Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common

The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."

Comments

Re:Tell me about it!

[Spad]

Steam isn't a problem, it's when you've got 12 Steam clones from different publishers all of which are required for you to be able to play different parts of your games library.

Re:Steam and Electronic Arts

[PopeRatzo]

What are the changes that Steam will go away anytime soon?

I said the same thing when I bought my 2008 Pontiac Solstice.

I remember some years ago a friend bought a bunch of music from a music service from Microsoft. I've forgotten the name now (or maybe I've blocked it out). The friend told me it was easy to use and they had all sorts of labels and artists. The only catch was that Microsoft had to "refresh" your licenses to keep the music files playing. I remember telling him it didn't seem like a good idea, and he said "what are the chances that Microsoft would go away any time soon?"

Today, he's got an external hard drive full of bits that he can't listen to. I've seen this with my own eyes. When he tries to open them, some dialog box pops up telling him that he has to connect to some Microsoft service to refresh his licenses and then he tries and nothing happens.

Many of the games I bough in 90's are too scratched

That's why we'd like to be able to make copies of our game disks, including the ones for consoles.

Re:Steam and Electronic Arts

[Anonymous Coward]

Gabe did not say that. There is no universal decryption key for the system they use. He said he expects he would make available a method to enable the games if the masters went offline. His wording was careful to avoid a legally binding statement. The reality is that it would not be in his control if they went belly up, as it would be a trustee's call with the creditors as the IP would be under their control. Something short of chapter 11 and it would be factors such as goodwill upon deciding there is no reason to continue the system for a given product. In other words there is no IP left that is profitable and as a gesture of goodwill and if within his control, it would likely happen. End of story.

Re:Steam and Electronic Arts

[david_thornley]

Except that I'm not normally paying for a license to read the copyrighted text. I'm paying for a copy. If I were paying for a license, I would have the right to read the text even if my purchased copy were destroyed, and I don't. Moreover, if I were to find a book that somebody abandoned, I wouldn't have the right to read it, not having acquired a license. In fact, I can own a book, but there are limitations on what I can do with it. There's some limitations on what I can do with a lot of my property, so this is nothing unusual.

Now, some software is sold with a EULA, and the legal system has not completely rejected that idea as it should have, so in many cases when you use software you've agreed that you don't own it, only license it. That does not in general happen with books, which are sold outright, and come with no restrictions other than copyright.