Comment The Hypocrisy of Second Hand (Score 1) 731
...as a company that's destroying people's legal right to sell on games second hand...
I love that people who rail against having to pay some arbitrary price to the developers of a game immediately turn around and claim they have a right to resell their copy of the game. Despite Steam, you have the option to buy games in a box, and furthermore you have the option to buy them second hand.
What you are failing to grok is that the cost for these options are increasingly not based on the intrinsic value of the physical item. (Which is ridiculous in this case because we're just talking about data.) The value you're getting is the ease at which you get at what you want.
I'm not a fan of DRM, but I think Steam has come up with an imperfect but workable solution. What I would love to see is for someone (and believe you me I'm working on a variant of this idea) to attack what the real problem is; namely that Steam has controlled the source. They have a superior method by which to deliver the product, but presently if you want that you have to go through them.
So, what is the product? The product (service?) is the personal use of games on any system you choose to install them on, combined with the ability to get them whenever you want (assuming net connection), and (and this is important) the ability to seamlessly connect into a social networking utility whose interface is constant throughout those games.
The Steam client is a beautiful illustration of what the end result should be; but what you're quibbling with, and what this whole discussion is about, is how the internals work. What you want is a service that can deliver the data and track what rights you have to it based on your identity - which can be worked out via another service. There is no reason that you have only one delivery service... and I don't mean 'Steam' and 'Greenhouse' per se. I only want to install one client. Rather, I mean that that client ought to be able to connect to either. It ought to be able to get my identity information (what I've bought) from any (valid) source I identify. And it ought to be able to network me across not only games delivered through different providers but also also social networks delivered through different providers.
In short; stop griping that it doesn't work like it used to. When humans came down from the trees they left off with the tail. Yeah, it sucks not being able to hold a banana with your tail, but we got over it. The key is to figure out how we can allow those normal market forces to work on what is the superior technical solution. Which requires a refining of that solution. At that point your money complaints will evaporate.
However, for the love of all that is good, lay off with the arguments that one person's quest for profit is evil, but yours is somehow sanctified.