Valve gives Oculus Rift a whirl with SteamVR mode Valve is trialing support for the Oculus Rift in its Steam platform. The company told developers that a new mode in the Steam Client Beta tool will allow for the addition of support for the virtual reality headsets. Dubbed SteamVR, the navigation mode will allow users to run the Steam interface with their dev kit Oculus Rift …
Being first to market is a very important edge, but there's a hell of a lot else to consider. They have to make sure the rift is comfortable and adaptable to a wide range of head sizes and glass wearers, is affordable to a sufficient number of people, and makes the absolute bare minimum of people want to puke.
They don't want to bomb like 3DTV, and considering the technical challenges involved anyone else jumping into the market will have a lot to learn very quickly if they want to overtake.
Not that I don't feel your pain though, I wish I had an Oculus to play with right now...
There is a State of "VALVe can do no wrong" at the moment on all the Tech news sites.
And to a point this is because they are doing amazing things and really pushing new ideas.
SFS should be one of them....
“Our customers have expressed a desire to share their digital games among friends and family members, just as current retail games, books, DVDs, and other physical media can be shared,” explained Anna Sweet of Valve. “Family Sharing was created in direct response to these user requests.”
So says the press release from VALVe
However their current design for Steam Family Sharing (SFS) is an absolute insult to those that asked for such a function and makes a mockery of the licenses people have brought via steam.
Valve have wisely made a system which requires the lending account to log onto target machine, this is good since it reduces the chance of people setting up SFS with strangers.
However if the owner plays a game, all other games are locked out and can not be played. If someone is playing a shared game and the owner plays and entirely different game the original player gets booted off in 5 minutes.
Like sharing a pizza, eating one slice but not letting anyone else eat the rest.
People want a proper Per Game sharing system.
And to add insult there is the offline mode loophole. In offline mode you can not only play your games, but all other games shared too you. In offline mode you could have 10+ people playing the same game at the same time having only payed for one copy.
Back to the pizza, If I go into a locked room a whole pizza magically get taken from PizzaGut and appears on my lap, and the same for everyone else that does the same.
4 Months ago VALVe was told of this issue, an issue that could be fixed with 4 lines of code. Yet it remains.
User that have been raising voices and trying to unify those that want a fairer and better system are being banned from the Forums. Long running and active threads that discus the issue and have been giving suggestions have been systematically closed.
4 months with out a single response from VALVe.
Well I can't make a small uppercase e that sits above the text line, like VALVe does for its name.
While I'm not an English Literature graduate I'm fairly sure when using multiple "and"s in a sentence there should be a comma to create a list like structure. If I remember correctly it should go between "properly" and "and" .
I'm sure there are better educated grammar Nazis on the board that will correct me if I'm wrong.
I am also not an English literature (or even language) graduate, however I believe you are incorrect about multiple instances of "and" and commas. My understanding of it is as below.
If listing multiple points in one sentence you can certainly separate them with commas, or you can conjoin them with "and" but not both. Also you should ideally avoid the use of multiple instances of the same conjunction in a sentence i.e. you can use "and" and then "also" to separate two points but not two occurrences of "and" or "also".
The format "Because of <point 1>, and <point 2>." is OK when there are only 2 points.
But for more than 2 the format should be "Because of <point 1>, <point 2>, <point 3> and <point 4>." unless using the Oxford comma, which is generally considered a matter of personal preference, where the format would be "Because of <point 1>, <point 2>, <point 3>, and <point 4>.
Clauses within a sentence, where you you encapsulate some clarification with commas as I'm doing here, should only be done once per sentence.
Additionally, if the phrasing of your points contains commas you can use the first format above but replace the listing commas with semi-colons.
N.B. If you disagree with any of the above or it is incorrect, blame my teachers. Any instances of Muphry's Law in this post are entirely intentional.
And, again, someone blames Valve here.
The problem is, some of those games don't even EXIST any more. The studios that made them are gone, you can't buy them, the owner is in doubt, etc.
But what you are desiring requires a MASSIVE change to their licensing agreements with the software owners. Let's say that even 10% disagree with the entire concept of family mode. That makes "per game" impossible. Valve are still bound by the contract with the software owner and they can't just break it without getting them to sign up to a new one.
And that signing up might well lose, say, 10% of the Steam library if people don't want to sign it. It's not just a case of "Tough, accept it" or even "We'll do it without your permission anyway". Valve has contracts and those contracts DO NOT MENTION this facility and, if they want to change them, it will probably cost them dear. Sure, an indie studio might just say "Yeah, no problem", but trying to get someone like EA to co-operate? That's gonna cost a lot of money, if it's even possible.
And even the owners might have to abide by agreements for, for example, their internal libraries, their assets, their online servers, etc. in order to agree to such a change.
What you want is just not possible overnight or, I would posit, at all in the current licensing environment. It's like Sky suddenly saying "Oh, by the way, we're going to let everyone share every channel that you put on Sky with their friends for free" - sure, it can be done, but there are also a bucket-load of channels that will say "Hey, hold on a minute, you can't do that", not least those with pay-per-view, etc.
When you can get all these people to sign on the dotted line, you can do this. Until then, I'm amazed they even managed to word their contracts so they can do SFS *at all*.
If what you said is true, then the offline loophole would have been closed as a matter of urgency, which it has not.
All VALVe need to do is ensure that the original license given to the end user is not violated. They have the power and technology.
What we have a system that neither protects the publishers nor gives families a way to use their purchased licenses.
Firstly, given the current ruling of EU and US courts regarding the rights of license owners (those that have purchased the games/software) I don't believe VALVe would have had to make any changes to their contracts with publishers.
Secondly, if this is true one publisher has no right to dictate access to other publishers software. If EA don't want their games to be shared, then VALVe can lock those games out of sharing. But EA have can not say while some one plays one of our games, the legally owned license of other publishers are not allowed to be accessed.
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