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Bleak Future for Videogame Customers
jvm writes "A recent commentary on Curmudgeon Gamer speculates on the future of the videogame market. Among the predictions: no more rentals from video stores, no used games market, no lending games to friends, less upgradeable computers, pay-as-you-play software subscriptions, and other consumer-unfriendly changes. In all, less gaming value for your hard-earned dollar."
That's why they realized that serial numbers had to be washed against a list of compromised numbers in some sort of revocation process. The result of that is known as "software activation"... phoning home with the CD key to see if that key is still valid.
But is hardly strong enough.
Yes games that allow you to play on OTHER people's servers are more restricted, because it is THEIR servers. Granted there are plenty of public Half-life servers, but they still are indexed by VALVes master server. In doing so they get people playing on their server, and VALVe is assured the people playing on these servers are using legitimate products.
If one has a problem with the 1984 style, then don't play on the servers, instead use other servers like one can use with open battle net. You can connect without any legit CD key, but you also are playing with less people; more then likely. As always a trade off.
As for Steam only downloading the parts you'll "Use in the near future" the author does NOT know what he is talking about. Steam downloads the levels as you play them, yes, aside from the core levels that come with the mod you are playing (or the original game). By core levels I mean, if you download half-life it downloads all the game content you need, but no added developer levels unless you go on a sever that has them, then it downloads them and you keep them on your hard drive.
It is for two reasons. To be gentle on VALVes bandwidth, and also if you never play any other levels/mods (like Counter strike, or Day of defeat) then there is less Hard drive space taken up on your computer.
As for the rest of the author's comments on making everything non-tangible, I doubt that will happen for a few reasons.
One of which is people like to have a product for convince they can grab and install if their system crashes.
Two people would want more for less, if they don't have that solid backup to go back to.
Example. Through steam, you either buy the game in the store or get an unlimited subscription to steam, or you pay 5 dollars a month for the same service.
I'd love to hear arguments against what I've said, so please...
(Offspring, I believe)
To do any significant game-related downloading, you need a fast internet connection. A LOT of users (self included) are still on dial-up, simply for cost reasons. If you add the cost of a required broadband link, plus a pay-per-play or subscription model for games, people will decide it's simply not worth their hard-earned money. I know people who pay $80/mo for their cable TV & internet, but they're double-income, middle class families. Students, young workers, and other lower-income people will not - often can not - pay through the ass just to play video games.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Although it won't help regular office-type software, the CD-Key is the bane of online-gamers who don't pay for their games. Most games that use one will connect to a master server to verify its authenticity. So games like Quake 3 and Raven Shield require you to be legit to play in most of the open servers on the net, while games like half-life (even though it has a cd-key system) don't check the number online and are able to be cracked. I don't know this from experience, or anything.
It's far harder to accidentally corrupt a plastic disc than it is to have a transfer error screw up an application.
If you have a scratch on your plastic disc, you'd better hope that the disc specifications put enough error correction data on at manufacturing time to fix the problem. If you're transferring data over a network, during most of the transfer you only need enough data to reliably perform error detection, since over a noisy link the client can re-request corrupted blocks and the server can increase the percentage of ECC data dynamically.
It doesn't make much difference for single player only games, but LAN & internet games will not allow installs using the same key to play together, but it still isn't that great a concept, as keygens seem to be widely available.
"keygens seem to be widely available"
1 -11111-11111
If you can't find the CD on an old microsoft application, try anything where the last 7 digits are a multiple of 7. e.g.
111-1111111
7777-7777777
11111-11111-1111
more details
What you say is true, but keep in mind the audience versus the hosts here. Even though one can crack a client to bypass the authentication, and one can crack a server to allow cracked clients, the only time the clients can even play is when it's on a cracked server, a very rare case. While you have some people with the nessisary bandwidth and the desire to run a cracked server for everyone, the large server organizations that run their own servers and official game servers(SCI, HomeLAN, etc) aren't in the buisness of running cracked servers, and neither are most server owners in general.
The point of all of this being, is that it goes to show how secure the current key-master system that Q3, UT2K3, etc is - at best, crackers can only unlock a portion of the "world." And this is why such a system is staying, as even after 5 years, it's largely held up, something no other system so far can claim. One only has to look at UT(CD protection) vs. Q3(key-master) to see why this is ideal - in the age of online games, must buy your game in order to play it, piracy just won't work.