They need to bring back oldschool copy protection

If you want to play a Steam game offline, you have to put it into offline mode while you're online. Case in point, my internet went down for a few hours so I thought I'd play some more HL2... but no.

It's a minor failing, but IMO it's something that should be fixed somehow.

Hmm, when I lose my internet connection, (which happens frequently with my shitty but have no where else to go provider), steam spends a couple long minutes trying to find the connection and then asks me if I would like to start in off line mode. It does take a couple of minutes the first time though.
 
I would just like to point out, for the sake of the slower [H] members, that my tongue was planted firmly in my cheek for the original post
 
Well, once the new internet launches, I think that things will change. The upload/download speeds will be so great, that there may not be a need to install the game on your pc. If that can ever be the case, then I think we may see piracy come to a conplete hault.

Unfortunately with providers like Comcast, that will be decades away.
 
If every game worked through steam and the multiplayer components as well, PC piracy would be down.

I never thought I would say this but, steam ftw.



Yes you can pirate games on steam, but its harder and when you want to play a multiplayer game you want to the Official community not the cracked community (e.g. TF2, COD4, WoW (in most cases) )
 
One of the amazing things Steam might be good for also is rentals. Imagine if you could play a game for $24.95 the first month, then $4.95 each additional, to a max of something like $65 (yes that sucks for gamers, but I would expect a faceless corporation to see dollar signs only at that kind of excess).

You could download and play a game for $25 (even though I'd want to see $19.99) for a month, and if you actually like the thing and keep playing, then you either buy it or rent to own. Piracy is down because the platform is online and locked, and sales are up because people will 'sample' more.

I don't think any company would go for this though because they would see people as getting their games for half off, since there are few games worth playing for more than a month anyway. But overall sales should be up since I expect people would spend more money overall for more games overall.
 
Hmm, when I lose my internet connection, (which happens frequently with my shitty but have no where else to go provider), steam spends a couple long minutes trying to find the connection and then asks me if I would like to start in off line mode. It does take a couple of minutes the first time though.

since when? everytime i launch steam when not connected it just takes an extra minute to load the says staring in offline mode.

I am not doing good... this morning I try starting Steam with my aforementioned scenario, no go, as I said in my post. It would just tell me I was offline, ask if I wanted to start in offline mode, I click yes, wham, Steam closes.

I just tried now... and it worked. :rolleyes: No reboot or anything.

I stand corrected. :)
 
Yea, I mostly play games offline and only connect to the internet to play MP games on my gaming PC so if Steam didn't allow offline play I would never have bought any games from them.
 
Steam does nothing to stop piracy. You can get a torrent of any Valve game in a minute.
 
Every single game ever made has been successfully cracked and is pirate-able... Games that require a username and password on a central server are no exception, you would just play on private servers instead (this includes WoW and other MMO's as well as multiplayer FPS titles).

Short story is there is nothing they can do about it and usually any attempt to thwart piracy only inconveniences their paying customers and does nothing to deter the people that download the game since all that crap is stripped out of the pirated version to begin with.

Oh and FYI steam games are pirated just as easily as anything, and if you ask how I know I lived in a dorm at an IT school for years.
 
The only surefire way to end PC game piracy once & forever is for the developers & publishers to release games the public is eager & willing to purchase.
 
As long as the internet exists as a place where you can freely exchange knowledge and information piracy will be unstoppable...
 
The only surefire way to end PC game piracy once & forever is for the developers & publishers to release games the public is eager & willing to purchase.

As long as there's a price to be paid, there will always be someone who complains about paying it. The only way to stop piracy is to stop making games or release them for free.
 
Do we really need another post for this, the CoD4 one has 7 pages, you got the holier then thou posts about how piracy is wrong (much like this one), You got people offering up half baked and completely ridiculous ideas to fix piracy which have been tried and failed, people suggesting more copy protections when all previous measures have been broken. Then you have a sprinkling of sanity and truth. But in the end the only conclusive thing is that steam is the only one that seems to know what they are doing.

Quake 4 forced you to have an internet connection and it would go online to validate your game before you played, much like someone suggested, that got cracked pretty easily.
 
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