Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sowelu]

Pretty much, if this happened, people would simply not buy anything. People do not like being watched.

How many people are connected to Steam right now?  What, one out of every three thousand people on the entire face of the planet?  Right.

I'm not proposing anything more restrictive than Steam, and it's a good sight less restrictive than iTunes.  It's also not that far off from what people do with ebooks right now.

Also, Neonivek:  Haha, nice.


...I suppose that there would be plenty of options open to people who really can't afford buying games all the time but still want to play them while accepting restrictions.  As mentioned earlier, some system where you can add another person to your game license for a small fee would work.  And I'm sure some publishers wouldn't mind opting into an actual pay-to-rent-directly-from-the-publisher system, with prices varying based on the game.  Maybe a Bronze Account let you play all the Super Duper Solitaire Plus and Minesweeper III: Sweep Harder you want.  Maybe you could find a Gold Time-Limited plan where you can pay $25 a month and get any participating AAA game as soon as it comes out, as many different games as you want...but you can only play for fourteen hours a week (recharging by two hours daily).  $20 of that $25/month would be passed on to the original publishers based on the proportion of time you spent playing their specific games.

Oh yeah--And installing on more than one computer, or making copies of your games.  Notice how online distribution systems not only say "that's okay, go right ahead", but make it easy to do it?  (In theory) they keep you from playing on more than one machine at a time, and they ARE your backup.  Again I'm assuming that technical issues aren't a factor, because who knows, in five or ten years that might be true.

Hell, if this system really REALLY got off the ground, I could imagine a Library of Congress for games, and requiring creative content licensers/publishers to get insurance something along the lines of FDIC: You pay into a safety net and if your content servers go down for good, the government-mandated fund will ensure that everyone gets their stuff during a clean transition to a new publisher and/or a full unlock.  Wouldn't that be sweet?

[dogstile]

Pretty much, if this happened, people would simply not buy anything. People do not like being watched.

How many people are connected to Steam right now?  What, one out of every three thousand people on the entire face of the planet?  Right.

I'm not proposing anything more restrictive than Steam, and it's a good sight less restrictive than iTunes.  It's also not that far off from what people do with ebooks right now.

Problem is, while I use steam, if every game came on it, i'd stop using steam. I would go find a new hobby. Steam is for sales, little things that cost barely anything and last hours, which is great and i'd be sad to see it go. But steam is also OPTIONAL. Only reason I find it acceptable to.

This is forcing people to conform to an idea. As a teenager, I am against this (yes, this was a joke)

I'm just against it in general

[nenjin]

*pitchfork*

Sowelu must have just taken a job with a publisher, or something.

Get him.

*pitchfork*

I want to throw out some ideas here, but honestly, diving into theoretical black holes is less fun than it sounds.

You pay into a safety net and if your content servers go down for good, the government-mandated fund will ensure that everyone gets their stuff during a clean transition to a new publisher and/or a full unlock.  Wouldn't that be sweet?

Haha. You want the Fed to have that sort of control or oversight over video games?

No, no I refused to get sucked into that nighmare scenario.

[Vel]

Are you seriously suggesting that people put tax money into a fund to insure video games?

Uh.

Wow, like.. seriously, are you just trying to troll people or something? That insurance fund would last about 17.4 seconds on capitol hill before it got spent on something else because the public at large would never miss it. Hell, they spend most of the social security money on other crap and that's something relevant to /everyone/.

You are talking like some kind of political scientist. (And that is not a compliment)

[Sowelu]

Er, I don't think you understand.  The PUBLISHER pays into it.  It's INSURANCE that the PUBLISHER is forced to buy if they want to take the property of that many consumers into their hands.

If content distributors get very big, I have no problem with the government saying "You need to buy insurance that will take care of your consumers' goods if you fall over and go boom".

[Vel]

Everything the publisher has to pay is paid by the consumer. The operating cost always trickles down into the price of the end product. Including taxes.


Edit -- Since we're replying by edit I will reinforce the simple fact of reality which is that everything the publisher is forced to pay is, in fact, paid for by the consumer purchasing the products. There is absolutely no way you can put a tax or a forced purchase of absolutely any kind that will not, in the end, affect the price for the final product paid by the consumer. Unless you are suggesting that the prices of games should be strictly regulated by the government, in which case I guess that makes you a communist. I suppose that is topical and amusing given that we are on the Bay12 forums.

