If the developer has pulled this off without inconveniencing legitimate clients, I fully agree with the measure and would hope to see it extended to revocation of the entire Steam account: I can't really see any justification for failing to support an Indie developer who seems to be asking a fair price.
Moreover, I would like to see this used as evidence of the ability to pursue piracy through Steam and only through Steam, which adds weight to arguments in favour of a global ban on third-party DRM on Steam. I am not arguing that Valve is somehow expected to impose this on developers wishing to use their platform, but surely they could evidence a bit of common sense and talk things out?
That aside, what on earth is this game? What exactly is a a "Sandbox Physics game for the Source Engine...With no predefined goals...?" This has been on my list of things I wish to have explained to me for quite some time.
It wouldn't be right to ban the entire Steam account if there's any paid for games on there. How can that be justified? Those other games are all legally paid for. A pirated game cannot be registered on Steam anyway, so the point is moot. But then that article I quoted suggests that the pirated game was somehow registered, so I'm confused on this one.
This "sandbox" is a toolset where you can use all the objects in the Half-Life universe and make them interact in any way you want. Comedy is often the goal and can be hilarious.
Just YouTube Garry's Mod for some examples, if you'd like to see.
I don't think Steam could ban a user for pirating a game. It would not make sense that they take away paid products from you because you pirated another product. In fact, at least in my country, this would not be legal.
Exactly, +1. All they can do is remove the offending game. The rest are your legally licenced copies.
I think the way steam works is you are actually buying a license to play the game you dont actually own it.
http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
Scroll down to section 2. Licenses
Yes, correct.
Thanks for making the relevant bit easy to find.
While this is true, if it were my game, I would not want to make it impossible for the people who (initially) pirate it to ever get a legit version.
The best idea, IMO, is to disable the pirated copies and show people why the software is a good value if you buy it.
If you can't convince them, then either it is not a good value or they wouldn't ever buy it anyway, and you still lose nothing as the bootleg copies are dead in the water.
Awesome! Easily the best post yet.
Think about it. If you disable the pirate copy, but don't alienate the pirates, they will respect you and sing your praises to their friends and on forums, instead of calling you a dick and making you look bad at every opportunity.
This will increase positive publicity and might make some of the pirates actually purchase it. If they don't want to pay, then you've lost no revenue anyway. It willl certainly increase sales of people who would pay though, because they may not have heard about the game otherwise. In short, not crapping on pirates (man I hate that word
) reaps benefits on both sides.
www.techdirt.com explains all this stuff in great detail and much better than I can.
The way it is now, it makes honest people like me wary of what booby traps are in there that could go off inadvertently and get me banned or penalized in some way. A big disincentive to buy, I tell you. :shadedshu
Forum support is not that expensive as moderators are a dime a dozen and ... oh wait.
Actually, you lot come free and in blue, green and red! lol.
And you're all fantastic on TPU.
No, you don't buy it, you buy a license to use it.
All software (other than open source) is distributed in that manner.
It's not whether you like it or not, it's reality.
If you do not want to pay for a license and you do not want to steal the software you will have to do with all open source code.
That is fine, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
It's a real shame that the open source development model generally produces software that is second rate to proprietary code.
We wouldn't have to put up with restrictive licences and DRM if these products were of the same standard as proprietary.
What about Firefox! people may cry. Yes, that's
mostly open source, but there's big bucks behind it and a dedicated developement team. It's not just hordes of bedroom coders all clubbing together over the internet to produce polished, professional code.
