Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'

www.pcgamer.com Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'

"I knew he wasn't a bad kid, but there'd been this generational shift."

Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24356878

DRM @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/valves-drm-was-inspired-by-the-cmos-nephew-who-used-a-usd500-check-id-sent-him-for-school-expenses-and-bought-himself-a-cd-rom-replicator-he-sent-me-a-lovely-thank-you-note/

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Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'

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Quality Gaming Content and Discussion -- /r/Games @lemmit.online

Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note'

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48 comments

I had a friend back in the early 2000's who did this.
He paid for this way through school by abusing the schools T1 access and pirated shitloads of movies and would dump them all to DVD-Rs and then sell them on ebay. He wouldn't make exact DVD rips, he instead would fill the DVD with tons of different movies or shows and sell them as collections. He did especially well with anime, which was difficult to access in the US at the time.
He later went on to be an electrical engineer at Boeing.
I also remember people hating Valve at first for this DRM scheme, and it's also weird that people forgot that Steam itself is a minimally invasive form of DRM.
- Back then everyone had enough sense to hate all DRM.
  Now they'll complain that Linux sucks because it can't play the harry potter game
  
  I pirated that game just so I could critique how god damned bad it was.
- He later went on to be an electrical engineer at Boeing.
  He wouldn't happen to have been named Kenneth D. Pinyan, would he?
  Jokes aside, real question did he meet ol' Kenny Pin?

What does she mean there was a "generational shift" that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn't pirating a ton of software?
- Generational shift means kids bad and stupid. That's all.
  A tip for millenials: Whenever you cringe at zoomers for their dumb tiktok dances, remember the badger song and realise every generation is stupid and cringe.
  
  Or just search millennial humor on TikTok and die. Recently tried watching SNL with the family and I cannot understand that humor at all.
  
  I've never heard of any badger song.
  
  Badger?
  
  MUSHROOM!
  
  That’s so funny that millennials cringe at zoomers, because I have always found millennials to be infinitely more cringe than zoomers have ever been.
- Don't copy that floppy!
  I think the generational shift was mostly that the previous generation just didn't have or use computers at home, and suddenly they were everywhere. Most households just didn't have a computer until the late 90s or early 00s. By then, floppies were on their way out, and burning CDs was all the rage.
  
  For a class project in college, I made a 5-disk raid-0 out of floppy drives and demo'd the performance by playing a compressed version of "don't copy that floppy" for the class. Thankfully my lecturer had a sense of humor lol.
- There was a period of time where a game being on CD was enough to prevent most copying. Games would read data off the disc, and some of those that didn't need to still required the disc to be in the drive.
  When CD burners became cheap enough for everyone to own, they needed new methods of DRM, like authentication, and custom burning methods that couldn't be copied the normal way.
- CDs absolutely influenced the scale and speed of it. And it was a generational shift that went from piracy being something that wasn't well understood and mostly a niche issue for music and movie lovers ("home taping is killing music") to something that impacted all types of media.
  
  MP3's sped up copying of music. As for games though, they increased in size because of CD's so that countered any speed up.
- Also this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- Yeah I'm not sure "generational" is the correct term here. It was often the same people living through those eras (and beyond) who were doing the pirating. It wasn't a generational shift in that different generations were necessary for CDs to get copied; everyone in every generation was changing how they operated as technology changed. Piracy naturally evolved with the times. Because of course it did. Why wouldn't it?
- right? I had more games for my C64 than any system since
- The heady days of using Copy-b and Copy-c in the Commodore 64 days. Back when floppies were really floppies.
  
  Friend of mine we by to the store to buy c64 games on tape. Took them home, copied them using a thing that would connect to datasette units at once. Went back to the store to return our exchange.
  After a few rounds of this, the store said no more exchanges
  Then he recorded a few seconds of silence somewhere on the tape and said 'but it's defective'.
  Man. We were high rollers.

I made so much money in high school downloading MP3s or anime from Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and burning then to CD/DVD since I was, like, the only kid in town with a computer, access to the internet, and a DVD burner. I remember getting asked how my parents let me get away with it and I was like "my dad is the one who taught me how to do it!" He was always borrowing games or music from co-workers. He got the DVD burner to make copies, since DRM was basically non-existent at the time for a majority of games. S'how we had Quake!
- Same. We even had a music store in the UK, called Music Zone, this place would let you buy a CD and if you didn’t like it you could return it and get a refund and then rinse and repeat.
  As for parents. Mine had no clue what I was doing on the computer, but even when they learned due to all the people coming to the door, they were pretty chill.
  It got bad when our ISP would charge us for excessive downloads.
- Of the 50ish Amiga floppy disks we had, I think Bubble Bobble was the only one my dad actually bought.
- If you don't mind me asking, were you on dial up, DSL, or coax?
  
  IIRC, we first got DSL when I was just leaving junior high. Or maybe when I was a sophomore. I really don't remember when, but when I was doing most of this downloading, it was on DSL. When we still had dialup, I couldn't even reliably play UO all weekend (first-world problems, AMR?), because we only had 1 phone line and someone would eventually need the phone.

Obligatory Goldberg link since lots of people these days are still unaware that SteamWorks DRM is easily bypassed these days (you don't even need to patch the files, you can just bypass it).

48 comments