steam hate, why?

[Whispering Cynic]

so even if steam didnt exist publishers would use other kinds of DRM on their game, lets just be grateful secuROM and other kinds of abusive DRM are right now practically dead

To be perfectly honest, I'll rather deal with Securom than Steam. When Steam shuts down, a Securom protected game will still work. The one using Steamworks won't.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

so even if steam didnt exist publishers would use other kinds of DRM on their game, lets just be grateful secuROM and other kinds of abusive DRM are right now practically dead

To be perfectly honest, I'll rather deal with Securom than Steam. When Steam shuts down, a Securom protected game will still work. The one using Steamworks won't.

this is a joke correct?

steam has existed for over 10 years, if you had bought HL2 via steam 10 years ago, itd still work today, if HL2 had securom instead and during those 10 years you had installed that game more than 4 times, youd be screwed (numbers of activations vary for each game, but spore, for instace, had 4)


im baffled, you are entitled to your opinion, but this is simply ridiculous, not only is securom much more restrictive than steam, but it offers no benefit to the end user

we dont know if your steamworks games will ever stop working, but we do know a securom game WILL stop working eventually, unless they invent PC parts that last forever

 

[cypher-raige]

I remember PC gaming in 2007/2008.
PC gaming was dying according to the industry.
Piracy was a huge problem according to developers.
Games were riddled with awful DRM.
Online games were a nightmare because each server had a different update/patch installed.
Online games required a different set of login details for every game.
Unless you played WoW, you were gonna have a bad time.
I could go on.

 

[Allspice]

so even if steam didnt exist publishers would use other kinds of DRM on their game, lets just be grateful secuROM and other kinds of abusive DRM are right now practically dead

To be perfectly honest, I'll rather deal with Securom than Steam. When Steam shuts down, a Securom protected game will still work. The one using Steamworks won't.

this is a joke correct?

steam has existed for over 10 years, if you had bought HL2 via steam 10 years ago, itd still work today, if HL2 had securom instead and during those 10 years you had installed that game more than 4 times, youd be screwed (numbers of activations vary for each game, but spore, for instace, had 4)


im baffled, you are entitled to your opinion, but this is simply ridiculous, not only is securom much more restrictive than steam, but it offers no benefit to the end user

we dont know if your steamworks games will ever stop working, but we do know a securom game WILL stop working eventually, unless they invent PC parts that last forever

Not all games with Securom limit the amount of times you can install the game, some use it only to check for the disk.

OT: I like Steam for the most part. My problems with it have been outlined by multiple people already, so I'm not going to bother typing them out.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

so even if steam didnt exist publishers would use other kinds of DRM on their game, lets just be grateful secuROM and other kinds of abusive DRM are right now practically dead

To be perfectly honest, I'll rather deal with Securom than Steam. When Steam shuts down, a Securom protected game will still work. The one using Steamworks won't.

this is a joke correct?

steam has existed for over 10 years, if you had bought HL2 via steam 10 years ago, itd still work today, if HL2 had securom instead and during those 10 years you had installed that game more than 4 times, youd be screwed (numbers of activations vary for each game, but spore, for instace, had 4)


im baffled, you are entitled to your opinion, but this is simply ridiculous, not only is securom much more restrictive than steam, but it offers no benefit to the end user

we dont know if your steamworks games will ever stop working, but we do know a securom game WILL stop working eventually, unless they invent PC parts that last forever

Not all games with Securom limit the amount of times you can install the game, some use it only to check for the disk.

OT: I like Steam for the most part. My problems with it have been outlined by multiple people already, so I'm not going to bother typing them out.

uhmm i didnt know that

 

[Strelok]

Not all games with Securom limit the amount of times you can install the game, some use it only to check for the disk.

OT: I like Steam for the most part. My problems with it have been outlined by multiple people already, so I'm not going to bother typing them out.

Not only that, Securom will, when un-installing a game online, revoke the install and re-credit it back to the CD key used, there is no need for an account.

 

[Iwata]

My problem with Steam is simple, and something I've mentioned in this forum before: as bad as other things are, as good as Steam might generally be, it holds the particular distinction of being the sole program to ever rob me of my video games.

Here's what happened: a few years ago, I was a hardcore PC gamer. I'd been gaming on the PC since the early 90's, and nothing seemed like it was going to change that. When Steam came along, it was heaven sent. I raved about it to my friends, and instantly fell in love with it. But I kept buying physical copies of games, as I like having the discs on my shelves. I am also staunchly anti-piracy.

