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Darwinia To Be Distributed via Steam
Nuskrad writes "Independent developers Introversion Software, creators of cult hacking sim Uplink have announced a deal with Valve that will see their highly acclaimed title, Darwinia distributed on the Steam platform from December 15th. It is hoped that the deal will help boost sales of Darwinia, and the profile of Introversion Software, which has been struggling against the 'big boys' of the industry."
There's a native Linux version of Darwinia, availiable directly from Introversion. The Steam deal only covers online distribution of the Windows version of Darwinia, IV are still handling retail boxes of Windows and Linux versions, and the Mac version is availiable from Ambrosia software. Here, have a demo
I'm quite certain his problem is that he was trying to run the same physical copy of HL2 under a different Steam account. That would get him blocked.
The account and the physical copy attached to the account go hand in hand.
No Comment.
Just a few.
Yeah, I bought it... nice idea. It was a great game while it lasted... but there lies the probelm. It's WAY to short. Maybe 10 hours of gameplay. The mod scene is non-existant, there are maybe a dozen incomplete mods. When it first came out it was riddled with bugs. I especially like the one where if you leave a certain amount of bugs alive on one level, (even though it tells you you're done) and then get to the last level, the game will crash without showing the end scene. Apparently you can't load mods until you've finished the game... It also won't let you reset the level to try again..... There was no fix, just play the entire game again, and make sure you don't trigger the bug this time.
I think THAT'S why no one is buying the game.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I bought Darwinia as a download.....I *WOULD NOT* have bought it if it had been a distibuted via Steam. Before I play Half Life 2 I end up disconnecting from the internet to play the game (which takes ages to boot up on my PC anyway) to stop it doing what it does. On the plus side Introversion may get more people buying the game (and kudos to them for writing something great and different), but the gaming community it seems only put up with Steam because Half-Life 2 was such a great game, but for an unknown indie game there's gonna have to be some *great* word of mouth stuff going on.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
The whole idea with Steam, and online distribution in general, is to put control back in the hands of developers, and take it away from distributors. Why should Best Buy or WalMart get to decide what games we can buy?
Cut out the middleman, and let the market choose.
Game Company Database
I have no problems running both HL2 and CS:S on multiple computers on my local network using the same steam login. In fact, I've never heard of anyone having a problem with this. Everyone complains about all these problems with Steam when in fact they dont even exist. Oh well, at least people find those ignorant posts "interesting".
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When worse comes to worse you can always play HL2 on multiple computers in "offline mode":
http://support.steampowered.com/cgi-bin/steampowe
I've been using steam for 3 years or so, and yes, it did suck back in the day. It's working fine now so everyone can stop that annoying, ignorant whining.
I hate steam as well, but your information is highly misleading.
There is no such thing as cd keys being bound to machine, they are bound to a specific account. So all your son would need to do to play the game on his computer would be to install steam and log in under your account information.
This means that you can log onto a friends computer, public computer and play steam from your account there no problem.(in fact over here at uni i have a few accounts so i log in under my friends comps so we can play online together)
The catch is only one account may be played at one time, if you are logged on your computer and your son logs on his computer you will get logged out. None of this banning bullshit your talking about. The banning was valve leaked a cdkey and around 30 000 people used this one key, if your key is already in use they will tell you it is in use, not ban you.
Steam is definetely not my preffered method of distribution (ut2k4 would be) but its far better then you portray it to be.
Actually, it isn't.
Actually, you're wrong.
Actually, you're even stating you don't know what you're talking about, sheesh!
No Comment.
With Steam the games you can access are limited to your account. Did you buy Darwina and you want to show it off to your friend? Just goto his house, fire up Steam and login with your account. You can download the game and play.
Yes there has been the rare occasion where Steam's login server has gone down and you can't play the games, but the times that has happened can be counted on 1 hand, and I personally never tried playing on one of those days. And for the record I preloaded Half-Life 2 through Steam, and purchased it through Steam. The day it came out I unlocked the game and played.
You should try Steam before you badmouth it. Since you own Half-Life 1, just download the Steam client and input your CD key. You'll be able to download HL to any computer you access. You'll also get access to Counter Strike 1.6, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift. Learn what your complaing about before you start complaining. The only real issue I have with Steam is that you can't transfer access to games to different accounts. This prevents you selling your old copy of the game, but then again I still have every game I ever purchased...
Darwinia will STILL HAVE A STEAM-LESS VERSION. If you'd read the site you'd know that.
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For some reason you have a score of zero and I missed your prior replies in the tree view. Now that I have read them, it appears possible. However, the guy assuming I wanted to play two copies of the same game and the same time remains wrong. Is it true that the requirement for doing this is to keep the machine "offline" during the game session?
I guess the key question is: what is Valve's understanding of an account. If the intent is one account per player, I don't see it as given that the current offline playability will remain as it is. My goal in life is not to deprive developers of income: far from it, I make my living off software and am sensitive to the needs for fair compensation.
