Originally
posted by
KaiN:
I don't see what the big deal is with this DRM stuff on PC you can'y lend games to your friends if you have used the CD key or whatever and its the same with Steam
It's totally different with PC gaming though. You can't really rent PC games either, there's no market for it and hasn't been. There has been for the consoles. There's also no real offline multiplayer for PC games; where as games like Halo are huge for that. In the past you could take your game to your friends house for a game night without having to lug your entire console over. In addition to that PC games are still more accessible than the console ones will be. It's not true that you can't lend or sell your games, you can. The key restricts multiple people from playing under the same key at the same time and it does that through the internet. Multiple people could play it offline. Part of the reason for that is so that you can play your game when you buy a new computer. Steam has a similar setup where you can play offline on multiple computers at once, and you can lend a friend your account if you wanted to so they could play online while you're not. The X-Box model doesn't even allow those. The games are tied to your gamer account. That's similar to Steam, but I can back up my steam games (and have) on an external hard-drive so if something happens to my account I still have access to my games and proof that I bought them. If your X-Box account gets hacked and banned though, then you're screwed. The always online DRM means even if they exist on your console, if you can't get on your account back in 24 hours with everything still there; then your stuff is blocked and you can't play it.
Plus steam mitigates it by giving you the workshop to help build a massive modding community, so you get way more than you paid for, and by constantly giving you steam sales so instead of paying $60 for a game that you have to be online everyday to play; you instead pay $15 for a game you can play offline at anytime and that has massive amounts of community involved modding supported by steam. It's leagues different.