[protimewaster]

I still think it's weird that Valve is viewed as so friendly to gamers when they're probably more responsible for taking away game ownership on PC than any other one company.

Prior to Steam, I used to routinely buy used games, give away copies of games I didn't play anymore, etc. Steam basically ruined all of that.

[grumbel]

Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.

Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.

[protimewaster]

There were definitely issues, but I think that some of those basically extend from Steam and the way it worked. GFWL was Microsoft's competition to Steam, so it just copied Steam (~3 years after a Steam came out) and worked similarly to the way other physical releases worked after Steam became popular.

It's true that some of the heavy DRM was an issue back then, but I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. Steam probably won't live forever, and there are tons of titles on Steam that use Steam DRM, third party DRM, or rely on servers that will kill the game eventually. Just because the lifecycle is longer now doesn't make it less of a mistake than it was previously.

My biggest complaint, though, is that the ownership terms simply got shittier with Steam. Many of those old games, even from big, "evil" publishers like EA, explicitly allow license transfers in their EULAs. Steam explicitly forbids transfers.

[grumbel]

> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.

I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.

Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:

>> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.

Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.

[1] https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Cache

[account42]

> The alternative isn't no DRM

Says you. Steam made DRM a no-brainer for developers and even got almost all players to stop complaining about it. If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.

> Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation

No, Wine gave us Windows-emulation. Even DXVK was not originally developed by Valve. They polished it all to make it more user friendly and fixed game specific issues, which is nice of course, but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.

> Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.

Right of first sale is well tested for digital goods sold on physical media and cannot be restricted by EULAs no matter what they say. Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?

[grumbel]

> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.

We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.

> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.

Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.

> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?

Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.