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Valve Cracks Down on 20,000 Users
An anonymous reader writes "Valve have disabled 20,000 steam user accounts belonging to users who have been caught using a pirated version of the game, or have attempted to use a cdkey to bypass the securom protection found on the retail version of the game. The Steam Forums have been swamped with people now claiming they are unable to play, many claiming they have had their accounts disabled for no reason. A Valve spokesman says, 'The number of people who actually had bought HL2 and used the CD key cheat was VERY small. VERY small. Most people just tried to rip off the game and not bother buying it.'" People are discovering that when you buy any product that is subject to "activation", you haven't really bought anything.
I know that a lot of people will have huge problems with this.
I still don't see why though- most people knew about Steam going in (everyone who tried to use the crack knew about Steam).
Someday, circumventing copy protection won't be seen as a white-hat activity. But it will be seen as people trying to cheat others out of compensation for their work.
No reason to lie.
I can understand someone who bought a real copy of the game using a no-cd crack so they don't have to have the CD in all the time (I do this for most of my games - I HATE having to swap CDs all the time), but using a cracked CD key? There really doesn't seem to be an excuse for this.
From what I understand, if you uninstall Half-Life 2 after activating it on Steam, then install off of Steam, you won't have to use your media anymore.
Admittedly, you'll have to download quite a bit of data and it's a pain in the rump and it might not work after their next patch, but that's what's been going around the message boards.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
So, you try to pirate Half-Life 2, and they lock you out from playing it... That's all well and good. But if you've got other products you've legitimately purchased through Steam you can no longer access those either because you tried to pirate Half-Life 2? That sounds like a great reason to never use Steam. If you ever do something they disapprove of with one of Valve's products you could lose access to hundreds of dollars of software that is completely unrelated.
Why aren't they just blocking those users from Half-Life 2 instead of revoking (shall we say "stealing" since they like to mis-use the word too) ligitemately purchased licenses for other products too?
Is this license agreement on the box in a place where I can view it before I purchase it? Not the last time I checked.
"A Valve spokesman says, 'The number of people who actually had bought HL2 and used the CD key cheat was VERY small."
So how draconian are they being? Is that "VERY small" number of users being excluded from the blacklist? Or did they trigger some End Game transgression of the EULA by even trying the CD key cheat?
If the latter, that would SERIOUSLY suck.
Your correct but this reminds me of the Registration backlash against TurboTax 2002. TurboTax lost market share due to having to contact the TurboTax server to get authentication for the tax product. People know that software companies fade over the years and to have something so important tied to a company that may not be there one day turned many customers off to the product. Many sought alternative ETax solutions. And as any license issue, Money talks louder than the Pen.
Now am I expecting people to associate the longevity of a game with the required longevity of tax returns? Of course not but I was thinking about purchasing HL2 but I think I'll pass until the dust settles instead of the risk/hassle of the validation scheme.
I bought Half Life through steam and was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly it went. I was expecting a nightmarish problem judging by Valve's earlier problems with network security.
However, regarding activation. Maybe if so many people in the "community" weren't so busy pirating the games Valve wouldn't need to go through these hoops.
What I'm more concerned about overall is, what happens when people have their steam accounts stolen? How is Valve going to deal with that. I could probably use Visa to get my $59 back, but what a tremendous pain in the ass.
Oderint dum metuant
I bought HL2 the day it came out. The steam servers were so swamped that it took me over 2 hours to get the damn thing activated. Frankly, I do find the idea of being treated like a potential criminal every time I launch the game offensive. It's like having a store run a criminal record check every time you wander in to buy something. I'm not going to argue about the license - Valve certainly does have a right to protect their interests, but I'll certainly think twice once I see any product using Steam as a prerequisite to using it. They can do what they like, and me and my money just won't get involved. (btw - the post above about still needing the damn CD is right - what the hell for? If anything good could have come out of Steam it would have been able to stop having to swap CD's back and forth).
So, what happens in 5 or 10 years when you want to play the game and can't install it on a new machine because Steam is gone or has been replaced? I understand their attempt to thwart piracy, but perhaps they should try a different approach. Perhaps innocent until proven guilty?
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
What happens if I buy the game on ebay that somebody already played. Will steam not allow me since it's already registered to the previous user? More importantly what happens when VU shuts down valve and steam B/C profit margins aren't high enough or some other BS reason, and there are no servers to validate my copy? I don't want to buy a game that might not work in a few years.
Is this license agreement on the box in a place where I can view it before I purchase it? Not the last time I checked.
