing pricing games based on region.

I checked a few more countries. Prices ranged from $9 USD to $30 USD for a quarterly subscription. It turns out that the countries which have the most rampant piracy get the biggest breaks. Why are you giving the best deals to the people who steal from you the most? I thought that Steam was your answer to piracy, but you still seem to be trying to cater to those markets where piracy is high. How do you think your loyal paying customers would feel about that?

This situation is unacceptable. Unless Valve can convince me otherwise, I will not be purchasing Half Life 2. I hope that upon learning of your current pricing strategies, other customers will hold off their purchases as well. We are sending you a message, and that message is simple: stop taking advantage of us. If you want our business then start conducting fair business. Your products should have one fair price for all customers whether they are home users or cyber cafes, and the price should be the same whether they are from Canada, China, or anywhere else.
TAKEN FROM -> h**p://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=7911&sid=50b035e15a93e0cc3d0e2967fb5580da
Breen Ouellette

PS - If you are a consumer who, like me, is not happy with this situation, then you can do something about it. Do not buy Half Life 2 until Valve changes these practices, and let them know that you are not buying their software because of their policies.

Whelp, it's better than DRM at least. I'd rather be without Steam and DRM, but such is the state of the world.

uhm, why do you need to tell valve its a cafe?

just buy the game however many times for the number of computers you have... and then just run the games exclusively on that account... I don't see what the issue is...

seriously you may buy the game more but you don't have tons of subscriptions and stuff... I seriously don't see why you couldn't do that

wow stupid non edit function... by the game so many times for a NEW accoutn and then have a different account on each computer...

Like it or not, Steam and other companies like it are probably the way of the future. I have used Steam and Direct2drive a few times. I only have 2 issues with them so far. First of all, I still like the comfort of having the disk in my hot little hand and not relying on servers and services beyond my control. And second, there have been more than a couple instances where a game is 20 bucks at a brick and mortar store, and 30 or 40 online. Even with the overhead of the servers and such, don't you think they could get away with selling the software online for 5 or maybe in 10 bucks cheaper?

Calling DRM obsolete? I think they should have declared it the "best DRM" or "rendering all other DRM obsolete". Due to the fact that this is DRM. Poor choice of words.

Anyway, it's the classic "trusted client" problem. Sure, only I can decrypt my copy but at some point, it's still run as machine code on my CPU. Someone will reverse engineer this. The only way to stop it would be a trusted ("treacherous") computing platform (hardware+os) where a cryptoprocessor prevents me from debugging application code.

Good try Valve, get back to writing games.

Well, I was more and more into Steam for last year or so. They seem good, and certainly better than local retail stores which keep outrageous prices on their own (European prices )

But while Steam still sounds better than local stores, I don't like this per-country pricing. Why should I pay same download 30€ if I'm not in US? And more over, this is just IP based, so if I fly to US, buy 10 games, I can play them in Europe without problems (??)

What I want to say is - this suc*s. Internet should be a "free medium".. and it's quite opposite, having such an obvious discrimination..

I'll keep looking at Steam, but I'm waiting them to revert prices for everyone to same. Than I'll MAYBE start using it.

Too bad, as it seems as a real nice service...

Assuming valve doesn't go under, steam is pretty much the only way to make sure your games are not pirated. I like the steam concept, the only problem is that occasionally steam fails to install or has terrible install problems.

Oh, and as weird as it may seem - I know of D2D, but I hardly know why noone ever talks about them, and it's always just Steam Steam Steam..

does anyone know if there is anything _WRONG_ with D2D vs Steam? Or retail?

As they do offer me FAIR prices compared to Steam.. even when I select my own country.

Tnx to anyone that explains this one to me

steam has a pretty UI

end of story

^^

I have serisouly been using steam for about 2 months now and i like it.It started when out of sheer boredom i picked up my copy of the orange box to play portal,messed around with the store and saw that new watchmen game demo, downloaded and installed it no fuss,about two weeks later i bought it for $20.I like that before the game ran it isntalled all the patches it needed to run and how it automatically keeps updating my other games.Some of you might have problems with steams pricing,to each thier own, but where im located games cost twice as much than what people in the Sates pay for them.With steam i pay one fee that while not as cheap as gogamer and amazon all the time steam A)Has specials running ever so often and B)I dont pay shipping or clearance and freight charges to bring in the box.

Licensing for individual use is different than licensing for a cafe where people, ostensibly, pay to come in and play the game on the cafe's computers. Even if the cafe does not charge to play the game, I am willing to bet that a good lawyer could argue that the cafe is making a profit off it because it attracts people to the cafe who then buy things from the cafe on which the cafe does make a profit. So, the attraction of the game does generate a profit for the cafe and this would not be personal use.

Personal use would be something like you have 20 computers in your house, you buy the game for one account, put it on all 20 computers and then invite your friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc., in to play the game for free.

I am not a lawyer and I am neither in favor of nor against their licensing scheme, but for the cafe to remain legal, unless the cafe has a pocket full of money to spend on a court case, they have to have some sort of "for profit licensing scheme." I bet what the cafe is doing is considered very similar to what Blockbuster does, and you can bet that even if Blockbuster buys the items they rent, Blockbuster is also paying a per rental fee to the copyright owner in some form.

Non-public domain software licenses have never been about selling you the software. Read several, you will see. They are about granting you the right to use the software; there is a big difference. Some non-public software licenses, take SolidWorks, for instance, prohibit you from selling to someone else the copy you bought legally. Legally, they set the terms of use for the software, and if the terms of use say that you have to pay fees to use it in a commercial venue, then shame on you for not paying attention to the software license.

Legally, that is just the way it is in the US.

Now you might be able to find gamesw where the license does not prohibit use in a commercial venue. Really, it is up to the software author to write a license like this, but I would expect many authors, since they need to make a living, too, explicitly prohibit anything beyond personal use.

stop whining, don't get it if you don't want it.

He made two mistakes...

Also "comon" is not a word.

@wiyosaya

While what you say may make sense, to me it is ridiculous.
1st What difference is there between a sports bar showing games on huge screens and an internet cafe hosting games. You think the sports bar is paying royalties for the games? Heck no, and the NFL specifically accepts it because it's pretty much the base of that bars operations. The NFL actually LIMITS viewing to screens no more than 55" and the amount of people watching the game at one time (even in your own home). So if your tv is by the window and people are watching it outside, you're infringing copyright and are liable to be fined if caught.
2nd rental shops buy the movie at ~$100 per copy (at least when I was there) that is why they get p*ssed when someone loses/damages their movies. No royalties (honestly how many times can you rent out a dvd before it gets scratched to heck, and they have to replace it).
Just my two cents.

Did I miss the part of the article that explains how this is uncrackable? People have been cracking copy protection and cryptography schemes for ages, I doubt this prevents that(although the claim was probably to attract business more than anything).

steam works for me, i like, though, i will not be happy when their servers shutdown and i can't play there games.

Your grammar isn't any better than his.

PC, PS3 Xbox360 Wii PSP you name the console I can show you a cracked game for it. There will always be a way of hacking and pirating software. I would compare it to illegal drug indstry; as long as there is a market for it the problem will NEVER go away.