Valve Takes on Piracy With Free, Pre-Packaged Game Publishing Tools

Heartless Gamer writes "Valve is rocking the boat in a big way, especially for PC gaming piracy. They have just announced the release of a complete collection of publisher tools, called Steamworks. They're making it available to developers and publishers completely free. Valve notes that beyond simply making the product available to consumers some of the tools can integrate copy protection, social networking services, or even server browsing features into a developing game."

Comments

Valve and piracy

[Brian Gordon]

They don't really have anything to worry about- their madly popular titles are all multiplayer so piracy is impossible and "cracked" servers are rarely of any quality..

Re:Valve and piracy

[Brian Gordon]

Do you still think Portal's price is unfair when it's part of Orange Box? Counter-Strike: Source and TF2 are both worth a full $50 but they've always retailed at $20 and $30. Episode 2 is worth eh $20. So portal's free per valve's pricing, and TF2 is disounted the entire price of portal for what I would pay for it!

Re:Valve and piracy

[Kreigaffe]

I hope you read this because I'm blowing my chance of modding something, and for once a subject that actually interests me has coincided with mod points..

You are obviously doing something wrong. Steam is open, you disconnect from the internet? Close steam, restart steam, click the "Start in Offline mode" button. OR, simply open the Games menu, go to File, and down to the "Go Offline" option. ... it's really not hard. You can use steam and never ever connect to the internet and still play any of the single-player games with no problems whatsoever.

Re:Valve and piracy

[deadpool42]

Have you actually tried playing anything after doing that? If you want to actually play offline, you need to enable offline mode, run the game you want to play so it updates (even though when I tried it with TF2 it downloaded nothing, but still wouldn't play until you ran it first in online mode), and then it will be available in offline mode.

Regardless of difficulty, it's pretty ridiculous that you have to prepare for an Internet outage.

Re:Valve and piracy

[Sparr0]

I always read replies, so thanks... But perhaps Steam has changed since I gave up on it. When I last used it, if you disconnected from the internet before going into offline mode then you could not play any games (for lack of "Authentication") until you got back online, even SP games.

Re:The particular reason:

[wolrahnaes]

The page you link to appears to say otherwise. The Adobe case listed shows that the EULA doesn't apply until you actually agree to it (presumably by installing it) but the next case after that seems to have the clear result that once you have entered in to the license agreement the publisher can limit your rights as outlined in the license.

Given that Steam (and pretty much every other online digital content store I've ever seen) requires you to agree to the EULA before you can even get an account, you can't claim any of the excuses you could against physical EULAs.

IANAL and such