Anyways, as much as I love steam I hate it. I can install non steam boxed set games without online drm to my laptop and play a different boxed set on my desktop. Cant do that with steam. Once you are logged in you are screwed on the other machine. I have over 100 steam games, 3 laptops 2 desktops and a server. So just because you are poor and can only afford one device well it shouldn’t affect the rest of us who want to ‘obey’ steams crap rules of having only one account. But I tell ya, running your own mail server is one easy way of creating and keeping track of many steam accounts ;D 1 game per account tracked in a db. or howabout starcraft2@myserver.com will log ya in to ya steam account just for starcraft ;P

Until then, piracy is just the smarter thing to do for a consumer that wants full access to software. Perhaps if cracking DRM wasn’t as much of a crime as downloading the illegal software I would feel differently, but under this ‘damned if you do anything’ methodology, I find myself choosing to just leave hell to its own devices.

Meaning: I am a lost customer who does not pirate because these companies are putting me in between my morality and intelligence.

…on two different players at once.

…AT ONCE.

Do you get the analogy now, or are you too retarded?

density duck’s analogy is retarded. you can take a dvd to a friend’s house in another country and play it in any dvd player you want… steam specifically restricts that. thank you for helping prove the point though.

you want drm free or steam free convenience, the publishers are making piracy the easiest option. even the vpn servers are free these days: http://itshidden.com/

If the price of having Steam is that I have to stop playing the game on (computer 1) before I can install it or play it on (computer 2) then by damn I’ll pay that price gladly!

@Binko: Personally, I don’t even think it’s the price. Yeah, Steam has a lot of cheap stuff, but the first-run stuff is just as expensive. The issue is convenience–I want, I click, I have. As the letter-writer in the article points out, he just didn’t want to get up and go to the store.

Wanting to access Steam on two machines at once is a rare enough situation for me that I’ve run into it a time or two but not often.

If I want to download something to my laptop, I’ll just do it overnight or some other time when I’m not interested in playing on my main computer.

Yesterday my wife was bored so I installed Steam and told her to browse the casual game section. She ended up buying a small collection of Popcap games and was happily playing in minutes.

Steam understands the crux of the digital age. The world is swimming in media and media must be sold very cheap. But people still enjoy buying stuff. So make digital media cheap and easy to buy and people will still spend a ton of money.

I’ve said before, when ebooks cost ten bucks each I won’t buy any. Instead I’ll search out free books. But if ebooks cost one buck each I’d probably buy twenty or thirty a month. Ebook publishers COULD have $300 bucks a year from me. But, as it stands they have nothing.