Comments on: Valve’s Gabe Newell Says Most DRM is “Dumb”

By: Mikey M.

Mikey M. — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 04:55:36 +0000

Having a 56k modem for the whole house in 2004 would is called “not keeping up with the times”. You can and you may always put the steam in offline mode. There are hardly any computers that still have 56k modems, now with broadband and sattelite internet.

By: David

David — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:06:58 +0000

“Steam is fine because it just works.” Yeah a very smart comment, not…

Back when Half life 2 was released my house had a single 56k modem, on the first day I spent ages fixing my pc to use the Internet, and spent all day and night downstairs waiting for my copy to validate.
Once it was done, I took my pc back upstairs and went to bed. 13 hours later I found out some game data was corrupt, and spent another 1-2 days downloading.
After which I had no problems till about 2-3 months later when Steam wanted me to connect again.

Steam “just works” if you have a net connection to that PC, otherwise its just the same as trying to use a SecuROM disc in a drive that SecuROM is invalid with.

By: bob

bob — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:03:14 +0000

The whole point is that Steam is not intrusive; it doesn’t get in the way of playing the games at all. Other DRM measures actually limit the number of installs a user can perform, before you have to ring the publisher to extend the loan of the game that you’ve paid for! And that is outrageous.

Steam is fine because it just works.