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Author: mrkniceguy

  • Steam Goes With Sharing

    Digital is the future! At least, that’s been the mantra around here for a while. But sometimes digital has drawbacks that physical media users have enjoyed for years. For example, loaning a game to a friend.

    Wouldn’t it be great to be able to loan a game digitally? This question has been on my mind since the reversal of the Family Sharing plan on the Xbox One. There were rumors at the time that Steam would go this way as well. And today, they announced that sharing is caring.

    Steam Family Sharing, a new service feature that allows close friends and family members to share their libraries of Steam games, is coming to Steam, a leading platform for the delivery and management of PC, Mac, and Linux games and software. The feature will become available next week, in limited beta on Steam.

    Steam Family Sharing is designed for close friends and family members to play one another’s Steam games while each earning their own Steam achievements and storing their own saves and application data to the Steam cloud. It’s all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

    While I’m bummed that this sort of feature was killed by consumers on the Xbox One, I’m excited to see how it plays out on Steam.

    Read more at the official Steam Blog: http://store.steampowered.com/news/11436/

  • BREAKING: Microsoft Backs Off of DRM – No Family Sharing Plan

    The last week as been an awesome roller coaster of trying to figure out where Microsoft was going with new features and how they were going to handle DRM. Today, all that died.

    Xbox One

    Don Matrick, President, Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft announced today that (alternate source since the Xbox site is under heavy load):

    An internet connection will not be required to play offline Xbox One games – After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One, you can play any disc based game without ever connecting online again. There is no 24 hour connection requirement and you can take your Xbox One anywhere you want and play your games, just like on Xbox 360.

    Trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today – There will be no limitations to using and sharing games, it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360.

    While this means the used game market isn’t going anywhere and people can still trade their used games, the features that went along with the DRM to add value are gone as well. No chance to share your game library with family or friends the next state over. Unless you want to put your game in an envelope and mail it to them that is. And hopefully they send it back.

    Where this puts publishers and developers down the road can’t be good. It’s already well-known that used game sales hurt AAA titles the most. I guess we’ll just have a few less Call of Duty class games and a few more indie games on our next gen consoles. Ho, hum. I’m not a fan of backtracking.

  • DRM – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

    DRM isn’t a new term, but it sure has been gaining popularity as of late. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and to put it simply, it is the tool that manages how an end user accesses digital content. DRM takes on many different forms; from encryption, to license checks over the internet, to limiting the number of installations. When a user encrypts their data, they are employing a form of digital rights management (something you should be happy you are able to do!). An encrypted DVD is using DRM to prevent illegal copies from being made without permission. Or a video game technology with empty blocks used to prevent duplication.

    ServerDRM usually has a bad reputation, and to be honest, it’s earned it fair and square. Seasons of DRM content becoming unavailable due to a management server being shut down, or rootkits employed on CDs to prevent distribution have plagued users since the inception of DRM. And DRM is in a constant struggle over controlling digital media that is quite easy to copy and distribute (commonly called “pirating” media). There is a very real tension between trying to make content easy to access, but not too easy.

    Book publishers are in the midst of learning how to distribute digital media right now. Amazon has a pretty heavy-handed DRM approach to books, but users don’t have a problem with it at all. Why? The make it incredibly easy to access their content. Most of the devices they sell  to use the content (like the Kindle) can get it anywhere they have a 3G connection. Amazon is also a huge company with arguably some of the best servers in the world.

    Music has had a rougher go of it. During the time span between 2006 and 2008 several major music distribution services shut down servers that allowed users to listen to the music they bought. Not being able to access music that users paid for was, to say the least, frustrating to honest consumers. The growing pains of DRM has caused many people to be bitter about the whole process.

    Movies have yet to settle on a good method, although some are trying to make access easy and long-term. Services like UtlraViolet, Amazon, Google Play and Apple iTunes allow access to movies and TV, albeit heavily tied to DRM.

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