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Would You Pay for Steam?
dasmurf asks: "Many users have discussed this possibility. Now that Steam has pioneered the biggest online game delivery system to date, is it as simple as that? Read my concerns about the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Has anyone else read this agreement? Should Valve change it? If you love Valve's games but you've never religiously kept an eye on your credit card statement, maybe this will give you more reason. ;)"
Valve's Steam just released 3 software packages you can buy. It's great to be able to play CS:S while Valve and Vivendi duke out their legal battles. However, I have some concerns about their Subscriber Agreement - in particular, section 4.
Most people dismiss agreements like this. EULA's are probably discarded on a per-minute basis around the world, but this SA is slightly different. First, the games being offered are
not for "purchase" but rather available for "access" via a "Subscription fee". If this doesn't fuel the fear that Valve will turn Steam into a huge subscription-based monster like Evercrack, I don't know what would (I'll leave the debate whether subscription based games are the future or not for someone else - read: don't discuss that here, thx). Even if Valve doesn't morph into a subscription-based system, the usage of the term certainly keeps this open (as if the terms in 4B doesn't). And second, there appears to be a "forced subscription" model in place - meaning that if you don't say "NO" loudly enough, you probably will have to foot a "bleeding from the wallet" fee.
In it, 4A suggests that the end user agrees to maintain up-to-date credit card information with Valve. Other than a pre-authorized payment subscription type plan, I don't know why else that would be required. Section 4B states that Valve offers a 30-day period for announcing changes to their fees and billing methods and that "non cancellation" of their services automatically means you agree to and authorized payment of the new fee(s) and/or billing method(s).
The concern of 4B is not limited to this Steam Powered SA and is apparent in many subscription and pre-authorized payment plans, albeit probably not in the exact wording. And if you're not careful, you may have ended up in this kind of credit card "trap" before.
By "trap", I mean that the credit card owner ends up paying for new and different services he or she may or may not have wanted in the first place. And that redressment, reimbursement, reversal of charges, or credit of any kind is not possible, as stated in the SA. I hate to be cynical, but you can hear laughter from the Swindler's gallery snicking "We've covered our butts, but we've prevented you from covering yours!"
This reminds me of the opt-in/opt-out warefare in the courts not too terribly long ago. The most recent in my memory is the Telemarketing do-not-call plan.
Here's an example of the Valve SA gone bad:
John Doe "buys" the Gold package and gets the merchandise 2 months later, all the while enjoying CS:S and awaits HL2 and other games when they're out. Then, he stops playing Steam games for some reason or other. Maybe it's going to Iraq for 6 months. Maybe he's KIA and his family's a mess trying to get his body back from some third world country. Maybe it's being laid off an no net connection. Maybe he's got a new baby and he has no time for the computer. Maybe his wife has cancer and he doesn't want to leave her side. Maybe he's in jail for insider trading. Maybe he's found a new game and dropped Steam games like a bad habit. Maybe he's just forgotten his password and given up on the damned thing. Or maybe he's installed a anti-spam software, e-mail filters, firewalls, anti-spyware, and disables services and system functions on this computer so that the accumulative effects prevented the announcement of a change in the fees and/or billing methods from ever being read.
Anyhow, Valve's new fee/billing method is not known for months until the credit card bill is examined. While the saavy credit card holder who bought the Gold Package may immediately know where to cancel, the poor widow of GI John Doe might take weeks to find out who the hell Valve is and put a stop to the incessant monthly billing. SORRY, NO REFUNDS!
The first thing you might laugh at is the assumption that John Doe doesn't read his credit card bill every month. Some people watch it like a hawk, and some people aren't as diilgent. It's a fact of life. But is it just to make such per
CS doesn't have a monopoly on team based, squad combat, the only reason to play is the level of the gamers involved.
That being said Raven Shield is heading for the $19.99 bin and bullshit with extra "content packs" aside it's a brilliant game.
I got a copy of HL2 for free but I won't be using it until I'm damn sure they won't want credit card information.
