Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I pick Episode 3.
If they're doing that by helping to promote games people want... what's the problem?
Check out my world simulator thingy.
it continues to amaze me that they become such sheep when Steam is mentioned.
I'm not sure sheep is really the right word here. Fairly certain most, if not everyone, on /. who uses Steam (myself included) are well aware that it is DRM. Hypocrite would seem to be a better word, though even then I would have to disagree. Finding some instances of DRM to be deplorable but other forms to be acceptable does not a hypocrite make.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Except they have the most draconian DRM system ever invented in the history of man: all you purchase is a revocable once-billed subscription to a license of a game. That means you don't have first sale rights or any rights under copyright law. That means you don't even own a license. Valve owns your license, and all you have is an active subscription to the game via Valve. Non-ownership of paid for merchandise is far beyond anything else you listed.
It does not matter what Valve puts on Steam. I will never purchase another game via Steam. I will always purchase the game in such a manner that I have rights and own a copy, then I will add the game to Steam. I do not need a potentially illegal DRM system controlling my access to things I purchase.
Its legality is questionable since all Valve employees and even Steam's own store website use terms such as "buy" and "purchase" and "game" instead of "subscribe" and "Valve owned license," yet in their legal verbage they refer only to subscriptions, never mentioning purchased products. "People who bought game X also bought the following: " -- this is misleading since technically nobody on Steam has ever actually purchased a game through steam.
It would probably have more to do with the legal issues and that a game developer must allow Steam to have digital distribution rights and quite an incredibly powerful license to the software. You see, Valve doesn't sell games on Steam. They sell subscriptions to a license to a game. Valve owns the licenses, you own a very limited subscription to that license, and it affords you no rights under law, and it can be terminated at Valve's discretion for any reason or no reason. To distribute a game under that framework, I presume there's legal footwork to be done, and to do that for EVERY SINGLE GAME ANYONE EVER MADE, EVER would be an intractable problem indeed. If you go into it with a publisher saying "our customers want this game" and they deal with the legal issues up front, customers get games they want and Valve has less legal work to do.
I still say nobody should ever buy a game from Steam again. The reason they can sell games at 80% off is because you never actually own a copy of any game purchased through Steam, so you're literally paying Valve to let you play in their sandbox; at the end of the day, you have to go home, and all the toys stay with Valve. This is the most anti-consumer system I could imagine; complete and total dismissal of all consumer rights.
Steam's subscription model is anti-consumer; that itself is sufficient to warrant dismissal of Steam as a valid outlet for purchasing games, regardless of any DRM they impose, be it permissive or not. You don't have any rights to that content outside of what Valve says you can do with it (sure, you can run it offline and you can make backups to save us money on bandwidth, but nope, you can never resell it, or run it without steam, because you don't own the copy!). Nope. Buy games THEN put them on Steam. Never the other way around.