actions to fight steam...

**Praetor Rick** · 10-21-2009, 20:52

There are lots of common sense answers to how CA, SEGA, or Steam might respond if one or two of the three went down/out of business. The problem is, they're not necessarily legal, which means they would likely not happen.

It's pretty common that when a publisher goes out of business, the developer still doesn't have the rights to sell the IP to somebody else. Those rights still belong to the now-defunct publisher, and will be sold as part of its assets to pay off the debts that put it out of business. The buyer almost certainly got them in a package, and will likely have no clear idea how much (or little) they may be worth, and will usually be somewhat obstinate about selling them back to the developer. Red tape ensues. This isn't hypothetical, look at other games whose publisher goes belly-up. Fairly routinely, they end up in abandonware limbo, with nobody who is interested in continuing development or even republishing them legally allowed to do so, and nobody legally allowed to continue development or republish interested in doing so.

Short story: if Steam goes to the bucket, CA and SEGA don't magically get rights to ETW back, unless their contract with Steam specifies that they do. And unless Steam goes under next week, it will probably be more work for CA and SEGA to get those rights back, in terms of legal fees researching who owns what and how much the IP is worth, than those rights are actually worth.

Sad to say, if Steam goes out of business, anything Steam had is probably gone for the foreseeable future, until its value has depreciated so much that somebody like GOG.com can buy 'em dirt cheap and sell them for $5 each and still make good money.

All IMHO, based on what has happened in the past when publishers suffer sudden existence failure.

**nameless** · 10-21-2009, 22:43

I can understand the argument, but the problem with that is that STEAM itself is simply just a digital distribution and rights management system. It's not a publisher.

STEAM has no involvement in creating ETW, it's just the middle man.

**pevergreen** · 10-22-2009, 02:26

Developer: CA
Funding and marketing, publisher: SEGA
Distributor: Steam

Steam has no hold over anything to do with E:TW. It hosts servers for people to download off and play on.

It is like saying Microsoft own everything on windows because thats how you use the programs.

**Nebuchadnezzar** · 10-22-2009, 05:05

So when you take away a persons "Title of ownership" as well as their consumer rights and replace it with a no return, no guarantee subscription service then this is not to say they have no hold over anything. They have hold over EVERYTHING.

As a consumer you are entitled to certain rights such as quiet possesion (steam says when and if you can play), clear title ie goods belong to you whether that is a licence or whatever at least to the extent any EULA allows. You own them outright to do as you please such as resell etc. but steam hijacks your ownership in lieu of subscription service.

Steam is oppressive and dictatorial that eats at the fundamental fabric of consumer rights.

**pevergreen** · 10-22-2009, 05:17

Its not secuROM.

**caravel** · 10-22-2009, 08:46

Originally Posted by pevergreen

Its not secuROM.

Steam is actually worse than Securom. Yes Securom installs crapware without the users permission, but Steam is "phone home" software that reports usage statistics back to it's servers, consumes resources and is much more intrusive. It's more of a parasite than Securom is.

Securom is local and is designed to verify that the CD/DVD in the drive is the genuine CD/DVD. It does not have the same intrusiveness and privacy concerns as Steam.

Also if Steam's servers fail for a time, or even permanently (i.e. they decide to go out of business or discontinue the service) paying customers are left with games that they can no longer activate or play. There's also the point that Steam is useless for people that don't have an internet connection. Then there is the issue of regional restrictions.

In essence though Steam means putting all games distribution under the control of one entity. If it continues to gain ground it will also gain a stranglehold over the market. Freedom of choice is a good thing, being forced to install this "platform" is not a good thing. It should not be a requirement but a choice. The situation is bad enough as it is, with 99% of PC games being developed for MS Windows platform - it does not need to get any worse.

Steam is simply not needed yet Valve and other developers that have jumped on the bandwagon seem to have convinced many gamers that it is. Steam is more of a market research/data mining tool combined with the ever present DRM than something that benefits the end user.

**pevergreen** · 10-22-2009, 08:57

Steam has a direct competitor in Impulse.