On the other hand, I could easily see the method you propose (one account per everybody you trust enough) being highly *unfair* to Valve. In that scenario, I could set up an account and buy one of everything. As long as people with my account don't go online at the same time, they can all play single player? If anything, that seems to be going too far in the other direction.
My personal feelings are that if my son wants to play a game I purchase at a different time than I am using it; that is fair use of a purchased CD/DVD game. If my son wants to play at the same time (say, as we do in multiplayer Dungeon Siege), then we each needs a copy. Again, I don't have a problem with this, although I preferred the old Blizzard "spawned copy" model which allowed a LAN game with a single disk. I have purchased multiple copies of quite a few games for this exact purpose.
Now taking this to the realm of steam: I have no problem with allowing family members access to different games at the same time, or the same game at different times. This does nothing more than replicate what I would do with disks anyway. On the other hand, it sounds like it would be possible to sequentially download the account's "library" of games and everyone could play offline mode all of those games. That's pushing it if I simply kept it to my immediate family, but what exactly is keeping people from doing this for an entire dorm floor?
It would seem that such an excessive abuse would be easy to detect on Valve's side. What do the terms of use say about such a situation? If such an abuse were to happen multiple times, would that affect Valve's allowance of the offline mode?
As much as I hate shuffling disks in and out of the drives, it seems to me they are a very acceptable method of regulating use. Of course, this all is supposing that neither disks nor Steam has been cracked, and we all know that both have been. Which brings me to Stardock: they seem to sell a decent number of download units without involving DRM at all. Sometimes I wonder if all this complexity does any good.
Sig under construction since 1998.
The catch is that to play on an account you need full access to it, including the ability to change e-mail and password or have the account disabled or VAC banned (for cheating). It only takes one person to screw it up, which even you must admit is a brilliant way of sensibly limiting access (and avoiding the situation you describr) without bothering anybody. This also extends to offline mode, not least because you can't simply transfer an offline installation to another computer. The offline details would be invalidated.
I don't know what would happen in cases of abuse because I've never seen anyone talking about it happening. You technically aren't allowed to have more than copy running at a time (and technically must never give out your account details as you've stated) but Valve turn a blind eye to this unless there is definite fraud going on, for both practical and moral reasons. If the worse did happen, you'd probably be able to get Support to give your account back with sufficient proof of your innocence.
I can guarantee you that if Stardock were selling anything like Counter-Strike online with no DRM, they'd be out of buisiness like a shot. ;-) They only survive because of their smaller and more mature userbase.
Hope it all makes a bit more sense now. Steam might be DRM, but it's DRM used as a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
That's your choice, and you are welcome to continue to live in the 1990's for as long as you can. However given that every argueement other than the "Valve can take their ball and go home" one has been shot down, the only real reason you could have is that you just don't want to buy games online.
Meh. "Valve can take their ball and go home" hasn't been shot down; it's been (and is being) practiced by lots of folks. The "average" gamer will take the spoonful they're handed; people drove Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and N-Sync to the top of the charts because that's what they were forcefed. Good sheeple :)
I have plenty of reason not to choose Steam for my games. Don't want their stuff snooping around on my system. Don't want their permission to play a game I've paid for.
It ain't "1990's." It's called "consumer choice." No subscriber-model apps for me, thanks. I like to own what I buy.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just upped and turned everyone off? The next day they'd be buried under class action suits and the week later they'd have turned the servers back on and potentially permentantly unlocked the software.
Heh! Wrong. First, their license agreement protects them from harm anyway -- they really can just shut you (and anyone else they want) off for any reason they choose. Read it again until you understand this. Second, you don't get buried under class action suits -- the whole point of a class action is to take a mountain of lawsuits (you do get buried under those) and combine the complainants into one big action. Third, such action would take years to resolve, not a week. They ain't gonna unlock all the software permanently because a lawsuit gets filed if they actually do shut things down overnight.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just fell off the surface of the Earth? The next day people would have posted the work arounds to setting up your clients to work permentantly without the servers.
...and they'd be criminally liable for violation of the DMCA. Sigh. Oh, and those workarounds already exist today anyway.
And you know what, neither of those things are ever going to happen. So worrying about them is about as productive as wondering what will become of the world when Bill Gates wakes up and realizes that the true path to happiness and heaven is in humility and a life of public service.
*chortle* Okay, that was funny. Still, they very well could happen. Companies are motivated by profit. The moment Steam becomes unprofitable and its products stop being profitable, they will vanish in lieu of something that is profitable. Corporate America's history is liberally peppered with instances of the consumer getting fucked when a company decided it wasn't profitable to keep a product alive anymore.
Welcome to 2005. Orwell was wrong.
Nah, he was just a few years off. Looks like we know which side you'll be on when the day finally comes, though...
Read my stuff.