Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohwaitnvm | Hacker News Reader

At work, a typical response I've received upon mentioning that I get most of my games through Steam is "Oh. Isn't that the one with DRM?"

At first, this threw me; I wasn't even aware that there was DRM on Steam. Well, of course I intuitively knew it, but I never associated it with the issues that people usually complain about regarding DRM.

I've never had the DRM get in my way... My experience with iTunes has been that when a bad bump on an airplane toasted my external hard drive and lost me every piece of legitimately paid for music and every legally purchased TV episode on it, I would never be able to download those purchases again. Steam, on the other hand, has let me download the same game as many times as I've found necessary, external to external, computer to computer.

View on HN

Apple doesn't advertise the fact that they do keep a list of your purchases. If you call them you should be able to get them to let you re-download all the content you have bought through ITMS.

IMHO, Apple should be putting a feature like this front and center, but my guess is that the labels are against it. Who else wants you to buy the same song first on vinyl, then tape, then CD, then digital, then...

> Apple doesn't advertise the fact that they do keep a list of your purchases. If you call them you should be able to get them to let you re-download all the content you have bought through ITMS.

yeah but sadly:

1. the list of stuff bought is pretty well hidden, and it's a pain to get back to the media from there. Steam gives you your library front and center, and from there it's a right and a left click to reinstall

2. for everything other than apps, you can't just re-download the stuff you lost. You have to re-buy it. That sucks. A lot. Here's hoping that improves with a hypothetical iTunes 10 / iTunes Cloud.

You can re-download stuff other than apps, but you have to contact apple. It's an open secret that they'll modify your account to let you re-download.

Ah yeah, forgot to point that out, but in any case it's a pretty sucky experience. There isn't a big button saying "re-download EVERYTHING" and boom everything you ever bought on iTunes gets requeued.

Yeah, it's true, it is a really crap user experience. Considering the miniscule cost of downloading a song, it really ought to be free to re-download.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com