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Comment by zalzane | Hacker News Reader

Valve often talks about trying to provide a service that is more convenient than pirating, and this looks like another step in that direction. If I'm playing a pirated game and want to share it with a friend, it would involve getting them to torrent/crack it, or uploading it to a file sharing host. Using Valve's new program, sharing a purchased game is as simple as sharing it with them on steam.

I'm curious as to what other kinds of convenience measures they'll be able to implement in the future - especially with hardware control via steambox on the horizon.

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It seems like baby steps though. We really should have a way to loan games at the very least, and this still isn't really scratching that itch.

How? Isn't this better than loaning? Or do you mean trading?

because you can't play other games from your library while someone else is using your account on, say another computer

It sounds like this essentially loans out your entire library. If you want to play a different game in your library, the person you loaned to would get bounced out of the game.

You can't play Game A when you've loaned your library to Friend so they can play Game B.

This is a way to avoid telling people your steam password to "borrow" your account, not borrow a single game.

This would have been very useful to me when, in University, my roommates and all played our games on the living room gaming PC.

I can imagine this being useful for siblings to share a game library mostly bought by parents, or a spouse playing a partner's library. So certainly not useless, but it isn't loaning a game to a friend for a week, unless you're not going to play games at the same time as the friend.

Hmm, you're right. I misunderstood this part:

> WHEN I AUTHORIZE A DEVICE TO LEND MY LIBRARY TO OTHERS, DO I LIMIT MY OWN ABILITY TO ACCESS AND PLAY MY GAMES? As the lender, you may always access and play your games at any time. If you decide to start playing when a friend is already playing one of your games, he/she will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing.

But I missed the implications in the FAQ directly above that:

> CAN A FRIEND AND I SHARE A LIBRARY AND BOTH PLAY AT THE SAME TIME? No, a shared library may only be accessed by one user at a time.

Of course it's baby steps. Publishers are terrified, and loaning is only one tiny step from what they fear second most, aside from pirates- a burgeoning used game market.

what they fear second most, aside from pirates- a burgeoning used game market

I'm not sure how they fear that so much. On the rare occasions when I buy videogames they're usually used ones purchased at GameStop or on eBay.

Publishers and Developers are gaining absolutely no revenue from you doing that. And that's their issue. They want everyone to buy new games, because then they get a cut of it.

Buying second hand props up the $60US/$90AUD new cost though. Without second hand (ie. Steam at the moment) the prices plummet very quickly, $5 for Just Cause 2 for example, do you think GameStop etc. would allow you to buy it new for that price?

No, it's the other way around. Buying second hand denies profit to the publisher, which reduces units sold, which increases the price they have to charge to make any money.

Parent makes the same point as you.

I know that, what I meant was that I'm not seeing much evidence that they're deadly afraid of it. Maybe it's a mistake to judge by console games which have reasonably strong anti-piracy protection, to the point that I've never regarded the getting a fake as a serious possibility. For PC games that's much harder to enforce, but I haven't bought a PC game in years - as I don't play games much and it's a leisure activity rather than a lifestyle, I prefer ones that I can play from the couch rather than at my desk.

Why? Loaning digital bits literally makes no sense. That's nt a thing. It's not something the laws of physics allow. Loaning digital goods is a gibberish statement.

I obviously understand the appeal. Who doesn't like free shit? If you want to "borrow" a game from a friend just pirate it. That at least saves the platform holder some bandwidth costs.

With DRM, you can "lend".

So basically, this is how DRM is useful in partially alleviating the problems introduced by DRM.

Am I going to have to write a flowchart for this similar to Inflection?

You can lend a license to use those bits in a specific way.

That's a new thing, a specific new thing defined by a license and is only synonymous to the concept of loaning a physical good, and only synonymous because the definition in the license intends to make it that way.

The fact is, lending requires scarcity. I would never in my life lend goods to a friend if I could provide an identical duplicate for basically zero cost. Why would I? I'm not bound by scarcity by choice.

Steam invents scarcity by limiting the number of "friends" to 10, and by enforcing a policy that will boot off friends ~five minutes after the owner logs in.

Real life doesn't need such machinations for the system of lending to work, which is why lending physical goods can never be the same thing as lending digital goods IMO.

It's not that new, or at least not significantly newer than the idea of intellectual property overall. Even before DRM ,most software had licenses defining how it could be used, how many computers it could be installed on and whether the license was transferable. Steam is simply doing the same thing but using technical measures to enforce the agreements.

Is your argument really that all software should always be given away for free?

You are being deliberately obtuse. Everyone understands how you might lend a game to a friend. Tokens have been around a long time [1]. Being able to lend your games to friends makes them more valuable as your token gets more play time per dollar. This is a good thing, and reduces the appeal of piracy a little bit.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_(railway_signalling)

I'm really not being obtuse.

When "loaning" digital bits the only thing that could possibly be loaned is a user license. Bits are copied, not loaned. If I "loan" you a digital game then your computer will make a copy of bits as sent by some arbitrary server possibly across the globe. You may even make a copy of different bits as your copy of the content may be for a different localization, quality setting, platform, or file format. My computer may or may not still have a copy of those bits.

It is not reasonable to expect licenses to digital bits to be infinitely transferable without limit. If licenses could be transfered without limit then there is no reason for more licenses to exist than the maximum number of concurrent users. Acquire a license when you launch a game and release the license when you shut it down. A 3rd party middle man could trivially run this exchange. Popular games sell millions of copies on Steam but only a small handful can crack even 100,000 concurrent users.

Assuming that you agree there should be a limit then it's just a matter of deciding where that line in the sand is drawn.

You are not wrong, it's just that your point is pointless. We know bits can be copied at close to zero cost. But the value of the bits can't be realized without the token (if DRM pertains) or can't legally be realized (if a single-user license pertains). The bits without the token have almost zero value. You are loaning the ability to realize the value of the bits.

You said "Loaning digital goods is a gibberish statement." This is simply not true.

I believe that the distinction between loaning digital goods and loaning a license to legally use digital goods is meaningful and important to recognize.

Yes, you are never actually buying a game, you are buying a license to play it. Even with boxed versions.

Most old popular games come with a .exe that you can run without installing the game. Make for some real easy sharing in Lans. Valve making it almost as easy.

Sadly this won't work for LAN party because only one person can use a library at a time. Your comment does me wonder whether this could at some point be extended to allow you to lend the multiplayer component of a game to a friend so that you can play together.

I know back in the day half my friends ended up buying copies of Starcraft because they'd done a multiplayer install at a LAN party.

When it comes to that I like how it is with xbox 360 games. I can just lend my friend the disk and he can play the game.

A PC game is not that easy, why is pirating a bigger problem on computers than consoles? Or is it so? I'm not entirely familiar with the numbers but since you can still swap used console games I'd imagine it's like that.

I am glad Valve is doing something to improve this.

I think it's mainly because a console has the DRM mechanisms integrated on a hardware and OS level. Also consoles are designed to run only programs that have been approved by the platform owner which makes it significantly easier as a general purpose OS can't tell the difference between a pirate program and a program that is legitimately DRM-free.

> trying to provide a service that is more convenient than pirating

Huh, I know the other content industries have to play that game, but here I thought the killer feature of legitimate software was "not a virus."

Oh, maybe not piracy so much as... resellers? GameStop?

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