Comment by Vexs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vexs | Hacker News Reader

Of all the DRMS out there, steam has done the best job at preventing piracy. Why? Not because it's secure, steam drm is pretty easy to get around. But because it's just so gosh darned convenient to use, and has so many extra features. Steam controller, steam community, steam workshop, and steam itself is a very good library organizer.

The best way to combat piracy is to offer a better service, which I have yet to see. It's always a tremendous pain in the ass, and gives subpar results compared to piracy. Take, for instance, rick and morty. To watch it, I have to sign into an account, link that account to my ISP/provider, and then I get to watch my videos online. Except it barely works. It took forever to get my ISP to authorize it, and the first time they messed it up. After that, online had subpar quality, and would for whatever reason, cut out randomly/not let me login. Compare this to a pirate site/torrent, where it's just one-click, watch in full resolution.

Also, Steam has its sales, which have done a huge amount to raise goodwill and provide price-sensitive customers with the choice of waiting in the belief that games will eventually be discounted to trivial prices.

I thought that Rick and Morty was free on Adult Swim's website? That's where I ended up watching at least the first season (that might have changed).

However, from the same creator, there was Dan Harmon's Community. Season 6 was funded by Yahoo, and they put it up on Yahoo Screen. For free! Great! Except they had big issues with buffering, and region locked the show to America. In the end that whole operation was shut down.

Some Rick and Morty episodes are available for free, but not all. I think they shuffle them around so if you have patience you can eventually watch them all that way.

Very good library organizer? Are we using the same Steam? Ok, you can add categories, but you have to do it manually. You can't even see genre tags or anything about the game unless you open the Store Page. Which for some games (when it's ultimate edition or whatever) doesn't even work.

That's not too mention that something like twice per week (again today) there is an update which blocks opening the damn steam client. Why can't they update it in the background?

Agreed, but I've gotten so many games through humble bundles and steam sales that I've had to find an alternative to browse my library.

http://www.lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/

https://github.com/rallion/depressurizer

Also, Steam was one of the first solutions to properly take care about the chore of updating your game, like modern package managers / app stores do.

Before that (and because most games shipped / still ship without an auto-updater, for good reason), you had to do it yourself by checking for each game's website (or specialized websites offering some centralization), download and launch a patch executable.

And before fast internet access allowed convenient download of those multi-MB patches (looong on 56k), gaming paper magazines distributed them on CDs (then DVDs) :) . Not so good old times, frankly.

Gabe Newell (director of Valve, Steam) on piracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLC_zZ5fqFk

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