You've always been able to go through twelve screens of settings and figure out which Facebook radio buttons are the "don't share everything" option.
You've always been able to opt out of spamming all your email contacts when you import from LinkedIn.
You've always been able to cancel your recurring subscriptions, you've just got to call our customer support number, no it absolutely cannot be done online.
Super obnoxious defaults are still super obnoxious if they can be changed. I've used Steam for a while, and don't mind the ads that much, but it would never would have occurred to me that I had the option to turn them off.
I too like the ads. But programs with "tip of the day"s in them have had this problem solved for a long time, just including a check box for never show me again. You could make the argument with some programs that it interferes with a minimalist design, but you'd have to admit this does not appear to be what steam is going for.
GOG also assumed that, and made a mistake delaying the release of the much awaited Divinity Original Sin, because they weren't ready with multiplayer support in their Galaxy. A lot of users were quite upset, and GOG rushed to release the version with single player only as a first step.
They also publicly admitted the mistake. Not many companies do that.
Steam’s preferences are an absolute mess. Completely disgusting and disorienting UI. Valve have only themselves to blame for this. There is no excuse for that atrocious UI.
Also they add a lot of cool features to the updates, especially if you are in the beta program. They just recently added the ability to cap the download rate and allow for downloading while playing a game, both really great features. I'm not anti-DRM, I'm just anti-BAD-DRM (ubisoft comes to mind.) Steam's is a perfectly effective level of DRM for me.
This sounds like a faulty logic to me. Being anti DRM on the basis of comfort seriously misses the point. Because DRM can't be good. It can be comfortable enough to ignore though, and that's actually a problem.
This is a philosophical position, not an infallible universal truth.
The problem with DRM, in general, boiled down to it's most salient point, is that it destroys value. It gets in your way, treats you like a criminal, and generally makes your life miserable so the people who made the attached product can feel like they're flipping off those eeeevul pirates.
Every system I can think of meets that definition, with one exception: Steam.
What's the benefit to me of SecuRom? There isn't one.
What't the benefit to me of Steam? I get all my games in one place, my save files synchronized across an unlimited number of machines, user-generated DLC automatically brought in (and synchronized the same way), in-home streaming, library sharing, the whole social network, in game overlay providing same and web access, some unheard-of-elsewhere sales, and quite a lot more.
What's more, if despite all of that you're still not interested and would prefer to go back to the dark ages, Steamworks is trivially defeated with an emulator program.
> This is a philosophical position, not an infallible universal truth.
Not more than the claim that police state is evil. We aren't talking about moral relativity here however.
> The problem with DRM, in general, boiled down to it's most salient point, is that it destroys value.
Somehow ethical problems of DRM you try to devalue, while practical problems of DRM (like being infective against piracy and punishing legitimate users) you promote as the main issue with it. I don't think that's proper. However both are enough of a reason to never use DRM.
> What't the benefit to me of Steam? I get all my games in one place, my save files synchronized across an unlimited number of machines
Benefits of Steam have nothing to do with it having DRM. They could all be provided in a DRM-free fashion. Yet they chose not to.
The premise of DRM is the same as police state ideas, that doesn't require convincing, it's the very definition of it. Whether you find it acceptable or unethical is another question however.
You can take the stance that DRM is a good thing if it's protecting creators' rights and doesn't get in the way of consumers using the product. I'd argue that most creators take this stance, because they want to get paid for the stuff they made so they can turn around and make more stuff.
Or you can take the stance that "DRM can't be good", because reasons. This is the stance that a lot of people take who don't create (or who aren't paying the bills by creating).
Personally I'm somewhere in the middle, but I see the validity of both sides. Creators want to get paid, and consumers don't want to be told how/when to use the things they own. Being anti-BAD-DRM is taking that middle ground, and in terms of Steam they're doing it pretty well.
The problem with such approach is that it ignores the root of the issue - the unethical nature of DRM.
I.e. to draw an analogy, imagine someone objecting to the police state methodology not on the grounds that it's evil and abusive, but on the grounds of discomfort of such invasion. By that logic, if police state would employ covert methods, that would be acceptable since it doesn't disturb one's comfort.
I think such logic is pretty flawed.
> you can take the stance that "DRM can't be good", because reasons. This is the stance that a lot of people take who don't create
No, it's the stance of anyone with common sense. Those who create including.
No, even if one assumes DRM not to be unethical, one can observe that DRM is nonsensical from the practical standpoint. I.e. because not only it doesn't reduce piracy while punishing only legitimate users, it even induces piracy! (See second and third links above).
> You can take the stance that DRM is a good thing if it's protecting creators' rights and doesn't get in the way of consumers using the product.
You could, but there's a problem with that. Because DRM by nature can neither operate without getting in the way of consumers using the product, nor effectively protect creator's rights.
DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad, not as a moral proposition (though it may be that, too), but simply at what it is nominally intended to do.
My rebuttal to that is: Steam (which is appropriate because that's what got this discussion started in parent comments)
I've been a Steam user for 8ish years now, and it's never once gotten in the way of me playing games. The only downside that I can see is that you can't gift old games to friends (or sell them), and they're very upfront about that fact from day 1. They just recently made a change that allows you to share game libraries with friends/family actually, so that small gripe is going away.
It's hard to have a real discussion about DRM because it's like religion to a lot of people, and many are quick to dismiss DRM because it's not perfect. Saying "DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad...but simply at what it is nominally intended to do" isn't saying that DRM as a concept is bad, but that the past/present implementations have been bad. Dismissing the idea because a few implementations have failed doesn't seem very hackerish :)
The core of DRM is: Creators should be paid for the stuff they create, by the consumers of their stuff. There have been plenty of misguided attempts at this, for sure, but I think you'd have a hard time defending the counter position (especially if you want to have a morality discussion RE: DRM and not just a conceptual one)
> The core of DRM is: Creators should be paid for the stuff they create, by the consumers of their stuff.
That's not the core idea, while it's often presented as such. The core idea is "we need to control consumers and limit what they can do with their digital goods, lest some piracy happens". That's why such idea is flawed from the beginning.
Saying that it failed because implementation wasn't perfect and more policing will help to solve the issue reminds me the story of the Watchbird: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579
Definitely read the whole thing if you didn't yet. What's hackish is not to be eager to implement even more draconian overreaching preemptive policing, but to understand from the start that it's a defective and unacceptable idea.
It reflects the fact that DRM is a fundamentally incoherent concept -- you can't provide data and all the tools for legitimate users to access it freely and still deny illegitimate uses of the data.