One day, I moved from my home to a new location. It took me a couple of weeks to sign back into Steam, and when I did, I got a warning saying my account had been 'suspended'. What followed was a story of incompetence and corporate vagueness so bad it literally drove me off PC gaming for years!

I sent tech support an email asking why my account had been suspended. They told me nothing useful; the account had been suspended. That was quite literally it. I insisted on the matter, and got copy/pasted replies from previous vague e-mails and in a couple of cases, I even got blank e-mails with just the signature that usually goes at the bottom and nothing else. The only noticeable difference was that at one stage they stopped saying 'suspended' and switched to 'deactivated'.

I offered to take photos of my games and CD keys, in case that was the issue, but nothing came of it. I even contacted the developers of a couple of the games directly to see if they could help (Relic and Creative Assembly), but even they told me there was nothing they could do.

After a few months of this, I just gave up. Not just Steam, but PC gaming altogether. I bought a PS3 shortly afterwards, and I have only recently (a couple of weeks ago, in fact) returned to the PC for my games. I never found out why my account was suspended. I recently found the ticket for my issue and decided to check it out out of curiosity, but it's not even valid any more.

I understand why people love Steam. It's convenient. It has awesome sales. But to me, the reality is, Steam robbed me of hundreds of ??? of legally-bought games as surely as if they had come into my home and took them off the shelf. As bad as EA, Activision and other companies are, Steam (and Valve) are the only ones that hold that dubious distinction. And although I have to use it these days (I quite literally have no choice on the matter), I'm always paranoid that my games simply aren't safe anymore and might be arbitrarily taken away at a moment's notice.

Again.

And you might say 'oh, but that's extremely rare and you were just unlucky', and that might be the case. But I'd argue that also gives me some unique perspective into the matter.

So when you were suspended you lost access to your games? If so, then a Ban would be the same I'm guessing, though permanent. I'm also guessing tat t deactivated account is one that is dissolved essentially.

Steam is a service. When you are suspended or "banned", you loose access to all of your games. Valve explicitly has a policy not to tell the reasons behind a suspension or a "ban". Your only hope is the courts or arbitration.

Exactly. but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst was how arbitrary it all felt, and how vague their justifications were.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

I remember PC gaming in 2007/2008.
PC gaming was dying according to the industry.
Piracy was a huge problem according to developers.
Games were riddled with awful DRM.
Online games were a nightmare because each server had a different update/patch installed.
Online games required a different set of login details for every game.
Unless you played WoW, you were gonna have a bad time.
I could go on.

dark days indeed, the PC master race still remembers the sacrifice our tribal PC gaming ancestors endured during that time, games famines, shitty console ports plagues and abusive DRM sickness

 

[Magmarock]

I remember PC gaming in 2007/2008.
PC gaming was dying according to the industry.

The games industry is the last entirety I would turn to for advice when it comes to the future of technology and culture.

It's bad enough with mini crashes such as Guitar Hero and gimmicky fads that go nowhere such as motion controls let alone telling what the bloody future is going to be.

What I'm saying is that the companies that have been saying these types of things owe their success to mostly dumb luck and not careful busyness planing.


Also I don't think piracy as is big a problem as they make it out to be. I'm not gong to advocate pricy in anyway but I'm am going to share with you a little common fact.

When it comes to the torrenting of TV show vs games, the games industry will often say they are worse affected. I can't remember the exact reason but it doesn't matter. Point is most torrrent video games are never finished. Most of the time people who torrent games don't even make it pas the half way point. They play it for about an hour or so before moving to some other game they pirated. The only games they invest their time into are ones they've paid for because they're the only ones they see value in. However a pirated TV show such as Game of Thrones will always get watched.


The Games industry said PC gaming was dying not because it that way, it was because the industry WANTS! it to die. They see it as a threat and it simply offers too much freedom to gamers and the industry doesn't like that.

Sorry for such a long reply to a short comment but I had a lot way to.

Dont worry, Im not picking on you or saying you dont like Steam What I am saying is, getting a refund, it should be fairly difficult or instead, be a case by case sort of thing because the actual times where refunds are justified, is really rare.

Take for example the new Thief that came out. I got it, got to the first mission, attempted to pickpocket a guy and got a hard crash to desktop. I made a new save, I tried every graphics settings, windowed, borderless mode, I tried almost everything.

BUT. I went to the forums, I found only a single person with the same problem and the thread disappeared pretty quickly under the weight of hundreds of other players who it worked fine for. Based on that, I immediately knew it was my PC that had the problem not the game. Posted another thread on the issue in the Bugs section, had a Thief dev reply and ask me for logs/specs, told me my graphics driver was out of date. Updated it, fixed the problem.

