I agree with everyone.
Steam is a horrible inconvenience. It’s growing more stable over time, but I’ve spoke to people (whom I can confirm did purchase Half-Life 2) who had delays of 45 minute or higher trying to log into the authorization server that first week. For a casual game, that’s simply unacceptable.
That said, yes. The industry is heading inexorably in that direction, because piracy has forced it to. Consumers as a whole deserve what they get.
But, let’s put that in context.
We live in a world where the only people who seem to place any value on the efforts of independant programmers are spyware companies. Think about that for a moment. If more than a few people registered their shareware, we wouldn’t have needed invasive reminders, and if those weren’t so quickly disabled, we wouldn’t have moved on to limiting features. As each new step is circumvented, an adversarial relationship is built up, until eventually, the thought of inflicting spyware on your users is not so repugnant as letting them get away with this. If the pirates weren’t so aggressive, no developer would ever have agreed to distribute spyware with their applications. But now it’s everywhere, and that too is where things are heading, for much the same reason.
There is justice in this, on a macro level. Individually, most of us have done nothing to justify that punishment, but as a group, we deserve the worst we can do to each other. When the bombs drop and there’s nothing left of humanity, we’ll have earned that as well.
That doesn’t mean these are good things, is all I’m sayin’. They’re awful. Maybe they can’t be avoided, but for god’s sake, let’s not encourage 'em.
