Valve controls Steam

To an engineer, this makes sense.

To a gamer, this makes sense.

But engineer ≠ gamer.

Allow me to elaborate. Valve makes games like the famed Half-Life, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat etc. Now, the point is that Steam is the network, through which these you can play multiplayer. Quite common, you’ll say. But the power of the network lies, not in its ability to allow mutiplayer, but in its tight-knit game activation system.

Let’s say I bought a copy of Counter Strike. To install it on my PC, I must first install the Steam Client, which comes bundled with all Valve games. Fair enough, I install it, and then I ‘install’ CS. The use of the quotes is because, I’m just dumping the installation files on my PC, not installing it. To play the game, I must first open Steam, create an account, and activate CS using the Activation Key I got with my PC.

To play a Steam game, you need to start Steam. Although, you can disable you Internet and play singleplayer offline, to play online, you must be connected to the Steam Network through your Steam Account. Other games with not-so-tough-and-very-crackable setups allow you to distribute your game around, and have a multiplayer party with your friends. Unfortunately, in the case of Steam, each one of them needs to buy an original copy to get an activation key, as each key can be used only once.

So that means that if I lease out CS to two of my friends, they can play using my account, but we’ll never be able to face each other in a match.