Thats what I see as the issue. There are very very few times where a refund is actually justified where the GAME is actually broken. So Steam does it mostly on a case by case basis, and because people are misusing it, it gets bogged down and doesn't work as well as it should.

Actually that is a very good point. The Steam forums aren't very well organized. making it very hard to find what you need. Check out GOG to see how it's done right. Lol long reply to short post followed by short reply to a long post. What has the world come to.

Well the idea that Steam is the best thing to happen to PC gaming, is damaging. That kind of mentality is why so many indie developers have trouble selling their game if they can't get it on Steam. Aside from that, Steam has a borderline monopoly on PC gaming, which is not a good thing, plus there's the fact that you don't own any of your Steam games. You're borrowing all your Steam games and if they ever decide they don't like you anymore or if the service somehow goes under, you lose all those games and will not be getting any money back. Finally, there's no quality control anymore and Steam is getting flooded with the kind of crap that you would expect to see selling for $2 at Target

I pretty much agree with this 100% say what you want about Origin, but I'm glade it exist to loosen Steam grip on the PC market.

 

[Sarge034]

Spoiler: Wall of text/ four different replies

ALL THOSE 17MEG MEMORY! ALL OF IT! GONE!

I think that you're suffering over this much memory being used, Steam would not be the problem here. I feel somebody has to say it and it might as well be me - your calculator would sadly need to be replaced with a working PC. My first PC from a dozen years ago wouldn't choke on that, so I somehow doubt anything reasonable modern should.

I was just showing the usage before I even opened the program, but the real resource sucking part is your bandwidth. Steam is constantly checking for updates and doing whatever else it does so this results is diminished performance in other online activities and a significant increase in overall bandwidth usage. Funny how you left that bit out of the quote...

did i say anything even remotely similar? im a programmer id never dare say anything so stupid

But you did.

1) i can understand how this can be problematic, theres no real reason for devs to do this, other than to make it easy to update one single version of the game and have feature parity as well as saving time thanks to the services steam provides, things like cloud saving and achivements

Last I checked you would have slightly different code for all of the OS. So either you are saying the code will run on any OS if coded for Steam or there is only one OS worth coding for. Given that the context of your statement was that Steam was required for hard copies for ease of updating it would almost certainly have to be the former.

but take for instance, what about games that use steamworks for matchmaking and/or hacking protection? some devs arent willing to support 2 versions of a game

theres other stuff like the achivements that i mentioned, and believe some people care about those, and some people do care about cloud saving, i find it very helpful that every time i install my games on a new PC my old saves are there as well, some devs want all the versions of their game to have the exact same features, its THEIR problem to include steamworks or not, nobody is forcing them, they could support 2 versions of the game like some indie devs do

you seem to be so lost in your own defensiveness you didnt realize I DID NOT DEFEND THIS PRACTICE

"i can understand how this can be problematic, theres no real reason for devs to do this"

how about you stop your ridiculous flammatory speech and make an actual argument or atleast put yourself in the shoes of the people who enjoy steam's features, just like i can understand someone who is agaisnt DRM because of principles

I made my stand a few posts back and you felt the need to change my mind, but it is kindda funny to watch as others correct what you type through your rose tinted glasses. Achievements are a strawman, plain and simple. Xbox Live, PSN, and WoW support achievements among many others. Hell, Nintendo doesn't have an achievement system and some games on the Wii and the DS have implemented their own systems. Similarly, Steam is not the only game in town with "da cloudz".

you do realize that game was pulled off because of its always online requirement right? steam had little to do with that

or maybe you think every single form of DRM is the same, and stuff like, say securom, which allows your game to be installed only on a limited number of machines is equal to steam which allows you to install your games in as many machines as you damn well please

So please show me how MS can come in and steal my copy of Halo 2 because they shut down the servers. Or how Blizzard can delete StarCraft (1) and/or WarCraft 3 from my hard drive when they decide to shut down their prospective servers. So how bout you address the issue instead of doing the "valve shuffle" around it?

