A Vault Tek Announcement Options

[Arcry]

Ladies, gentlemen, and mutants their upon, I would like to direct your attention to a scheduled announcement from your friends at Vault-Tec! Please see the enclosed notice.

-Enclosed notice-

This post has been edited by Arcry: Jun 3 2015, 04:10 PM

[SubRosa]

I am an old school gamer, and confess to loving having my games on disc. I loved in the old days when I could walk into a computer store and there would be aisle after aisle of computer games. It was one way I kept up on what games were out. Now you are lucky if there is even one little shelf of games in a store, and I barely know what games are out, or even exist.

But I do like the convenience of online shopping. Not to mention not needing to put the disc in the drive whenever I play a game. Gog.com is wonderful. I have bought more than a dozen games from them in the last year alone. All DRM-free, that I can play anytime, anywhere, without an internet connection (after I have downloaded the setup files of course).

Steam I do not like so much. The reason is the DRM that Steam forces on everyone that uses their games, and how you must have their client running whenever you play, even offline. It is insulting, as they are basically saying that they believe all of their paying customers are criminals who are going to steal their games at the first opportunity. Not to mention DRM schemes do nothing to dissuade piracy. You could have downloaded a pirated, non-Steam version of Skyrim the very first day it came out. Add in that DRM schemes often prevent paying customers from playing the games they legally bought, and they are just bad for everyone. They are even bad for the companies that use them, because they had to pay for it, and it literally does nothing.

But DRM aside, and even the possibility of greedy online storefronts like Steam charging us a monthly subscription to play the games we already bought, there is also the danger of hackers. A hacker attack taking down a site the size of Steam seems unlikely. Until you consider that such an attack did the very same thing to Sony last year, and now we are reading the private emails of their executives. TBH, given how many hackers are also gamers, it is kind of surprising that Steam has made it this long without a major incident. Or maybe that is why half the time when I try to install a Steam game I get the error message "Steam Service is not available, try again later".

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 5 2015, 06:10 PM