Steam Integration

[Gondar]

If it was a matter of being able to have it verify once, some sort of "Submit your steam ID, we won't use it for more than verification of game" and then not require any sort of linking like that, I'd be fine with it. I have the game, and if I had to prove it to stay here I would, but I haven't linked my ID because, well, I don't USE Steam that much. I mean sure it loads with windows, but that's as far as it tends to go except for occasional uses of whatever game. Some of which I need to play more of, I admit. Thus there's no real reason to add some steam ID for everyone on the internet who sees this site to check. I hide by obscurity, and having some public profile linked is kind of against that.

So yeah. I'd be fine with having to provide one to be verified by some automated thing if possible, but rather not leave it permanently linked. Some people are fine with linking it, but I'd rather not, thank you.

 

[UndeadSocrates]

I hide by obscurity, and having some public profile linked is kind of against that.

So yeah. I'd be fine with having to provide one to be verified by some automated thing if possible, but rather not leave it permanently linked. Some people are fine with linking it, but I'd rather not, thank you.

Looks like you'll be fine in that regard Maybe you missed Minimaul's post:

you'd just need to link your forum account with your steam account so it can verify you own the game. You'd be able to set your profile back to private afterwards, and we don't gain any control over your steam account this way - all we can do is see information that's basically already public.

I'm also usually pretty tight on privacy due to the nature of my job - but since my entire profile is "undeadsocrates lives in Australia" I reckon I'll just leave it public.

Ah, forums: the last vestiges of Internet 1.0 anonymity. Gotta love people who get confused about this change and do stuff like incite racial hatred on their Facebook page... and then post a photo album of their new house.

 

[Gandalf]

Looks like you'll be fine in that regard Maybe you missed Minimaul's post:

I'm also usually pretty tight on privacy due to the nature of my job - but since my entire profile is "undeadsocrates lives in Australia" I reckon I'll just leave it public.

Ah, forums: the last vestiges of Internet 1.0 anonymity. Gotta love people who get confused about this change and do stuff like incite racial hatred on their Facebook page... and then post a photo album of their new house.

loved your student,Plato's work.His dedication to you was quite remarkable but in all honesty wasn't he a bit of a nuisance?
Following you around taking notes or were you best buds ,making the scene, kicking it together....

The most important insight i gleaned from Plato's work is," As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. "
Simple, yet a lifetime i've spent in awe and amazement at my own ignorance.

I started searching for the answers to all the questions that revealed themselves in my daily efforts at living
and in the end found that i now know less than i did before i began the search.How can that be?
Btw that hemlock had some nasty side effects,hey?

We live in societies that are governed by elitists that want to count the freckles on our butts and the more we say
yes to scrutiny the more we will be asked to reveal.

Pirates and those who patronize them are at the root of the problems that those who buy their games are facing.
In essence those who buy their games are being punished or scrutinized for the illegal acts of other individuals.
Fair?IDK because i know nothing.

 

[Gondar]

Oh, it could be worse. As far as it goes, Steamworks isn't bad. You have to log on to use it, or at least to get a connection 'token' to play offline. However, the alternatives are that AND DRM. EA is notorious for that... and while Volition selling everything as DLC is kinda bad.. it's nothing compared to the others. Just watch, how much do you want to bet the "real ending" of Mass Effect 3 (Having seen footage I'm a believer of the 'it was aaaaaaaaall an indoctrination dream!) is gonna be a $10 DLC? Only Squaresoft is the other company willing to make the ending to a game DLC.
And then of course you have other companies who use Securom.. AND Steamworks. Or if you buy say GTA4, it's Steamworks, Securom, AND GFWL.

The problem though isn't that people pirate the game. It's that the people running the publishers THINK people all pirate the game. Sure the pirates should buy the game, but the publishers see "Aha! Pirates!" and go "THAT'S why Generic FPS 201X sold like crap! PIRATES!" instead of the fact that it was a pretty rubbish game. I mean, people who hated the game bought it anyways, so they helped you make profits, so you must be doing it right, right?

