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."

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:Insert steam hate

[Gideon Fubar]

This is a real problem, though it should be noted that this doesn't happen after a game is signed to play offline.

also, the early implementations of the platform were quite buggy, in both client and network services. Most of these issues are sorted, but not all of them.

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

[bigstrat2003]

Except I'm not talking about the Orange Box here. The Orange Box is a great value (unless you only want one of the games), but that's not Portal. Portal's pricing has nothing to do with the pricing of the Orange Box, they're separate prices to be considered separately.

Re:Insert steam hate

[Elyscape]

Actually, you can use SteamWorks without using Steam. Or at least, that's what the SteamWorks website [steamgames.com] seems to say:

Whether you're publishing your games on Steam or not, Steamworks lets you take advantage of Steam features in retail products.

Obviously, using SteamWorks would make things more easily added to Steam and allow for better integration, but it doesn't seem that you need to use Steam to get its benefits. You might not be able to reap all the rewards without it, but at least some of them are independent.

Re:Valve and piracy

[croddy]

I found $20 to be quite reasonable for Portal.

Re:Valve and piracy

[badboy_tw2002]

Ah, but you have two types of transfers - a "transfer ownership" and a "loan". The ownership gives them the rights for good: they can transfer it to someone else or keep it forever. The loan means you can take it back whenever you want - the other guy is just borrowing it (but even better giving them than the disc or powertools- you can actually get this one back! :)

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

[Pyrion]

I guess you've never heard of Stardock?

Unlike Steam, I can have SDC running on multiple computers downloading games and updates to games without any of this "you can only log in on one machine" bullshit.

Re:Warning:

[DingerX]

They're giving away the tools for DRM, automatic updates, encrypted delivery (unlock at release date), voice comms, community access and server browsing. They are not giving away access to their network.

So, they're giving away the parts of their toolkit that would make all those 3d-party games not suck with Steam.

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

[gfxguy]

The most important thing, in that respect, is that you are free to copy your stuff anywhere you want - work, other computers at home, friends computers, wherever; like the old philosophy "it's like a book, you can share it, but only one person can read it at a time," your account can only be logged in from any one location.

So you can make backups, you can transfer to as many computers as you want (I have it on my laptop and several desktops at home) - they still have their rights, and you still have yours.

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

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.