Sorry, who is forcing you to use Steamworks?
I'm not a professional level games developer in a publically owned company with a responsibility to my shareholders to protect our companies future via methods such as DRM, such as Steamworks, which means siding with the leader in an emerging market that is slowly gaining ground and responsible for a significant portion of total Sales.
Are they going to force companies like Ubisoft to use Steamworks instead of Ubisoft DRM? Are they going to force you to develop for their platform only? The only future in which everyone uses Steamworks, is if Steamworks is the best solution.
A nice thought, but completely unrealistic and uneducated. Right now, Steam has competition with servcies like Direct 2 Drive, Impulse, etc.; if Steam doesn't offer the best deal, they won't succeed. We're not talking about them establishing a monopoly now - no company gets to be a monopoly by raping the industry, they get there by offering sweet deals in the short term and then using their established position to muscle everyone else out of the market. See Windows (funnily enough the founding membes of Valve are ex-Microsoft employees. Weird.)
Are they forcing developers to use Steamworks DRM at this very moment? Of course not, they don't have enough pull right now, but we're not talking about right now. We're talking about a future where every major title released on the PC has Steamworks DRM because Steam is the leading Digitial Distribution platform and has enough pull to demand all Steam hosted games have Steamworks, forcing them to be exclusive Steam titles. Once a title has Steamworks, it will not be made available via other services due to the nature of the DRM - this is a forced exclusivity deal. Once all the major titles are shipping with Steamworks (ya know, like Modern Warfare 2, Civilisation 5, etc.) do you honestly believe it's such a stretch that Valve in their newly established position of complete Digitial Distribution dominance - and I don't mean like today, I mean when every major and non-major title is available via Steam - that every title released on Steam must carry Steamworks DRM, essentially locking the platform out? You can release it via Impulse, however Steam simply covers too much of the market to ignore and to ensure Sales, Publishers will not have another option for Digital Distribution - it's either Steam, or bust. Thus, every retail copy of every PC game will carry Steamworks DRM to ensure that it can be sold on Steam digitially. This is complete, 100% market dominance and forces their competition out. You can say it won't happen, however that simply shows you don't know your history.
MODERN WARFARE 2 IS $60 BECAUSE UBISOFT PRICED IT THAT WAY.
I think you left your caps lock key on. Anyway, Activision prices Modern Warfare 2 at US$60.00 and AU$120.00 at retail, despire that US$60.00 is only around AU$80.00. Anyway, the game was released on Steam for this price, despite the fact that it's cheaper to sell the game this way due to lack of boxes, manuals, physical production costs and shipping fees. Thus, the price is in inflated. Now, let's take a look at today's prices. As you've pointed out, Modern Warfare 2 is available for less than it was released. No surprise, considering the backlash the game and it's publisher are now receiving. If I were to purchase the game here, at my local sore, I'd pay AU$49.99. On Steam - even discounted - I'm paying AU$69.99. The price is inflated for the digitial version. Why? Because there is no competition for this game digitially. If the game was available on, say, Impulse, the discounted price on Steam would be significantly lower as Steam tends to do (see the Unreal pack) because it has to compete with Impulse for sales as it makes 30% profit on every sale, thus the lower the price the more likely someone is to buy it via Steam. With Steam's larger Account base, they're able to more aggressively negotiate prices with their Publishers. With no competition, as is the case with Modern Warfare 2, the price doesn't need to compete with other Digitial Platforms, and so there is no need for price wars. This isn't saying Steam is going to single handledly raise the price of the entire industry - that is Activision's doing - this is proof that competition benefits the consumer, even in a Digitial environment. Steamworks DRM doesn't mean higher launch prices, but it does means less competition for your business and thus worse deals overall.
...Actually, you'll notice MW2 is $49 on steam while at retail (Gamestop, Bestbuy) it is still $59...
That's discounted for this weekend, not the standard price, and you'll notice that all of them are loaded with Steamworks DRM, however Steam only makes Sales Commission off of titles sold on Steam itself. Competition in Action. Remove the competition factor, see what happens, I'll wager my immortal soul that it's bad for the consumer. Business 101.
I'm in Brad's 'Group 3'. I don't mind that Valve's own titles require Steam, because that's their own platform. I don't mind that some games are exclusives and othes aren't. It all encourages competition, and competition is what has made this industry develop and change and produce all the amazing titles we have available to us today. Removing that change, that need for innovation on any level in the industry only damages the future prospects for the gamers and for the industry as a whole. I game on the PC because I like to do things
my way, not someone elses. A closed PC platform turns my expensive, high end machine into a larger than needed console where modding games is illegal and will get you banned, where wanting to be offline for whatever reason makes you a pirate and wanting to know that in twenty years, if I want to play through the games I bought today and have the ability to emulate, modify or change whatever code is needed to make sure that I get what I paid for makes you a fanboy or an idiot. We're already stuck with Microsoft to turn the computer on and have a hope of running anything, why do we need to stick ourselves with Valve to play a game?
