Getting Steamed

It looks like Steam is still generating a lot of controversy, and what would a gaming-heavy blog be without yet another uninformed opinion…

Some people can’t activate Half-Life 2 online. Although the system requirements do state that an online connection is required, it’s easy to miss, especially when you’re only expecting to play a single-player game anyway. Ideally Valve really should have provided an activate-by-phone method as well (though that does make mastering more difficult, if each disc has to be encrypted slightly differently). At the very least, people should be allowed to return the game if the CD key hasn’t been activated yet, but retailers often won’t take online games back.

People who bought the retail version still have to keep the CD/DVD in the drive for the copy protection. That seems unnecessary, since you need the unique CD key you get when you buy it to play online anyway. Unfortunately that’s Vivendi’s decision as the publisher, not Valve’s, and Vivendi is, well, an evil megacorp…

People have been banned from using the single-player version. These people used a pirated CD key to initially activate Half-Life 2, and then got caught in a recent wave of bans. Some of them had in the interim gone and purchased legitimate copies of HL2, assigned them to the same account, and then lost access to their legitimate copy when the account was banned, and that’s where most of the controversy lies.

It’s hard for me to feel sorry for them, since they did try to steal it in the first place. If you steal something, it doesn’t suddenly become okay if you offer to pay for it later on… (Insert the usual debate over whether piracy is really ‘stealing’ or not and blah blah blah… Not going there.) They can still buy a new copy and create a new account though, and I think that’s enough of a slap on the wrist to punish them.

People can’t resell the game to someone else when they’re done. This one gets a lot more complicated…

The problem is that your CD key gets attached to a Steam account, and by the terms of the EULA, you’re not allowed to sell your Steam account to someone else. But, the doctrine of first sale gives the consumer the right to turn around and sell something they bought to someone else. But, that typically applies to physical goods, and it can be argued that usage of games through Steam is a service, not a good. If it’s a service, then it’s more like a contract between you and Valve, and you can’t just arbitrarily pass on contract responsibilities to someone else, especially when that’s specifically forbidden like in the EULA. But, EULAs are largely untested and potentially unenforcable. But…

For now the workaround is to simply give the other person your Steam account as a ‘freebie’ along with the game, though that also has risks. The person buying the game wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s a banned account, for example, and would have no recourse to challenge it, since Valve wouldn’t recognize the transfer of ownership — the account is banned and stays banned, no matter who’s using it. It also forces you to give them every game attached to the account, not just one, so you can’t just sell HL2 and keep CounterStrike. Unless you keep them on separate Steam accounts, but then it’s annoying to have to manage multiple accounts…

In the end, the problem is that this is all shaky legal ground. It’s not clear that Valve has the right to do some of these things under standard product laws, but at the same time it’s not certain that the existing laws even apply, and they have to do *something* to try and fight the cheaters and pirates, so you can’t blame them for trying whatever they think they can.

It just isn’t clear yet where the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not are when it comes to software and its complex and obscure environments, and it won’t be until some more high-profile test cases actually go before the courts. If some players think they’ve been wronged then they should certainly take it to court; that’s how these unclear cases get settled. But they shouldn’t be surprised if they lose, either.