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Anthropoid -> RE: Steam sale (11/5/2010 7:17:13 PM)
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I am all for intellectual property owners protecting their rights, and have nothing per se against EULAs. It is just that Steam's strikes me as being particularly heavy-handed. I did have the intuition that what it does overall is 'stack the odds' against the user in the event of a dispute, but beyond that, no I honestly did not know for sure what that stuff would mean legally.
Your point to me begs the question: if Valve/Steam are just doing what is reasonable and pragmatic, then why don't all EULAs look like theirs? In fact, why don't all distributors look like Steam?
There is a pretty clear underlying philosophy of the consumer-patron relationship in Steam/Valve's business model: we don't trust, and we don't like you. In fact, we don't respect you either. Just give us the money, and we'll give you the goods, as long as you play by our rules. As long as your expectations are 'normal' (from a distributive population standpoint) you'll like us just fine, but we reserve the right to NOT satisfy you at all. It is not our goal. Volume, and market penetration is our goal.
Let me contrast that with the ethos I pick up from say Matrix: sorry about this but, here is this serial key that we need you to use. Please believe me, we're gamers like you, but we're also business men and we are aware that there could be some cheaters amongst us. Our games are not for everyone, but we find that the guys and gals that like us, well, we like them a lot too. We're kind've a community of like-minded strategy and wargame enthusiasts. Some people seem to feel that hanging around in our forums is at least as much fun, if not more fun than actually playing our games [:)] You'll find that we charge a pretty high price for our games, but we also stand behind them, and we do everything in our power to insure you are happy as a customer and fellow gamer. We're certainly not a charitable organization . . . and beyond that, I don't think they are nearly as transparent in their goals to make lots of money; I like to imagine the Matrix folks doing pretty well fiscally and living a good life based on their hard work, for one thing because they strike me as nice folks, but for another because they make games that I enjoy and which don't involve DRM or tricky EULAs.
If one's goal really is to protect one's bottom line, then being more cagey and wiley with one's client's might, in fact, NOT be the best strategy.
Here is another interesting story about what a failure DRM proved to be with Spore, and how it indeed backfired, causing the game to suffer even worse piracy.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/12/spo...0912spore.html
quote:
How do you measure the failure of the copy protections that software companies place on their media products? In the case of Electronic Arts' highly-anticipated game "Spore," just count the pirates.
As of Thursday afternoon, "Spore" had been illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks using BitTorrent peer-to-peer transfer 171,402 times since Sept. 1, according to Big Champagne, a peer-to-peer research firm. That's hardly a record: a popular game often hits those kinds of six-figure piracy numbers, says Big Champagne Chief Executive Eric Garland.
But not usually so quickly. In just the 24-hour period between Wednesday and Thursday, illegal downloaders snagged more than 35,000 copies, and, as of Thursday evening, that rate of downloads was still accelerating. "The numbers are extraordinary," Garland says. "This is a very high level of torrent activity even for an immensely popular game title." . . .
"PC games are massively pirated because you can pirate them," says Brad Wardell, chief executive of Plymouth, Mich.-based gaming company Stardock. Wardell argues that the driver for piracy is user-friendliness--not price. Instead of digital locks, Stardock requires users to use unique serial numbers which it monitors, in conjunction with IP addresses.
"Our focus is on getting people who would buy our software to buy it," Wardell says, rather than trying to strong-arm people unlikely to pay for the products into become paying customers.
ADDIT: from a consumer psychology perspective, the fact that DRM seems to cause more harm than good to the maker's bottom line comes as no surprise to me
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...sed-by-drm.ars
quote:
Musicload: 75% of customer service problems caused by DRM
By Ken Fisher | Last updated March 18, 2007 6:39 PM
Deutsche Telekom's Musicload, one of the largest online music stores in Europe, has come out strongly against DRM on account of its effects on the marketplace and its customers, according to German-language Heise Online.
Musicload said in a letter distributed last week that customers are having consistent problems with DRM, so much so that 3 out of 4 customer service calls are ultimately the result of the frustrations that come with DRM. In a business where the major music labels expect to be paid well for their source material, the costs of supporting DRM are borne entirely by the music retailers. If the labels' love affair with DRM is hurting the companies trying to make a go at selling music online, something is horribly wrong.
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