- Once purchased you could potentially download the game from the service of your choice, be it Direct2Drive, Steam or StarDock's own Impulse service. This would help remove the fear of any one of the services going out of business and you losing your game catalog.
- Since the email address and key are independent, owners could potentially resell their keys. This would open up a digital second hand market and even possibly a way to rent PC games.
- If adopted, this would mean you wouldn't need a half-dozen copy protection systems on your computer.
StarDock's Unified DRM Dream
- Once purchased you could potentially download the game from the service of your choice, be it Direct2Drive, Steam or StarDock's own Impulse service. This would help remove the fear of any one of the services going out of business and you losing your game catalog.
- Since the email address and key are independent, owners could potentially resell their keys. This would open up a digital second hand market and even possibly a way to rent PC games.
- If adopted, this would mean you wouldn't need a half-dozen copy protection systems on your computer.
It sounds good enough, but Stardock is going to have to fight an uphill battle convincing publishers to adopt their DRM. Most of publishers want to either develop their own form of DRM or simply use Steamworks. Also Stardocks download service has always been the alternative of the alternative of Steam, meaning they don't have that many users to entice publishers or have publishers take them seriously.
DRM makes 7 year olds cry.
As a PC gamer I've had enough of people talking about the death of the platform for the past 20 years... If a nobody that makes stupid desktop applications for a living can raise to the spotlight thanks to a most excellent 4X TBS game and on top of that grow enough to become a digital publisher of Stardock's caliber, the platform's doing just fine, and the more room left for such developers by the fledging big name companies the better.
Actually Steam allows UT3 and Defense Grid keys from D2D to be activated. It's more a question of the publisher or developer of the game making the keys available to be authenticated against.
And that is the entire thing right there - those keys can be activated because those devs/publishers decided to voluntarily cooperate with Steam.
The amount of cooperation a system like GOO would require is kind of staggering and while I like Stardock, their idea sounds like another "great in theory, terrible in practice."
Steam has been pretty good about letting people add their retail-bought CD keys to the service. From what I understand, you can actually buy games like UT3 in a store and put them on your Steam account as if you had bought them there.
I imagine Valve would be the least resistant to something like this.
Only happens in games like UT3 because the last update REQUIRES Steam, even if you didn't buy it through Steam. Same for Total War, minus the "update" bit.
Games that run independently to Steam aren't 100% certain to be addable in it, the publisher has to provide the existing CD keys to Steam or something.
Nice write up Snide. I have to admit though I can't see this being used by the industry as a whole. It wasn't long ago Stardock created their own "bill of rights" which outline some key issues the industry must resolve when making a game. Infact it was a pretty damn well written piece but no one paid any attention to it other than Stardock themselves. Thats what I can see happening here, everyone will nod their head and agree it is a good idea. But no one will willingly take the first step to carry it out.
A pity really. As like you said there is some huge potential for the PC playerbase to get some love from the industry when all we seem to get is contempt and hate.
It sounds like a nice idea, but for it too succeed it would have to be endorsed by one of the major players in the industry like Activision/Blizzard.
"It sounds like a nice idea, but for it too succeed it would have to be endorsed by one of the major players in the industry like Activision/Blizzard."
Or if Valve said developers had to use GOO instead of DRM if they want to get their games on Steam. I think developers are becoming dependent enough, on this pariticular digital distribution service, to the point that they wouldn't want to try calling bluff.
couldn't pirates essentially just give the username and pass to the email away in the zip file along with the key and the game?
"CitizenKane said:Well Steam in itself is a form of DRM, albiet more friendly and less obvious compared to other forms. I'm not so sure would Valve be the first to step up to this, not when they themselves are trying to get everyone to vote Valve for president if you catch my drift."It sounds like a nice idea, but for it too succeed it would have to be endorsed by one of the major players in the industry like Activision/Blizzard."Or if Valve said developers had to use GOO instead of DRM if they want to get their games on Steam. I think developers are becoming dependent enough, on this pariticular digital distribution service, to the point that they wouldn't want to try calling bluff."