Steam still gives you the full program to play the game, if steam collapsed, the games are still there, they could be hacked. There is no question there.

I did an indepth investigation of secuROM last year.

Problems with secuROM that are recognised:

Under Windows Vista, SecuROM will prevent the game from running if explicit congestion notification is enabled in Vista's networking configuration.

Disk drive emulators and some debugging software will also cause the launch of the game to fail and a security module error to be generated. In fact a reboot of the entire system was required if Process Explorer prior to version 11 was used before an attempt to run the protected software. That problem was caused by a driver that was kept in memory after Process Explorer was closed.

BioShock

The game required consumers to activate the game online and originally set a maximum of two activations before they would have to call to get more activations. This was raised to five activations because an incorrect phone number had been printed on the manual and call centers were only in the United States. Users also found that the game had to be activated for each user on the same machine.

In 2008, 2K Games removed the activation limit, although users are still required to activate it online.

In May 2008 EA announced that Mass Effect for the PC would be using SecuROM 7.x requiring a reactivation of the software every 10 days. Due to complaints, EA removed the 10-day activation while keeping SecuROM tied to the installation. SecuROM's product activation facility was still used to impose a limit of three times that a customer is allowed to activate the copy of Mass Effect they purchased. The game becomes unplayable "as is" after the activations are used up, until EA's customer support is contacted to reset the activation limit, or until activation is bypassed using one of a number of available tools. Unlike BioShock, uninstalling the game does not refund a previously used activation.

And thats just secuROM.

Do you really care if steam tracks that you are online?

Freedom of choice is a good thing. What if I don't want secuROM. I have no choice. I'm not even told its being installed.

Steam is a multiplayer platform as well.

If Games For Windows Live went down.

What happened to the good old days when a CD-Key was all that was needed.

I've never had an issue with the current steam. The old one, I loathed with a passion. (old as in 5+ years ago now)

Steam is the chosen copyright protection. It functions as many other things for the games as well. Break your disc of Med2: total war? What are you going to do now. Ask for another? Like thats going to work.

Either buy another or download illegally. With steam, its yours.

**Freedom Onanist** · 10-22-2009, 09:17

Originally Posted by Asai Nagamasa

Steam is actually worse than Securom. Yes Securom installs crapware without the users permission, but Steam is "phone home" software that reports usage statistics back to it's servers, consumes resources and is much more intrusive. It's more of a parasite than Securom is.

Securom is local and is designed to verify that the CD/DVD in the drive is the genuine CD/DVD. It does not have the same intrusiveness and privacy concerns as Steam.

Also if Steam's servers fail for a time, or even permanently (i.e. they decide to go out of business or discontinue the service) paying customers are left with games that they can no longer activate or play. There's also the point that Steam is useless for people that don't have an internet connection. Then there is the issue of regional restrictions.

In essence though Steam means putting all games distribution under the control of one entity. If it continues to gain ground it will also gain a stranglehold over the market. Freedom of choice is a good thing, being forced to install this "platform" is not a good thing. It should not be a requirement but a choice. The situation is bad enough as it is, with 99% of PC games being developed for MS Windows platform - it does not need to get any worse.

Steam is simply not needed yet Valve and other developers that have jumped on the bandwagon seem to have convinced many gamers that it is. Steam is more of a market research/data mining tool combined with the ever present DRM than something that benefits the end user.

Some good points there, though a bit paranoid Orwellian. But yeah, Steam is not needed. The point about the user friendliness and ease of patching/DLC and whatnot could be done direct with the Publishers. Even if they don't want to get involved in web and net management they could contract that out to a service provider. A bit like the situation with Steam but transparent. This would open up the whole niche Steam occupy. Oh, and without the constant pinging back and forwards with usage data, permissions and "phone home" stuff.

However, some way of purchasing and keeping software up to date via the web is needed. Here in the UK a major internet provider has just decided to make 50mps as standard, and the UK lags behind many other places in this respect. With those kind of online speeds online purchasing is going to grow. On the one hand it is natural for companies to try and control that as much as possible but on the other I think the offerings are oging to get a bit simpler than Steam's offering.