This is where the line is drawn; you simply don't know the licence details before buying. As far as you know, as a consumer, you're buying a boxed game which you expect to own, to do whatever you want with it. Sell it, play it, sit on it, burn it with gasoline. Can you even return the game if you don't accept the licence?
Michael put it with little subtlety, but he's right. You buy something and you have absolutely zero control on how it works, when it works and for how long. Hence, you don't really own it. This is fine if you're buying the game online via Steam, where the licence should be agreed on before the purchase. Not for a boxed game.
I think that's the only real issue here.
The problem's not that people are pirating the game -It's a problem, don't misunderstand, but the issue of legitimate purchasers being locked out of the game because they chose to circumvent the game's CD requirements.
IMHO, it's perfectly alright to bypass such protection on a legally purchased copy of the game. For instance, I downloaded such a hack to circumvent the protection on Civ III for the PC, which required that a CD be inserted to play, and which I had purchased at Best Buy. BTW, the hack works great!
And Valve has a right to 'lock out' customers stealing the game, but they enter a grey area of legality when they lock out legitimate purchasers who simply want to avoid the annoying CD checks on their legal copy of the game.
I think this is going to be a growing problem as game programmers get wise to the hacks and cracks that are put online almost simultaneously with the game releases. The ideal solution would be one in which the purchaser controls where and how they use the product for which they've paid money, while preventing unauthorized users from doing the same. Valve seems to have nailed a lot of actual piracy with the method they've chosen to use, but they've also impacted some legitimate users as well.
Interestingly enough, gamers on the Mac (Yes, there are a few!) don't have as many problems with this kinda protection since they can have store and mount CD images directly off their hard drive. When I play Civ on the Mac, I simply have to click the CD image of the game, mount it as a disk image, and bang!, the game thinks I've inserted the CD. Too bad PC users don't also have this option. It's also too bad that more games are not released for the Mac. The G5's ready, but the gaming company's still don't see it as a viable game platform. 8(
That's the stupidest thing I've read on /. in a long time;...
/. a lot. I've seen a LOT stupider things written on /. Damn, that one wasn't even in the Top 10. :-)
Then you don't read
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You can't just dictate whatever terms you want to people. They'd like ot pretend you have a contract with them. No, sorry, it's not. A contract requires an exchange of things (goods, money, whatever) and requires both parties to agree and sign. Saying "You agree by opening the box" isn't valid. Also contracts must be open to negoation. If you are leasing an apartment and disagree with a clause in the lease, you can strike it out, inital the change, and send it back to the management company. They are not required to accept these changes, but they have to negotiate it.
EULAs try and do many things that are just unenforaceble. Basically they want the best of both worlds. They want it to be a physical good when it suits them, but a licensed product when it suits them. Doesn't work that way. When you sell a product on the shelf, with no contract signing, you are selling a good. Things like the doctrine of first sale apply, even if you write an EULA that says they don't.
This is different from something like an MMORPG. Here there are two parts: the good and the service. The game they sell you is a good, and you are welcome to keep it, even if you never use it online. Their servers, however, are a service, you pay for the right to use them. Being a service, they can put restrictions on that without a contract, since if you don't like it, you are free not to use the service.
Think if the logic Valve applied here was applied to a physical good, like a dishwasher. You go and pay for it up front, no contract, and take it home. Then, one day, it stops working so you call for warentee service. They say "Oh no, it's not broken, we just deactivated it. See you violated your license for using it, so we are turning it off. You'll need to go buy another one if you want to use it."
That's how stupid this shit with the software is. It's not a service, it's a good. You are purchasing it with the expecation that oyu are able to use it as such. You can use it in any way you like, reverse engineer it, resell it, whatever. All you can't do is make a copy of it, or a derivitive work. Those are copyright infringement.
Either way, I hope it blows up in their face. I can gaurentee I will not be buying a copy as a result. I'll stay with the Unreal Engine series, as Epic aren't assholes about things like this. Likewise, I'm recommending to all my friends that they do not purchase it.
Should such a time come when Valve wises up and gets rid of this retarded protection, I'll reconsider, but at this point, there's no way they are getting my money.
Valve is a for-profit business selling a piece of closed-source software Valve isn't selling any software, they're selling the license. If Valve goes away, or the Steam servers die, or they decide to drop support for HL2 in a few years what then? I can still play my legally purchased copy of Quake and even Half-Life, but I know 10 years from now I most likely won't be able to go back and replay HL2. Michael's comment was perfectly valid. When you buy HL2 you're not purchasing anything tangible. Frankly I'm shocked at how many geeks I know who are OK with the fact that their $60 game will expire at some point in the future.
