Some highlights, and finally some steam numbers (even though they are percentages, not actual hard numbers ).

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/69334 ... tware.html



















Dang. Dang. Dang. Companies would kill for this kind of success. And success built on a great relationship with its 'users', too, not just EA-style evil empire mass marketing DRM domination.

If Valve were a woman, I'd be in love with her.



P.S. saw this on Steam yesterday:

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 Update Released
February 19, 2009, 12:00 pm - Valve - Product Update

Updates to Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted.

This game was delivered with both Sony SecuROM and Steam digital rights management technology. This patch will remove the SecuROM technology from the game as well as remove the game-specific SecuROM license from your machine. The game will continue to be protected by Steam technology. To remove SecuROM files from your machine and for more information, see the EA support site at http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/ph ... aqid=20763.

Well, as ok as I am with Steam, it's still DRM and it still ties sales to a specific user. Is it possible to resell a game you bought from Steam? I don't think you can do that. So they've wiped out the first sale doctrine. They can also arbitrarily lock you out of your account, potentially cutting you off from dozens (hundreds?) of games you legally purchased. I don't like either of these. Also, playing offline is a bitch... and if Steam decides you need to validate, you're screwed until you find an internet connection. Not necessarily a huge deal for any of us, but if I had a job where I was traveling more, it would matter a lot.

It's nice they're stripping securom, but Steam isn't the be-all end-all of game sales. A completely open, completely DRM-free model would be superior. If someone created a Steam without DRM, I'd switch to it immediately.

You can't resell or even gift your old games over Steam, nope. Which is too bad. But then you can't really give away most of your retail games either, because you'd run into problems with the MP and all that jazz. But I agree, not ideal. Because Steam is such a uniform system they could bypass those MP problems by just re-assigning the MP id to the new player's account...but of course they're not going to do that, from a sales perspective.

I don't mean to say that Steam is perfect, just that it's very much preferable over draconic Securom-style DRM. I do run into issues with Steam from time to time (connection lost or whatever) but I find they are rather rare (and often restricted to MP games like L4D). The last 3 games I bought that featured Securom, otoh, all frequently crapped out while playing offline or even locked uo my box. I have yet to see Steam do that.

Meh...I think we mostly are just saying the same thing. But perhaps I am more positive about Valve running the show and their success, as i believe it might lead to actual user-friendly innovations. And I feel their success is a reward for their attention to their clients, which in turn might cause other companies to look up and take notice. You know?

Btw - there is a steam-like system that caters to a part of your wish, namely playing your games without needing to be online. Stardock - the company that releases its own games completely free of any DRM - has created its own service named 'Impulse (Driven)'. The service is still fairly young but its catalogue is starting to look rather nice. Of course, whether the game still has any sort of DRM will depend on the developer...but at least you won't have to connect to the internet through impulse itself.

http://www.impulsedriven.com/

yea, I think we're on the same wavelength. I'm just afraid of what might happen if Steam gets too popular. We need some competition. The impulse driven thing might be cool...can't really check it out from here.