Following the recent furore over Ubisoft's Nazi-style DRM scheme in which you must always be online or they will dispatch their killer dogs who bark killer bees at you and shoot lasers from their eyes and stuff, we receive news of this from Valve.
It's almost as though a group of people at Valve periodically sit down and say, hey, how can we do stuff to make our products things that people would want to actually have on their computer? I don't know what they teach the business grads who run a lot of the major gaming companies these days, but Valve are going to be laughing all the way to the bank while the rest of them fade gently into the company-churning mill that is the global recession.
The only problem is, I can't see any possible way that Steam won't have a >90% market share of games sales across the world within the next 10 years (this includes all physical retail outlets, which will die a slow death).
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and all that.
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That's a nice set of features they are playing with. I don't see a fix for the one that bugs me most, though; the lousy offline mode. Sure, I can apparently tell individual games to play offline, but if the Steam client itself isn't updated, they refuse to play. Since it updates a couple of times each week, I may as well be required to have a connection.
*shrug*
Still, they seem to have a good bead on what makes their product useful and valuable. ...and that draconian DRM isn't a part of it. Nice.
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