I only meant that other big companies still require online activation, while providing overall worse distribution schemes.
Well again, worse is highly subjective. My copy of SPORE comes on a proper DVD. Should EA go bankrupt, I can get a crack and patch from any one of 1000's of perfectly legal websites that redistribute it.Now let's say I'd bought it off Steam, or even the EA store, and they go bankrupt. I'd have to download the whole thing, from an unambiguously illegal site. I am in short a criminal, and if I happen to live in a place like France, I'd also be potentially without an Internet connection.
Having a physical product, while far from ideal, is much preferable to having a single monolithic gatekeeper, that controls everything. Do you know why it's a bad idea to "keep all your eggs in the same basket". Yeah, because you want to avoid a situation with a single point of failure.
obvious advantages and obvious disadvantages in case of a nuclear fallout.
Really? 2 months ago, which would have been the safer investment? A wall street investment bank, that had been in business for 158 years, with 26,000 employees or video game company that's been around 12 years and has 150 employees. Well if you'd said Lehman Brothers, you'd look pretty stupid today, wouldn't you? So yeah. If one of the worlds largest investment banks can tank in less than a year, despite a conspicuous lack of nuclear fallout, what on earth makes you think Valve is impervious to harm short of nuclear fallout? You don't really need nukes to cause a company to tank, give them enough rope, they'll hang themselves.It's not like video game publishers haven't gone bankrupt ever. In fact generally speaking the video game market is a lot more volatile than the investment market, and you can bet your government isn't going to spend 700 billion dollars, and then some just so you can keep playing Half-Life 2.