So what it comes down to is as it goes, I'm ok with Steam. It's relatively benign. (I had a Gametap account once. Having to ALWAYS be online to play is nothing new) I'm ok with DLC for the game, hence I opened a thread to ask opinions about it (and came to the conclusion I probably won't bother, unless they do a sale on the season pass). I just won't buy it. Some people will pirate too, fine.. but unfortunately it doesn't matter if they will buy the game or not, the publishers are convinced it's lost sales (since you can track how many pirated copies are done, roughly, but can't track a lack of theoretical sales, so they go for the figures even if they don't matter). I'm also perfectly fine with locking down the forum against pirates.. some companies are ok with modding, no matter what I think of Bethesda's writing I love them for encouraging modding.. some companies are neutral as long as it's benign, like Volition seems to be.. and some are hostile to ANYTHING no matter if it's free use no sales and REQUIRES buying the game.


So long rant short, I hate pirates because they're a great scapegoat that's far easier than trying to find the real reason why your game isn't doing super-hot (short answer: you're expecting it to sell like the next Halo, then blame it selling quite good but not super amazingly good on pirates, or the market, or what). I understand THQ is having some financial problems, but regardless of that versus piracy versus what.. my hope is Volition survives. They make good games, and that's sadly becoming a relative rarity nowadays from a big-time developer. Doesn't mean I condone pirates, just that I blame idiots running the major studios far more than idiots who pirate the game. (Personally I think if they pirate SR3 fine, but go and buy the damned game so you can visit here and try modding it next, maybe do a bit of coop and so on.. there's too few really fun games out there, and we need to show publishers that hey, we like this stuff!)

On the plus side, Steam looks like in the future it might end up an actual publisher, more than just hiring everyone who develops something cool.. and that will be a REAL shakeup of the market that will make us see the old-names worry, and either adapt or die. I just hope the people who make the fun things to play get to keep making them.. they love making the games we love to love, and it shows

 

[Gandalf]

How can you say that pirating games isn't a problem and the pirates should be seen as scapegoats?
I don't know where you get your information about what publishers think but trying to downplay the
effect piracy has had on pc gaming is rather puzzling.

I still remember when i just tossed the cd in the drive installed and played and i didn't have to prove to anyone
that i bought the game.

The whole mess started because users started sharing games and efforts to stop that brought on the hackers and pirates.

There's evidence here that users can't get their heads around the idea that downloading pirated games is illegal.
For someone to say, point blank ,on a forum,"Oh,i'm not using the steam version i'm using the(insert pirate name here)version."
indicates that they don't get that it's stealing.I've been on sites where a user will be talking about cracks and upcoming games they hope get
pirated then mention a new car they just bought or how much a gaming system is going to cost them.

Poor games will appear that, once word gets around, many won't purchase but how many of those will simply download a pirated
copy instead?

 

[Minimaul]

*snip*"Oh,i'm not using the steam version i'm using the(insert pirate name here)version."
indicates that they don't get that it's stealing.*snip*

It's not stealing! It's piracy

Stealing requires that you take it away from someone else.

 

[Gondar]

I'm not talking about if piracy is or isn't illegal. What I'm saying is the impact is way overblown to make them a big scapegoat. You want to ask me how I get that? Simple, let's turn it around here, shall we?

How many millions of dollars a year are lost to video game piracy? No, don't go quoting theoreticals. You can take the number of pirated games then multiply by full price. That assumes everyone who pirates would buy the game. That's like assuming everyone who walks into a car dealership is going to buy a car after looking, maybe after a test drive. So none of those made-up numbers. I already noted that's what's used and it's wrong.
Give me a number. How much money is actually lost to piracy. Show your statistics.


You can't. It's impossible to give qualitative figures on something that doesn't exist. You can give projected sales figures.. you say you expect to sell X copies. If you only sell W, and W<X, then you claim you lost sales. However, it's a trick.. there's no lost sales, only you claiming you "lost" sales because you didn't meet your projections. You can apply that to most things in business. A company says it projects a quarter income of some figure, assuming everything is perfect and they get a lot of sales etc. They get less, therefore they projected a loss. There's no actual lost money, it's all virtual theoretical pretend money. No one stole the money, there's no loss, just a smaller growth than you hoped. The same thing happens with piracy. Publishers throw about figures, but all they are is justifying whatever they want. Besides, if they had a definitive idea how much piracy actually did, they wouldn't use DRM, would they? The result is the DRM hurts the people who have the games, but the pirates cracked it, often BEFORE ship date. So therefore it's not fighting it. But they claim it is, and since there's no way to prove how much money is being "lost" they claim it's having an impact by the same guesses to claim they needed it. Neat, huh?