That being said it wouldn't hurt to see Valve and Stardock team up on something like this. Both seem to have the same ideals about DRM / customer value. So it could happen, but the cynic in me says it wont.
PC gaming is not anywhere near dying - it is thriving.
DRM is essentially useless - it has never really worked, and I don't see that changing now.
Publishers look at the piracy rates and imagine what life would be like if all those pirates bought the game. But that is a dreamworld - pirates wouldn't buy the game if the miracle DRM worked, they'd just go download something else.
I don't see why it's a concern to games players. Let publishers worry about their bottom line, and enjoy your games.
"BiggerBomb said:I can't see Valve considering GOO at all, but only because, they have their own DRM solution (CEG) being implemented in Steamworks (which is already being used by a bunch of relatively large game developers)."CitizenKane said:Well Steam in itself is a form of DRM, albiet more friendly and less obvious compared to other forms. I'm not so sure would Valve be the first to step up to this, not when they themselves are trying to get everyone to vote Valve for president if you catch my drift.That being said it wouldn't hurt to see Valve and Stardock team up on something like this. Both seem to have the same ideals about DRM / customer value. So it could happen, but the cynic in me says it wont.""It sounds like a nice idea, but for it too succeed it would have to be endorsed by one of the major players in the industry like Activision/Blizzard."Or if Valve said developers had to use GOO instead of DRM if they want to get their games on Steam. I think developers are becoming dependent enough, on this pariticular digital distribution service, to the point that they wouldn't want to try calling bluff."
I have no problem with DRM if it works and works well if its fucked and messes up games then its not worthwhile.
"BiggerBomb said:"CitizenKane said:Well Steam in itself is a form of DRM, albiet more friendly and less obvious compared to other forms. I'm not so sure would Valve be the first to step up to this, not when they themselves are trying to get everyone to vote Valve for president if you catch my drift.That being said it wouldn't hurt to see Valve and Stardock team up on something like this. Both seem to have the same ideals about DRM / customer value. So it could happen, but the cynic in me says it wont.""It sounds like a nice idea, but for it too succeed it would have to be endorsed by one of the major players in the industry like Activision/Blizzard."Or if Valve said developers had to use GOO instead of DRM if they want to get their games on Steam. I think developers are becoming dependent enough, on this pariticular digital distribution service, to the point that they wouldn't want to try calling bluff."
I might have misinterpreted that, but are you saying that digital distribution is DRM?
I bought GalCiv II Ultimate edition off of Stardocks' Impulse service. Thats the only place to get GalCiv digital legally that I know of. (Its not avalible at Steam, D2D, or GOG)
The game is patched to it's latest version, but is a total mess. Crash, after crash, after crash.
I paid 40 bucks for it, and can't even play it. Haven't heard a word back from customer service. Crap like this is the reason PC gaming is going south.
Fuck Impulse. Fucking program merged my friends account with mine and now neither of us can play Sins of a Solar Empire. I hope they fucking burn.
DRM of any kind is a horrible idea. It only punishes the users who pay. It isn't difficult to pirate and since there is no DRM or CD check it is a better product. As long as the game companies disrespect their users with DRM and annoy them with things like a CD check, piracy is the best option. Even if you buy the game legitimately it's best to pirate a clean copy.
Um...this isn't a DRM it's just a reg key system. The casual games industry has been doing this exact thing for the past 7 years. It works for casual games because the average casual gamer isn't savvy enough to realize that you can just give somebody else your e-mail/reg key and they can download and unlock the game for themselves. Since most casual gamers don't frequent forums (good luck finding one), developers don't have to worry much about people just posting their reg keys for everyone to use.
If you put this on a larger scale with gamers that actually understand the implications of it, you'll have anarchy. Websites will pop up all over the place posting universal e-mail/serial codes for every game released. It could maybe work if there was a secondary authentication built in where you couldn't use the serial code more than once unless the original purchaser requested an additional install verification...but then we're right back to Spore-caliber DRM.
It doesn't work.
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