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Tuesday, 16 September 2003

A Gamer's Panacea?

Last week I read about the release of Steam. It’s supposed to be a service for direct software delivery and content management. In short it allows you to buy and download games online, it has some kind of inbuilt Gamespy-like network, it handles patches and upgrades. Especially for us poor Germans longing for uncensored and undubbed gaming experience it seems like a dream come true. Downloading games the instant they are released without waiting months for a fishy translation? Yes. Halflife 2? Oh yeah, baby… Not to mention that the most interesting games aren’t released in Germany and you have to directly order them from Japan or Canada.

If you believe the marketing drivel it’s even better than pirated games. You can download games in minutes, play them on every PC and don’t have to worry about patches, cheaters and whatnot.

I was just about to wipe the slobber from my keyboard when the first doubts slowly appeared in the back of my head. Looking at the Status page I got greeted by a bunch of Server Down messages. Hmm… I guess that page will be all red on October 30th when Halflife 2 gets released. Download games in minutes? You bet.

Today I stumbled over posts on kuro5hin and Penny Arcade. I knew there had to be a catch somewhere. It’s the built-in DRM system. They accidentally forgot to mention that on the feature list. At the moment you have to be online to start a game downloaded with Steam. You can’t play on a LAN party without internet connection. Patches and Upgrades are forced down your throat and if their servers are down you just can’t play. Oh, well. I guess they never learn that DRM systems that work against the users will never work. Goodbye Steam, it was nice meeting you. Maybe some other time…

[Archive Link]  Posted by Michi at 17:32 CET

Comments


[Comments Link]  1. Posted by D on 23 September, 2003 21:15 CET

Funny you should talk about Steam, I just came off it to read some of my favorites. It is flawed and has been since the very first beta. With the release of the first non-beta Valve have discovered just how much of an audience they have.

For playing CounterStrike it is not at all a bad medium, providing you already have the install content. If you were to sit through the download, install and then be told that Steam couldn’t connect for something as important as HL2, then yeah, I can imagine that a lot of people would be severely narced.

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