I can't seem to figure out who Valve is actually banning? If somebody has a pirated version of the game, then they don't even have a Steam account to ban in the first place, because the cracked version bypasses Steam!
Are they only banning people who actually paid for the game and used a no-cd crack? That's just retarded; It stops the legitimate users but does nothing about the pirates.
People are discovering that when you buy any product that is subject to "activation", you haven't really bought anything.
Not true, not true!
If you buy the Half Life 2 Collector's Edition, you get a shirt!
Actually, PC people do have this option using software such as Alcohol or Daemon Tools (which is free for private use). This is why the newer CD checks refuse to allow you to run if you have these programs installed. In fact, I've heard of cases where the game refuses to run if you have Nero, a very popular CD/DVD burning package and rumors of games which won't work if you have a burner attached. If the Mac ever takes off, you can kiss your disc images goodbye or find a www.MacGameCopyWorld.com.
Here's where you're wrong:
If you violate the terms and conditions, the company can suspend or revoke your license to play the game.
This should actually say:
If * the company says that * you violated the terms and conditions, the company can suspend or revoke your license to play the game.
Whether or not you violated the terms and conditions is not at all relevant.
I saw the other reply getting modded into the dirt, and decided to reply here :-)
Up in Canada, the product is QuickTax (same company). I was trying to print out some tax returns for a exparte court visit (exparte meaning does not require proper service). So I find out late Friday afternoon that it's going to be a Monday morning epsisode in court, and I require tax returns. I have all my tax returns on cd, not printed, because, hey, I own the software.
I got 1999 printed, but not 2000, 2001 or 2002. Why? Because I had installed the software on an older, now dead and gone machine, previously when I did the original fucking returns. So their 'activation' detected that it was a new machine and prevented me from installing and printing out my returns. I attempted to call their amazing technical support, but because it was out of tax season, it was 9-5 Monday to Friday, or in my time zone, 10-6. So basically, they expect someone to make personal calls from work.
I ended up calling Revenue Canada and having someone pick up summary returns while I delayed in court. Thank you Intuit, for worrying that I might be trying to redo a 3 year old tax return. If you are going to disable shit, allow people to at least PRINT OUT WHAT THEY ALREADY HAVE and kill the ability to make a new return, or something more useful than that. And it would be nice if you would reply to emails too.
I use XP, simply because it came with my laptop. I do not use Office XP or later, or other software that requires *activation* unless I can now absolutely avoid it. After all, how are you supposed to ensure the company you are buying from will remain in business in case you need to reinstall. And for all you linux zealots that are going to attack me on the using Windows statement - piss off. I develop software for the predominant platform so I can feed my kids.
Story contents aside, why wouldn't michael just post that IN THE FORUM? I think the objection here essentially lies in his ego being so large to think that his opinion is so important that it needs to be in the article text as opposed to posting a comment like us underlings get to do. Forget about Half-Life, forget about steam - the editors are abusing their privilages by posting their personal comments where they don't belong.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
I won't even looked at HL2 because of this. I read their "policy" on that forum and it basically sounds like if you screw up, they cancel your account for a year or five. Why anyone would put up with that I don't know, paying 50$ for a game that, if their servers crash, or someone bought copied and returned to the store, or they make a mistake AT ALL, cancels your ability to play it sounds like idiocy to me. It seems like it should be a pleasant diversion not some fscked up nightmare of registration servers and copied CD keys. Maybe I don't understand the new math, but aren't we customers? Why would anyone put up with this crap?
andy
True, but that's what hardcopies are for.
True, but that is not an excuse. If you use a program, say Quickbooks, to manage your company's financial data, and then you want to get into your data, and you own a legitimately purchased copy of the software bought and paid for with your own money, you'd better damn well have access to your data whenever you damn well please, irrespective of the software company's wish for you to buy the $200 upgrade every other year.
I did not buy the "license" to use this software until the software developer arbitrarily decides my time is up. I bought the fucking software. I should be able to use it however I want, for as long as I want, on any and however many computers of mine that will run it.
I'm so sick of software makers restricting my freedom to use software the way I want to use it when I've paid for it. Same goes for DVDs. I'm SO SICK of sitting there waiting for the FBI, Interpol, Mossad, Secret Service, MI-6 and the Office of Navel Lint warnings that I've read time and time again. I want to skip them, dammit. Don't tell me what actions are and are not "permitted" by the disc. It's my fucking disc!
Back to decaf for me ..
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
"And yes, the box DOES state that you have to have a working account on their Steam network."
This is a lie. It says you have to have an Internet connection.
