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Valve Will Let Gamers Pick Games To Appear On Steam
Valve has announced a new system called Greenlight, which will allow the gaming community to select which games get chosen for distribution via Steam. Developers will post information about their games — this can be screenshots and videos, or even concepts and potential game mechanics for titles still in development. Once posted, the Steam community will be able to vote on which ones are the best. This will prioritize which games become available on Steam first. Greenlight is Valve's attempt to solve what they call an "intractable problem" — figuring out ahead of time what games players will like. They also hope to facilitate the development of interesting games. "We think it's going to encourage this virtuous development cycle. The problem we had of, how do we encourage somebody when they're not done developing yet? This we think will work. We think a bunch of people will be looking at it going, 'oh my gosh, I want that.'"
Because Steam DRM is "consumer-friendly".
It doesn't encrypt anything except unreleased, pre-loaded content (which is decrypted when the game is actually released). .exe - I copied the DLC files from my Steam install of Oblivion to my retail install of Oblivion with no problems (it was cheaper to buy the "Deluxe" all-DLC-included version on Steam than to buy all the DRM alone).
It allows you to go into offline mode, and to back up your games to DVD.
It doesn't itself restrict anything except the
It includes a notice on any game that includes additional DRM
It doesn't do any spying other than the opt-in Steam Hardware Survey
It tries to be a beneficial service, including chat and modding features
It hosts, for free and without DRM, user-created mods for several games
It supports OS X, and is expected to shortly support Linux
It does not in practice restrict what you can do with your data (the ban on sharing, trading or selling accounts is not strictly enforced)
Valve has pledged to, should they go out of business, release a DRM-remover for any games they legally can. (and Steam is easily broken, if you wish to)
So given a choice between "not getting the game at all", "pirating the game", "buying it on Steam" or "buying it on some far more DRM-encumbered platform", is it really a wonder that people choose "buy on Steam"?
Yes, in theory, everyone should boycott DRM. But this is the Real World, and out here, you have to make compromises. Steam is the best compromise solution - it eliminates or ameliorates the problems with DRM, but still placates the corporations' concerns about digital distribution and "piracy".
My only real complain with steam is that all games are locked to a single account on a single PC (e.g. I can't have two games across one account active on two different systems).
Offline mode. I use it regularly for LAN gaming.
Start Steam on one computer, go into offline mode. Repeat for all (n - 1) remaining computers. Last one can stay in online mode. Start up a local server on any of them, have the rest join. Bam. LAN party on (n) computers with 1 copy of the game.
The only thing offline mode really stops you from doing is updating, chatting or using the server browser (IIRC, you can still directly connect to internet servers). So for single-player games or for LAN, it works perfectly (at least until one of them updates and gets out of synch).