• Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      I referenced DRM in the context of online DRM.

      American pioneers didn’t discover that America existed. They went out with maps from earlier explorers and settled.

      Can you name any online DRM single player game that came out before HL2 and was as popular as Half Life 2? I played fps’s and rts’s in 2004 and none of them required online DRM.

      The Steam hate was huge on forums I frequented. (Arstechnica, Slashdot, Usenet)

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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        8 minutes ago

        To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don’t think are necessary to the argument, like “single player”, then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there’s no world where we didn’t have Steam and then online DRM didn’t become standard, because you’d have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users’ disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren’t rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.

        The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.

    • index@sh.itjust.works
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      7 hours ago

      He didn’t say valve created DRM he said that steam pioneered it. Don’t revision people comments.

      • sep@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Had to google “pinoneered”, but it say: “developed or be the first to use or apply” and i do not think valve did either.
        They have an easy way for developers to implemet drm by require steam services tho.
        But in my opinion it is better there are few well understood methods instead of a million uniqe ones. Incase there is a world this have to be reverse engeneered.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          I used pioneered because it has the context of one of many.

          A pioneer is the name you give to people who go out and explore new things.

          Apple was a pioneer in home computers. That doesn’t mean they invented the first home computer. It means they were one of the first.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      15 hours ago

      I remember, buy game. Enter CD key “key already taken” Return game “sorry, box is open we don’t take media returns” Rage.