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Is the Half-Life 2 EULA Illegal?
Ant writes "Many people are having problems connecting to the Steam servers to play Half-Life 2, and now the legal agreements that surround a purchase of Half-Life 2 have been examined. The German Consumer Association has found that the packaging on Half-Life 2 is misleading. In a report made following complaints from the public, they said that the mere listing of an internet connection under the 'other' category in system requirements did not accurately describe the true extent of the internet tie-in with the game, and ordered Vivendi to amend the packaging and untie Steam from HL2 or face a hefty fine."
Or is this going a little overboard
The "mere listing" of an internet connection as a requirement IS misleading, and not just for the reasons they mention in the article. I made the mistake of trying this with my aluminum-line, out-in-the-boondocks 26.4k connection. I returned the (opened) software to the store and told them the system requirements were misleading. Internet Connection!=broadband
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
Don't turn this into a "we can finally rip Steam out of HL2" issue. It's completely irrelevant.
Wise men learn more from fools than fools learn from the wise.
I don't own this game so maybe you can help me. Will any internet connection work fine? If I live out in the country and can only connect at 28.8 because of crap lines out here is that enough? That satisfies the "internet connection REQUIRED." thing....but is it enough.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
For years, large corporate game publishers have been setting all the
rules for gamers and game developers alike. Valve software, because
they are privately funded, has a chance to change the way games are
not only distributed, but the amount of control that the corporate
pointy-hairs wield. What do gamers do? They promptly shoot
themselves in the foot by whining about how steam is n't perfect.
And it's not. Steam still has all kinds of things that bug me.
However, Steam is a huge step in what I believe is the right
direction.
Game publishers have been REQUIRING that more and more copy
protections be added to games. These protections often make the game
UNPLAYABLE to PAYING CUSTOMERS. (Note the idiocy of Vivendi in
requiring a CD check for the CD version of HL2.) They go as far as
installing stealth DRIVERS for your hardware to enable these copy
protections.
Steam offers an alternative. True, it requires an internet
connection. (Oh no.) True, it's not perfect. But it's got a MUCH
better future then the alternative.
Not only does Steam offer an alternative way of authentication, it
ALSO offers and alternative method of distribution. The beauty is NOT
that distribution occurs over the internet. The beauty is that
distribution is easily available to small developers.
No need to fight for shelf space at distribution outlets. No need to
coordinate mass-production facilities and release dates.
Vivendi, et al. would like few things better then to see Steam fail.
It would be icing on the cake if gamers themselves stuck a knife in
its back.
On the other hand, I think that requiring an internet connection to use software you bought in the store ought to be fucking illegal, unless the software is internet-centric. HL2 is not; only some of its features are. They are holding your software hostage. You're just leasing it.
Of course, that's not what the law says, so I think this is the wrong way to go about this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its not about an internet connection being required, its about the fact that the box doesn't mention having to install Steam to play it and how "internet connection required" != Steam.
While I agree that online distribution is a potential boon for the independent developer house, it doesn't have to come at the price of "if we go under, you can't play". Having been bitten by *that* shell game already I refuse to buy any software that requires authentication with the mothership if there is a viable alternative available. There is nothing like upgrading your computer to find that your reg key is missing or invalidated by the upgrade... and that the company either doesn't exist or refuses to issue a new key without a browbeating. I have enough to do each day without battling authentication schemes. (And yes, I have a few disks that fail due to DVD incompatability... that's why I keep a CD drive installed.)
Off topic: WTF is up with the manual line breaks?
Sig under construction since 1998.
What it doesn't say is that you will have to sign a second EULA (the Steam one) as well as having an internet connection.
It's simple: by buying HL2, you just haven't bought a game. Not even a user license. What you have paid are "subscription fees". And what you have is just a subscription to some content on an online (?buggy?) service. And don't believe it is a lifetime subscription. Just read the damn SSA, it is definitely not a no-brainer.
And it's getting really fun when you start comparing with the retail HL2 EULA. There are contradicting themselves on such little details like change of terms and billing, termination and transferability. But bad luck, the evil SSA is suposed to superseed the nicer retail EULA.
I know I'm paranoid and that Valve may not do something of terrible taste, like for instance adding recurring charges to Steam in order "to defray" bandwith costs (a bit like they are charging $10 if you want to re-sell the game, to "defray the costs" of this operation). But they claim in the SSA to have that kind of rights. And I find this legal trick with the SSA/EULA to be already of VERY bad taste, especially for a company whose marketing line is to be THE company who really cares about its fan base....
And is there any official clarification on theses issues from Valve? Well, on the Steam forums, apart the "We are tired of these legalese chats" from the mods and the "We are experiencing a troll infestation" by a Valve representative... nothing really meaningfull. (Apart maybe the funny "our $10 re-sell fee is *consistent* with VU after-90-days warranty" which was very rapidly deleted...)
I'm tired of people saying you can't play Steam games offline. You don't need the internet to play Steam games, you just need the internet to authorize the games and unlock them. I unlocked and updated HL2 on a 56k modem. When I am not connected to my ISP through my 56k modem, and I run Steam, it asks me if I want to run Steam in offline mode. When I confirm that I do, it allows me to play all the Steam games offline including the single player Half-Life 2.
