> We might just have seen the future of PC gaming DRM. That you will pay per hour instead of a one-off payment.
While I would hate to be locked into an ecosystem that was pay-per-usage, this article is just amortizing the cost of hardware over time.
The PC gaming community is (I hope) fairly intolerant of any sort of lock-in. If Steam went the way of pay-per-hour there's enough competition that we'd see a transition to other services.
Unless Valve goes through some other route to give themselves an advantage (e.g., buy Xfinity Valve package and get unlimited access to Valve Streaming services, the rest of the internet is low-bandwidth/high-latency), there's not much to worry about.
I don't think a lock-in would be an issue. There's however other issues I think will be very hard to solve.
This is a quote from a salesman trying to sell me 3G Internet.
"Why on earth do you need more data then this!? You know downloading movies is illegal, right!? Ohh, and you will also get a free Ipad."
The problem is that people refuse new technology like fiber networks, because they do not see any use-cases beyond e-mail and Facebook.
My depressing thoughts about ISP's is that the only reason they use fiber instead of copper is that fiber is much cheaper over long distances.
While I would hate to be locked into an ecosystem that was pay-per-usage, this article is just amortizing the cost of hardware over time.
The PC gaming community is (I hope) fairly intolerant of any sort of lock-in. If Steam went the way of pay-per-hour there's enough competition that we'd see a transition to other services.
Unless Valve goes through some other route to give themselves an advantage (e.g., buy Xfinity Valve package and get unlimited access to Valve Streaming services, the rest of the internet is low-bandwidth/high-latency), there's not much to worry about.