Sunday, December 21, 2008

What do you get when you pay for a game?


This is something that's been bugging me for a while.

I had recently bought Counter-Strike Collection and when I started installing it a pop-up showed up prompting me to register in "Steam", something I had read about some time ago. The purpose of this was to make me log in everytime I wanted to play so they could make sure I was using a legal copy of their software.

Fair enough, I paid for it and it was an online game so it wasn't that big an issue.

Sometime later I bought Valve's Half-Life Anthology. The main game I wanted to play using it was the original Half-Life. I started installing it on my computer, which wasn't connected to the internet and at that time simply couldn't be. Suddenly a pop-up showed up. "Register your copy on Steam or you won't be able to play the game". I couldn't.

It was a singleplayer game, I had paid for it and it was there in my hand but they wouldn't let me play it. What had I just bought?

Apparently I had just bought permission to play the game but only if they were watching.


(I'll probably write more about this in the near future.)

2 comments:

Luís said...

My UT doesn't save the campaigns in offline mode, but is playable in offline mode. Now I only needs some stable drivers to my GPU :/

Raistlin said...

My UT saves the campaign in offline mode. Are you sure yours doesn't do that? I never even played it online.

I also wish I had a pc that could play that game in medium settings and wouldn't slow to the point of crawling when 3 or more characters are on the screen.

It's too next-gen for my hardware.