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Firov -> RE: DW: Universe in top 10 sellers @ Steam! (5/27/2014 3:27:01 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Spacecadet
Darkspire, Bingeling, and Gregorovitch55 have pretty much covered my feeling on it.
What really gets me is why do Steam users think their games are so secure?
Have they ever thought about the bigger picture?
Let me throw out some real world facts :
- Servers, Bandwidth, etc. have a continuing cost.
- Steam has over 75M Subscribers.
- Steam has been approached as a buyout target in the past
That last one, why would someone want to buy Steam?
75,000,000 Subscribers
Now, since your games are essentially held hostage, the new owner could easily implement a trivial $1/mo fee to maintain your account (could easily be more).
75,000,000 x $1/mo = $75,000,000/mo . . . or nearly $1B per year ($900M)
The DRM that is Steam, has you locked in to this very real scenario - Gabe is not going to be doing this forever.
Frankly, this is conspiracy theory garbage. Yes, in theory, this could happen. In theory a cosmic ray born in the final moments of a star's death hundreds of years ago could also flip a bit in the control chip of my hard drive, irrevocably erasing all of my locally stored games.
Steam isn't perfect, I agree. But claiming that it's a plot by "the man" to take away all of your games is laughable. What you're suggesting would instantly kill Steam, and it's not in any business' interests to instantly alienate 100% of their user base.
As for "Steam DRM", people need to realize that Steam is nothing more than an extremely convenient distribution system. The DRM, "Steamworks", is separate, and not included in all Steam games. Indeed, I've got local backups of a number of Steam games that work perfectly without the Steam client even installed, for example, Kerbal Space Program and Red Orchestra : Darkest Hour. Plus, at least Steamworks provides some value to the user, unlike most other DRM systems, by allowing you to tie in with Steam's extensive social features, achievements, multiplayer lobbies, and mod workshops.
Even with games that require Steamworks, and by extension, the Steam client, you have the option of running the client in offline mode. You may complain of system resource consumption, as some people have in this thread, but unless your system is several years old and has two or fewer cores you're not going to notice a difference, since the vast majority of games don't support the full number of cores (or RAM) that modern systems contain. As such, the resources required to run the Steam client is going to come from the un-utilized cores and RAM.
If you want to continue hiding under your blankets from the "evil Steam", that's your prerogative, but don't expect others to blindly accept your conspiracy theories anymore than people are going to accept that HAARP was meant for mind control.
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