Holy Crap, do you work for valve or something? You seem to have been completely duped into accepting this notion of buying a license. Suckers like you are going to ruin it for everyone. If consumers accept this, we're going to see more and more software subject to cancellation on the whim of corporations. Perhaps more likely, when companies fold or even just get bought, we may be stuck with useless software. For me that is unacceptable, and where games are concerned it will push many people toward consoles where activation isn't an issue.
More importantly, why aren't more people telling this company to fuck off? When TurboTax tried the activation bullshit, there was a huge public outcry, people applied for refunds in droves (and got them in states where the laws allow them), and rushed to H&R Block's TaxCut. TurboTax got the message big time and took out a full page ad in the NY Times and other major newspapers apologizing for the incident and as a result TurboTax for this year has no activation required.
Of course, I can answer my own question: because there are other ways to do your taxes, but Half-Life 2 is shiny and game addicts need their fix. If you hate a company's product, you shouldn't support them. People need to be stronger and stop buying movies and DVDs and software that impose restrictions. Only then will the companies wake up.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Actually, most states have that law. Most people do not realize it. The laws are also "dummy" laws - which means they cannot be waived no matter what sign is posted, or document you sign. Stores just try and "freighten" you by acting like the store knows best. In all reality - just grow a back-bone, know your rights, and stand up for yourself....within minutes the manager will refund you fully.
Another great thing to do is - buy with your credit card - you get plenty of protection. My mom's fiancee bought a laptop through Dell - didn't use it - but was able to return it two months later for a full refund due to his AMEX card...
Just a side note, I live in PA -A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
The trouble with product activation is that it's implemented in such a painless and convenient way (in the majority of cases, where it works properly) that people fail to see this process for what it actually is: repeatedly asking permission from the manufacturer to use the product you purchased, after you purchased it. It seems the process is too automatic, too obscure not only for Joe User, but surprisingly, technically literate Slashdot readers who you'd normally expect to understand abstract threats to their freedom.
Perhaps if people had to actually speak to the company and say the words, "could you please activate my software?" and say it a few more times for other software packages, and a few more times after reinstallation, it might hit home. Perhaps if they had to wait on hold for thirty minutes, desperately seeking permission to use the software they purchased, it might sink in. Perhaps if, in a fit of nostalgia they decide to reinstall an old game only to be dismayed they can't play it because the activation system no longer works and no patch is available, they will get the message.
Indeed, whenever I've had to phone Microsoft to activate Windows XP, or Intuit/Reckon to activate Quicken, it's not the annoyance of being put through a five minute exchange of serial codes that sticks in my mind, but the more profound emotion of resentment of being put in that situation in the first place. I resent having to obediently request permission to use something I'd spent hundreds of dollars on. I resent having to repeatedly ask permission during the life of the product, according to criteria set by the company. I resent not knowing if I'll still be able to use the software a few years down the track. I resent that many of my friends, who paid nothing for their pirated/cracked copies, don't have to suffer the same indignities or worry about such things.
The most important issue about activation is not whether it's convenient or inconvient, but the way it fundamentally changes the relationship between the customer and a company selling proprietary software. For the life of the product, the customer is now dependent on the company to repeatedly affirm the most basic right of any software user. Not to peak at the software's source code or modify it, but simply to run the program they purchased legitimately.
I live in Minnesota, and you actually can return opened software here, but you must trade it in for a new copy of the same product; no cash refunds.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
A friend of mine came up with the idea that the set of laws should be restricted, by forcing them to fit inside a book of fixed length (say 200 pages of 12pt text). That way, when a new law gets brought in, they have to get rid of an old one (or make an old one simpler), and everyone gets a better chance of understanding the law.
I reckon that's not a bad idea.
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Did you even try and look for these answers? I had exactly the same ones and found them out VERY QUICKLY:
"If I download the game and my hard drive crashes, can I reinstall it via Steam to a different hard drive?"
Yes: I want to move my Steam installation to a different disk or computer, how can I do this?
"Can I install it to more than one computer if I only play one at a time (ie my desktop machine and my laptop)?"
Yes: Can I use my Steam account on other computers?
"Does it cost anything to have a Steam account other than the initial cost of the game?"
No: " Is Steam really free?
At least try and find these things before bitching the information is not available... that took me longer to cut and past the hrefs than it did to find those answers....
All you had to do was go to Support and type your question. I've had no problem with downloading all the Steam content onto my computer, then copying it over to my brothers (he only has dial up)... and that was it. He now has and is playing HL2, and when he is done with it, I just fire up Steam and away I go... it's already there for me to play. Excellent stuff!