The sad thing is that people will never have a game they can play nostalgicly, they will never have the option of being without steam. Why would you trust these people? They are trying to move away from Vivendi and ensure that they have a ton of money to start publishing for themselves.
On top of that you are playing MODS these were created by people who theorertically loved the gaming community, now they are thinking of doing it for a living! How many people who contributed to making CS, DOD, Natural Selection and other things that allowed this state of events will never be payed? In fact their hard work was flushed down the drain with the arrival of Steam.
Mod makers I beg you develop for a free platform! There are engines out there you can use for free!
I'd rather write a game engine (open-source) which updates itself as you play. I have 2 mbit DSL, there's no reason Steam should make me wait to download an entire HL level when only 50 feet in front of me is visible. Make it use bytecode (java, perl6, c#), open-source it (all the major client-side attacks you'd get from an open-source game engine have already been done through GL hacks)...
With this system finished and used by major game studios, all games would be developed faster and run on any major platform without any modification. I'd be willing to pay a subscription fee for that. Not Steam -- I have Doom 3, I don't care about CS, so HL2 is all I need -- I'd subscribe for a week, then lose it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As it stands now, if Valve converted steam to a pay-for service, I'd drop it. It just isn't worth the hassle. The client is still pretty buggy, which bothers me a bit. I'm not into paying a fee for MMORPGs either. I'd much rather pay for my game once, and then be able to use the game as often as I like. If the game has online multiplayer support for free, I will use it to see if I like it. But if I have to pay a usage fee, well, my monthly entertainment bill is high enough already.
As CS requires you to have a key to install on a client machine, the saving grace is that there is no authentication so you can use any key you can generate or otherwise find on the web to play 1.5
In norway a WON2 network (emulated WON servers) has been set up if you are interested in a minimal amount of authentication where a cheating client can be banned for 5 years from all WON2 servers via key and ip, but this is not very useful in USA and not reliable in most cases of cheating. My 24/7 admins just do manual IP bans and masks if necessary, as we never trusted the original WON servers.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
i paid for halflife a long time ago (1998). now i want to register it with Steam (just so i can play it online) but they say my cd-key is already used. and in their FAQ they want me to pay $10 "handling" so that they can "reset" my cd-key.o unt_faq
TOTALY EVIL http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=cd_acc
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
Maybe...but I would be really pissed off. I already paid 30 bucks through Steam in order to play the CS:S beta (or in other words i bought CS:CZ, which is really not worth a dollar if you already own cs). Than I paid 60 bucks for the HL2 silver package to be able to play CS:S source right away. I think Valve is gonna make tons of money off of gullible dumbfucks like me. I knew I was wasting my money when I bought CS:CZ but I just wanted to see what the source engine felt like and I was so sick of the old half life engine. Even though it's sorta my own dumb fault (I even saw it coming), I feel like I was tricked. Now if they decide to add a Subscription fee, I would be incredibly "steamed." I would do every thing I could to pirate an account before I would pay a monthly fee. I know piracy is illegal but I feel no regret taking advantage of companies that take advantage of me. But if I can't find a way to get a free account, I would probably end up paying the fee. I'm just that addicted to CS and half life I guess.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
I think the main thrust of the fear by the article's submitter was the whole "negative billing" aspect, and the subscription based thing.
First to address the negative billing (We add new stuff and you pay for it unless you tell us otherwise), I've been hit by this wonderful "feature" before, the cable company up in my neck of the woods (thanks Rogers! Go burn in hell for me, wouldja?) practiced it until enough customers made a royal stink in the media about it and the provincial government threatened to step in on their behalf. Nothing like opening up your cable bill to find that you've had 10 new channels for the last month that you didn't want, and were charged $7 for the privilege. And it's only easy to get a refund for that *AFTER* the government threatens to kick the cable company between the legs. Somehow with Steam I don't think there'd be anyone stepping in. It took dozens of people picketing for weeks on end to get action with the cable thing, I just don't see that happening over such a decentralized customer base like Steam's. Steam's agreement IS set up to potentially allow negative billing. That's enough for me to never consider using it.
