I really don't like the concept of Steam, but, apart from the way it kills the second hand market, I have trouble coming up with a rational reason as to why.
I still buy music cds, would never pay for an mp3, still less DRM protected crap, but in that case there is the justification of better sound quality, plus I resent the way the music companies have saved all that cash on distribution, warehouses, physical media, printing, and retailers' markup, and yet pass almost none of that saving onto the customer and end up charging much the same per track as they always did.
But not sure that the same objection applies to digital distribution of games really. Do digitally distributed games end up cheaper than ones sold on physical media?
I guess I just prefer the idea of paying to own an object that I can then use, without having to ask them for renewed 'permission' every time I go to use it. I dunno, I wouldn't buy a house that required me to phone up the previous owner to ask permission every time I wanted to open the front door. Or, if the analogy is reinstallation rather than execution, every time I wanted to redecorate.
I also worry that companies might eventually move to a 'pay per play' model, charging you every time you fire up a game.
(When in that article the Valve guy talks about viewing games 'as a service' that's what I worry he means. If it gets to that point I would probably give up on gaming).
But it's probably just because I'm old and set in my ways. Prefer the good old-fashioned traditional computer game on disk, like grandad used to play.
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