So again, pirates are a scapegoat. The proper solution is simple... STOP SELLING CRAP! Stop making games that are bug-ridden, featureless derivatives that rely on a mix of marketing hype and 'safe' sales. Make a good game people WANT to buy. The problem is that takes money or time, and a measure of risk. Compared to the safe design of "Game++" which is just adding a few features to whatever, redoing a bit, and calling it a day. Hence I used the term "Generic Shooter 201X" The most infamous is the sports games.. tweak your physics engine, change the roster, add a little graphics update, call it a new game. Done! Instead, publishers should ask why people are pirating the games. I'm betting a large number of people do it because it's easier, but another large number do it because games are really expensive, and if it sucks you feel ripped off. I for instance actually bought Dragon Age 2. Full retail price. That alone is why I gave up on Bioware, and apparently all the stuff about Mass Effect 3 and the obvious fact that reviewers are being forced to give good reviews (common publisher trick. "Give our game good reviews, or we stop sending your company games of ours to review". Sadly it works, IGN was just the one exposed, not some exception).
I know there's reasons for publishers to try to squeeze out every bit of money, making a big title is expensive. However, we're reaching the point we're either gonna have to find another way, or have a revolt. I mean, EA was just voted America's worst company this year thanks to everything they've done. (Their response? In effect, "Don't be silly. We're the fourth worst at least! Look at these guys who are already voted before us!") We're gonna see some sort of shift. Again, my hope is the publishers I like manage to survive and adapt.

However, not once did I say piracy is right. Just that it's overblown far out of proportion. It's quite fine to lock the forum against the idiot pirates who line up for the gangplank if you put a "all non-steam-version users here" sign. I'm just saying that they're a nuisance really, and keeping them kicked out when found keeps us on Volition's good side, because it doesn't give an excuse on 'piracy' grounds to stop what is technically against the EULA I think. (even if EULAs tend to be illegal in their contents).

Personally I think SR3 is an interesting experiment. Give the ability to load all the DLC and mod it in with a bit of editing.. provide the stuf. How many like me could and already have poked in the files and made it squirm, but just didn't bother buying the DLC and didn't do any piracy to get it either? And how many did do that? How many bought it after? Track how many people play the game with the DLC content, both pirated and not, see how much they continue to play. Does the DLC add anything past the one time playthru? Does the game itself? If people only play it the once, then that doesn't say pirates would buy the game.. they got a playthru, why bother? Buying it won't add more, except multiplayer, do people play that? Does it extend your game life playing?

Eh, that sort of in-depth statistics would be interesting, but I don't think we can do that yet unless they put some spying code in the exe (and why not? They put half of the game in that file alone, it seems). It'd at least give people a good idea how their sales work and their pirated non-sales work. Something to do more than make up "lost sales from piracy" numbers to throw.


But I've ranted enough. I've probably already made an impression here as a ranty young rebel even if I'm not young (not getting old like some of you, but not THAT young). Long story short, pirates are a scapegoat used by companies who don't know how to actually fix things or prefer scapegoats cause it's easier and it makes it seem like you'rte doing something to appease panicky stockholders. But they're still illegal, so I think steam piracy checking would be ok, provided yeah I don't have to worry about my gamer name getting thrown across for every reader of the forum to see.

 

[Gondar]

Oh, and on the topic of Steam vs piracy versus what not.. right now SR3 is featured on Steam, and is in the top-20 selling games (as of this point checking, notably wednesday evening).
Let's hope this helps a bit of the money woes, and maybe we'll see some of the pirates go "Well, I DID pirate.. but then I went and bought the game since it was featured and all..."

I know, I know, probably not, but still, you know?

 

[arkayn]

Do we know what is going on with the Integration as almost everyone say invalid profile data?

 

[Minimaul]

Do we know what is going on with the Integration as almost everyone say invalid profile data?

A lot of forums running the same addon are having the same issue - we think it's something valve changed and I'm waiting for the author of the addon to fix it.