Unsteaming HL-2

[NuTTeR]

I sent an email to Gabe,

Begin quote [...I presume the Steam subscription does not confer any rights to continue running cached steam games should someone decide to cancel their subscription.

If it did allow people to continue running subscription cached games after cancellation then I can see some unscrupulous people signing up for one month to get HL2 and anything else cached before cancelling their subscription.

If it doesn't then I hope the cached version of HL-2 is secure enough to prevent someone 'unsteaming' it if you get my meaning.

Which set me thinking as to how I'd go about protecting such cached content on a hard disk, it would probably involve building the handshaking and 'bit checking' (Steam) so widely and deeply into the software that it would just be too much effort for a hacker to try and reverse-enginer and disable.

The only worry would be whether someone cracks the steam protocol and writes an emulator to simulate your Steam server comms, effectively allowing someone to run a cached game forever.
...] End quote

What do you think, will HL2 be cracked or do you think Steam is unsteamable ?

Note: Before anyone flames me, I don't advocate piracy, I posted this to start a sensible (?) discussion on whether any security/anti-piracy scheme can ever work, and also because like everyone else, we need new things to talk about in the absence of any Valve generated movies/news.

 

[dscowboy]

The twist is that Steam can be updated at any time. When Valve first started releasing the HL2 videos, Chris_D hacked the Steam cache to retrieve videos before they were 'released' to us. A few days later, Valve updated Steam and suddenly the steam cache files were encrypted in some manner.

So if someone figured out how to hack the local Steam cache files, Valve could probably just build a new encryption scheme and update Steam. Not a perfect solution, but definitely a lot more effort to crack.

 

[Adam]

Heh, sorry, just like you cant play HL online without a CD key, you cant play HL2 without Steam or a canceled subscription. Thats what all the 'hand shakes' are for. It doesn't matter if someone extracted HL2 from a cache file, that still won't allow them to play HL2 online since theres no way to authenticate without Steam.

Why did you waste Gabes time with that email when hes buzy in the final stages of HL2's development?

 

[NuTTeR]

Adam - Hey, don't get all 'holier than thou' on me. Gabe will only answer what he wants, when he wants, I'm sure he doesn't need email police like you to shield him.

dscowbox - True, that effectively rules out the Warez community releasing an Internet MP able version of HL-2, by the very nature that it has to talk to the mothership (Valve) to be able to participate.

But I doubt Steam can stop SP and LAN only MP warez....

 

[Ahnteis]

You'll never have the full game on your HDD.

It'd be much easier to just copy the CD's from a friend then to try using steam to get the game.

 

[Whatup1049]

The steam version being cracked is totally inevitable. But the money they make on it (from honest paying users) will most likely outweigh the loss from piracy. I'm sure they know it WILL be cracked they just know they can still profit from it. Unless Valve has been working on a new revolutionary "un-crackable" software (which they could be, it is Valve ) I am most certain it will be cracked. Thing is I think most people, pirates included will buy Half-Life 2 because they know it is worth every penny!

-Chris:afro:

 

[Anwar]

they wont chage full price for the sp only version

so instead of going to the middle man and making a cd, box,books, shipping, ect...

they probably would only make 10$ per game sold at the stores anyways

they still get their money.

 

[Adam]

Originally posted by NuTTeR
Adam - Hey, don't get all 'holier than thou' on me. Gabe will only answer what he wants, when he wants, I'm sure he doesn't need email police like you to shield him.

I dont get it. Holier than thou? Im a email police? Your weird lol

 

[Anwar]

nutter you should reconsider your sig

the hole on a cd is very very very small

 

[dscowboy]

Game studios and publishers are incentivized to include attractive multiplayer gameplay in their products because of this reason: You can force players to authenticate their license through a central authority. This is one of the reasons why it would be strange if HL2 MP was 'just deathmatch'. Valve has every reason to devote a lot of resources to multiplayer. The better the multiplayer, the more people actually pay for the game instead of stealing it for single-player only.

 

[Demonmerc]

Steam will probably not get hacked. If it does it will not be for long. However, if steam goes down for any amount of time it will be a very, very bad thing. Of course HL2 will be able to be downloaded and played for free soon after if not the day of its release, but the warez0rs will only be playing single player.

If you play HL2 off steam, it will only download the level you are playing, maybe the next one too. Levels may not stay on your hard drive after they've been passed. It's all up to valve.

 

[NuTTeR]

Originally posted by Anwar
nutter you should reconsider your sig

the hole on a cd is very very very small

lol!

It's not what you've got it's what you do with it.

Originally posted by Adam
I dont get it. Holier than thou? Im a email police? Your weird lol

Adam, your post deserved my reply because you gave your opinion to my original post (fair enought and accepted) and then you accuse me of wasting Gabes time.

Try complaining to each person that makes a post on the the 'Information from Valve' thread, I'm sure you'll be popular.

Anyway seems like this thread is about done and so am I.

 

[wormstrangler]

Alot of you are underestimating the warez groups. They got BF1942 to work, How'd they do it? They just made a cracked BF1942 server that did not autheticate the client version.

Of course these cracked servers were like 1 in 50. But it was still done.

I'm guessing that to do a similar thing to Steam, you would crack the client so that it authenticates to 'localhost'. You then run a cracked steam server (that will be the hardest bit) on your own computer that tells the client you have a legit copy and away you go again.

The only problem wrong with this way is that you will never get the updates, which I imagine will be daily. So within a day you will be stuck playing on a LAN or playing agaisnt all the other warez people on the same version as you.

 

[NuTTeR]

My thought's exactly.

I guess there are two morals from this thread

1) If all suppliers move to a authenticating/updating server model then the Warez community will stay relativley limited to those sad people that like limited online servers and old/buggy versions.

2) SP versions of games will always be be cracked, nothing can ever be done to prevent this, even with the strongest encryption of content(because the encryption key would still have to exist locally and hence could be found/sniffed) AutoDesk probably realised this years ago when you used to have to install a hardware dongle on your parallel/serial port to run the AutoCAD.