[Sowelu]

I'm really not sure how we got on the subject of taxes.  I was saying that if you're going to manage content-distribution accounts for a hundred million users, it's worthwhile for the government to say "You need to set some money aside to make sure that people won't lose their content if you go bankrupt".  That's not really a tax to me.  And okay, maybe the prices go up a tiny, tiny insignificant bit?  I guess?  Meat prices go up when you make sure it doesn't kill you.  House prices go up when you're forced to wire them to code.  I'm happy the government makes my banks do that whole FDIC thing, and as these content networks expand--along with the whole 'no physical objects' thing--I think everyone would be better served if publishers were made to not lose all our stuff.  I'm not sure how you get from there to "prices of games should be regulated by the government", but I'm glad you're getting exercise from all those logical leaps.

[Vel]

Yes, that is a tax. It doesn't really matter what you dress it up as, it's a tax. It's a tax that the consumer will pay and which will immediately be spent on something else because there is no way to protect the earmark -- the people who could put a protection on that money are the same people who could and would immediately revoke said protection. If and when that money is needed, the government will shrug their shoulders, because 'people who play video games' is not an important group of people and they will have already spent the money on something else, and won't want to take money from another thing for it.


I don't think you quite understand why Steam is good and successful. It's good and successful because people have to option to drop it like a rock and use other methods if Steam were to become a negative influence or if a better method of acquiring games arose. If you /forced/ people to use a Steam-like method of acquiring their video games, that service could be oppressive as it felt like being and noone could do a damn thing about it. I am going to go ahead and preemptively guess that your solution to that would be 'have the government regulate the service!!' -- how much regulation are you planning to shove into this? Every bit of regulation will invariably mean higher costs for the consumer, as both government and corporate money and time is spent on the issues.

[Sowelu]

Lol the fdic is actually a privately-held (but government-sponsored) corporation, not a bucket of the federal treasury, but nice try.  l2economics, insert quarter to continue.

Anyway, if you're done guessing wrong, what I was proposing was widespread acceptance of a whole new concept of "ownership" as relates to creative works and intellectual property.  One that's already well on its way to being accepted.  Yeah, not everyone has to buy into it, but you know how all those EULAs are full of horse crap and haven't hardly been legally challenged?  It would be nice to establish what, exactly, they can legally cover and what they can't, and rein them into a nice middle ground.

If publishers say "Here is our new publishing model, and it does not allow resale", and copyright law says "Okay we have vetted that and it is legit", and consumers say "Okay we are going to purchase your products now", then...uh...I don't see how that's oppressive government regulation.

Oh yeah, and I'm just going to lol again at "Steam is successful because people aren't using it".  :|

[Vel]

I didn't say Steam is successful because people aren't using it. Lots of people are using it.

I said that Steam is successful because people have the option /not/ to use it and acquire products from other, less controlled methods if they choose to. This keeps Steam on the up-and-up and prevents them from implementing crazy draconian crap that would drive everyone away (unless they had nowhere else to get the products, of course!).

[Sowelu]

Okay, that makes sense, I think.  Steam is being kept lean and strong by the existence of strong competition that follows different business models, so they can't be dicks or they will fail.  Works for me.

[Neonivek]

I didn't say Steam is successful because people aren't using it. Lots of people are using it.

I said that Steam is successful because people have the option /not/ to use it and acquire products from other, less controlled methods if they choose to. This keeps Steam on the up-and-up and prevents them from implementing crazy draconian crap that would drive everyone away (unless they had nowhere else to get the products, of course!).

Personally I think Steam is biding its time.

I know eventually it will stiffen up its DRM to the point where everyone will complain but few will do anything about it.

[Zangi]

*Tin Foil Hat*
Once X amount of people have invested over Y amount of monies and Q amount of game companies have put W amount of games into Steam... DRM will be jacked up to Epic Evil.

[kg333]

http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110209/

Funny that this is today's comic.

KG

[LoSboccacc]

I buy an handful of top titles at year, the one that most impress me or that have nice idea I'd like to try (last year pick were r.u.s.e. and civ V). for those, I'm not planning any resale, I pay them brand new full price, and they sit happily on my collection.

for everything else, I'd never had a chance of reselling. when I tried, you had to accept ridiculous prices or endure the hassle of ebay and the likes.

seriously, there is too little residual value in an used game. what you lose in purchasing&resaling is more than you would have paid for it if you got the game at a bargain price.

to me, steam provides a nice collection of cheapo games to buy. I've just got the mediocre king arthur at 3 euros, and just cause 2 at 2.5, thats way less of what I would had lost on a purchase/resale strategy, and the game will always be with me as long as steam lives.

sure, you have the limitation by accepting the steam agreement of not being able to resell them. frankly, I don't give a damn.