Seems like the problem here isn't with Steam the distribution system, but Steam the authentication system.
I have no problem with Valve distributing games via Steam. That's there prerogative. I do have a problem with having to reconnect to steam, unless I want to pull my network cable (offline mode has not worked for me unless I do that), every time I want to play.
As so many people have mentioned, some of us like to come back to games we've played in 5 or 10 years and just give it another go-round. Steam the authentication system has the potential to make that impossible.
But for those with broadband, should we be forced to unplug our network connections before firing up Steam? I don't see why I would essentially have to rewire my PC and re-route all my network cabling to make them easily accessable just to play a game. Although I feel like I'm missing out, I am one person who has already voted with their wallet, and refuses to buy into this whole Valve/Steam thing.
No argument there. However, the alternative is hardly more promising.
I've had numerous CDs fail due to scratches. As more and more copy protections are forced onto CDs, it becomes harder and harder to make a backup copy.
With Steam, I don't have to worry about physical medium at all. I can (and have) installed HL2 on multiple machines with only my username and password. I don't have to worry about transferring a CD back and forth between computers (possibly being lost or scratched in the process).
Currently gamers use 3rd party "no CD cracks" to achieve the same thing. However, as copy protections foisted upon us by corporate "geniuses" become more robust, that option may disappear.
Yes, it would be nice to have some guarantee of a "no steam" patch in the event that the Steam servers disappear, but I'll settle for now without it.
Gee. That's funny. I though that I remembered seeing HL2 boxed sitting in Best Buy, where they do not ask you how much you have read about the game before agreeing to sell you a copy. Come to think of it, I believe that they even let NON-GEEKS and AVERAGE PEOPLE in Best Buy! How could they do that! To think that they sell items to people who might not have read 20 articles on an item before buying it!
I do agree that most people knew about it. But I bet that a fair amount of sales was also to people who just saw a pretty box on the top slot of the bestseller end-cap.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
1. The offline authorization expires, and requires you to re-authorize periodically.
2. If Steam goes down, but your internet connection is still working, you'll lose your offline authorization.
3. Because of #1, if Valve ever goes out of business, takes Steam offline, or disables HL2 on Steam you'll lose the ability to play HL2, even offline, once your authorization expires in a month or two.
#2 is the really nasty one right now-- it's impossible to know if Steam is up without checking (their status page said "steam is online" during the last whole-day outage), and once you check, your old authorization is cleared out while it waits for a new one from the server. Of course, if the server's down, you won't get a new one, leaving you with an unplayable game until they fix their shit.
#3 will be particularly nasty in the future. Although they're nice folks now, if Valve is ever purchased by a nasty company, they could push us all out of the game to encourage "upgrades" to newer games. Or, valve could just die and leave us in the lurch.
Steam offers an alternative. True, it requires an internet connection. (Oh no.) True, it's not perfect. But it's got a MUCH better future then the alternative.
So what happens to our precious Half Life 2 in ten years when Gabe Newell suddenly decides to start flying into space or kayaking instead of making computer games, and disbands Valve? Or when they decide to can Steam for Steam 2? While copy protection blows, Steam doesn't really help the consumer because they are as reliant on the company as they were with copy protection - perhaps even more so. For example, I have long since lost my code wheel to Starflight, now nearly a 20 year old game. For kicks, I tried contacting EA (the publisher) who had no idea what Starflight was. Thankfully, I had already found a crack on the net. The dependence is easily kicked.
But let's say that your dream of complete Steamed anti-piracy comes true. Let's say that with the next expansion pack, the only way you can possibly play it is by verifying with Steam's servers. Then, the next year, Gabe Nevell decides to start flying into space instead of working on games and shuts Valve down. So where's your precious Steam then, when it doesn't even exist and you can't play HL2 for old skool kicks? You have no physical product to even prove that you bought the game. Sure, ok; realistically someone somewhere would come up with a solution, but it would be akin to downloading a crack now. How does that solve anything? What's more is that I can lend Starflight to anyone I want. Can you do that with Steam? Nope. Is that exlusion in the EULA? Nope. Do I have a guarantee that as long as I own Half Life 2 and the PC to play it on, I can play it? Nope. You can only play HL2 on Valve's terms, and on Valve's timetable. How is that helping the consumer?
You talk about Valve software as if they're some kind of perfect Messiah sent to rescue gamers. Well, they can admittedly produce great games (two of them, to be exact). But Steam blew my system a four hour kiss, and then it took 4 more months - four months - until they released a patch that stopped the stuttering and made the game playable. Remember September 30th? They openly lied to you about their release date. They've also screwed the mod community several times over. Sorry bud, but they are as much the "corporate pointy-hairs" as Vivendi.
If there's a limited amount of "power" in this publisher-game studio-consumer relationship, all that's happened with Steam is a transfer of power from publisher to game studio. None of it comes down to the consumer. In fact, it seems to be robbing us of it. I prefer the "system" now in comparison Steam. I'm not an idiot for thinking so either, and if it means helping Vivendi so I have more control over products I rightfully purchased and own, than so be it.