The subscriber aspect is also not so good. If in fact the software you download only works while your account is up to date, what's the point? I spent $180 over a year and a half playing online games with nothing to show for it the second I closed out my account. I'd feel like a real chump paying to use Steam for 6 months, just using Half-Life 2, and then cancelling and having nothing, instead of taking that same money and buying a box from the local software shop. And also, does this mean that each time you fire up the game it has to authenicate against Steam to see if it's allowed to run? Good luck playing it without a net connection then...
What happens if your decision to pay for the "all products within sub-period" is based upon fraudulent information? I bring this up because it seems the very issue has already arisen with Valve, who kept repeating a release date they knew they never had a chance of meeting - and I think a fair few people are regretting the purchase of new video cards based on that information...
I can imagine an awful lot of people subscribing for a year (or however long) based on the assumption that the new game will ship in that time period, and being awfully annoyed when it doesn't.
That and I don't like the idea of paying basically full price for a game but getting less rights to it. If you buy the physical copy you can still play it in a few years time; there had better be a huge cost saving or a lot of extra features over Steam before I gave up that ability.
...a good thing for gaming when it comes along? Valve has done nothing (aside from the cyber cafe nonsense) but try to preserve PC gaming. Granted they're doing some of it for profit but I wonder how much the creators of CS and DOD got for Valve to buy up their mods? I wonder what incentive that puts in the minds of mod-makers to work on mods for HL2. If its good, Valve might buy yours and release it for $10-20 to the public via retail for those that might not have been mod savvy enough to find and download new mods. If Valve was evil there would only have been retail versions of Counter-Strike. Attracting mod-makers is good business. Hell Epic and Nvidia have a million dollar prize ready for the winner of the Make Something Unreal contest.
:) heh) I opened a few gmail accounts just to store game patches and content packs for other games, its easy to reinstall steam after a format. No finding the case for the key, then digging for the cd for the install.
And I am sick of hearing whining about buying products through steam and how its gonna be a monthly charge. Either they're gonna charge once for a product or monthly. Pay-to-play gaming outside of the MMO arena is dead. Heat, TEN, Mplayer, Engage, Kali any of them still around? Multiplayer via the net has to be played through steam so that they can ensure you didn't pirate the game. If you're careful with your CD-key you shouldn't have a problem unless of course you want to play the game for free.
Steam doesn't abuse your rights by simply not working or forcing you to disable or uninstall burning / emulation software so you can run it like newer game releases. It doesn't have annoying cd-checks that you're better off cracking than dealing with. Honestly I prefer not having a cd for the games I own or multiple for all the add ons and patches. When I preordered HL2 I don't recall steam even giving me a cd-key to write down and remember. It shot me an email and flagged my account to be able access HL2, how fool proof is that? (Please no Newell password jokes
Meh, I've ranted enough. I honestly don't see why people are legitmately upset with Steam, I rode 1.5 till WON servers were shutoff and just switched over and I don't see what the huge fuss was about. I think people just don't want to change. Paraphrasing what Tycho said in Penny Arcade about Valve and Vivendi. You used to have to go to the well for water and then someone figured out a way to get it from your house.
My experience with Steam: Last month, I heard that if you installed Steam you could pre-install HL2, so I installed it. Steam proceeded to download a couple gigs of data files to my computer. Very slick. Last week, when the packages were made available, I purchased the Silver package. I spent the weekend playing Counter-Strike Source and enjoying some of the back catalog of Half-Life mods that I had never tried. It takes about 5 seconds to authenticate before a game starts. That's about the same amount of time that most of the CD-protection schemes take, but since I never have to swap CDs out of my drive (or use disk imagers and virtual drives to get around the schemes) I have no problem with that.
I honestly believe that Valve has taken the first step on a path that will eventually lead the software industry in a new direction. As with most revolutionary ideas, there are those who embrace it, and those who think it will lead to the downfall of society.