Steam Q&A

What protection against piracy does Steam afford software released through it?

Doug Lombardi: Steam's encryption system has proven effective for both electronic and retail distribution. The holiday Half-Life 2 was released was a big year for new releases. And like many holidays, unfortunately, many of the titles released that year experienced "Day Zero" piracy - meaning the final product is available on the black market but the retail versions are still in replication. Half-Life 2 was a noteable exception and the only title encrypted through Steam.

Of course this leaves out the "I can't contact the Steam auth server, you can't play anything" vulnerability, and the "Oh, all of the sudden you don't own anything that was once in your Steam catalog; fuck off" vulnerability (where you'd have to take such steps as deleting your clientregistry.blob file, etc., etc.

And Friends still doesn't work, and has never worked. Backing up and restoring Steam is less than clear, and moving it from an old system to a new one is still an undocumented crapshoot (or maybe it's just buried in some obscure "custhelp.com" page that is subject to change without notice). And you can forget about rolling back a game to an older version to make sure an older mod still works; you're fully at the mercy of the Valve developers, and your only recourse is to beg the mod developers to stay up to date.

At least now it asks for permission to restart Steam before doing it, along with a summary of what the patch fixes (though it's vague as usual).

No mention of actually following through on all the talk of getting modders access to steam :(

2 years ago it was something that was always mentioned in these kinds of interviews. Obviously I'm aware that valve are a business and the interest shown in steam by indy devs results in them generating income. Still.... its kind of depressing that its completely dropped off the radar.

I absolutely love Steam. It was weird when first released, but now I think it's fantastic.

Nothing terribly new in this interview, but a good read none-the-less.