"2. LICENSES

A. General Software License

Steam and your Subscription(s) require the automatic download and installation of Software onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a limited, terminable, non-exclusive license and right to use the Software for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms) in accordance with this Agreement, including the Subscription Terms. The Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Software. To make use of the Software, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet." http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/


We don't own shit.

nope, it works almost flawlessly, maybe yiou should do some research before speaking agaisnt something

So you're telling me Steam always had the offline mode? Or are we omitting the fact that Steam was just as draconian as Xbone DRM not too long ago?

i have a question for you, do you actually read my posts before commenting? did you by any chance miss the "free" part? or stuff like, the workshop, big picture, community features, etc

Yes I did read your post. It sounded like you were touting all these features only Steam had and I put a swift end to that. As for being free. I guess it's just as free as Origin's cloud feature, as in all I have to do is download spyware onto my computer to use it.

the reason i also mentioned standard stuff like achivements and cloud saving, is because DRM free services like GOG.com dont offer that

The Witcher 2 was DRM free and it had achievements on the PC so... ?

steam manages to be free, relatively non-instrusive and feature-rich

Here's Valve's job listings. I'm sorry but they don't have a PR position open so you can stop trying so hard.
http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html

such as?

Such as reports of intentional and unintentional data mining and caching as found in a simple Google search if you were so interested.

oh hohoh i NEVER said the forums werent modded by the devs, but the REVIEWS, the stuff YOU complained about, cant be censored by the devs, and those have much more visibility than the forums, those are in the actual store page

It appears someone else already lit you up over this one. The revews were being sterilized on the game's page and they have since moved to the forums after being called out on it. Why do devs have the right to delete anything? Does Valve own Steam or do the devs?

wait, you complain about QC, right after you complained about valve removing a non-functional game from steam?

and no i have never asked for a refund on steam, not that i dont acknowledge that is an area that could be improved, but when i look at my 100+ legal game collection i couldnt have gotten otherwise, and the 200+ dollars ive made thanks to trading and the steam market i say, thanks valve, hell i even bought a part to fix the family van with the money i made via trading, so much for not owning my games haha

You probily shouldn't go around saying that too loud...

"G. Restrictions on Use of Software
[...]
You are entitled to use the Software for your own personal use, but you are not entitled to: (i) sell, grant a security interest in or transfer reproductions of the Software to other parties in any way, nor to rent, lease or license the Software to others without the prior written consent of Valve, except to the extent expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use)"

Now while I don't know what, if any, agreement you have with Valve but it sounds like you are selling your licenses if you are receiving money on top of trades...

errm no they are not, the spit is up to the content creators, so even if they used a tool made by developer X, they can choose to not give developer X a cent, this system also was not in place in the many years TF2 allowed for user created content to be sold on the store, and all the money comes from valve's split, not the content creator's

errm, yes they are. As soon as Valve enters into an agreement to sell the game on Steam they are, to a lesser degree, held accountable for the product. If Valve didn't make sure all IP laws were satisfied they could be named as a co-defendant for selling a game containing unlicensed "things" (drivers, graphics/sound engines, modules of any sort). The reason TF2 was ok was because Valve owns everything in TF2 and made it open source. IE, all IP laws were satisfied.

you didnt even know how the offline mode worked for christ's sake

I know how it did work. Something those enamored with Valve desperately wish to forget. How old is Steam? It came out in Beta in 2002 so that would make it 12 years old and offline mode wasn't implemented until late 2011 or early 2012. Should we have given the Xbone 9 or 10 years to evolve into something that wasn't a draconian piece of shit? no, then why dose Steam, and by extension Valve, get a free pass? That's the hypocrisy.

I like how you talk about being "truly informed", and don't bother to check up on your facts.

In addition, you DO in fact own the things that you bought with your money. You do not run Steam games from an external server - you have to download them to your hard-drive first. All of the games I have bought on Steam are either on my hard drive backed up on an external hard drive, or on their own in an external hard drive. And whether or not Valve is willing to admit it, Steam has REALLY shit DRM, and some games can be run without a Steam installation or connection just by using some simple admin account commands.

This is all I'm going to reply to because of this right here ^ (bolded)... Don't bring ignorant conjecture or brainwashed faith to a legal fight. The EULA wins every time...

"2. LICENSES

A. General Software License

Steam and your Subscription(s) require the automatic download and installation of Software onto your computer. Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a limited, terminable, non-exclusive license and right to use the Software for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms) in accordance with this Agreement, including the Subscription Terms. The Software is licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Software. To make use of the Software, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet." http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

Snip

Whoa whoa whoa there. I didn't say anything you have attributed to me. I think you deleted the wrong tag. Would you be so kind as to fix it please. Seeing such Steam praise attributed to me is rather infuriating actually...

 

[cypher-raige]

Oh and I forgot one last thing. You have people who are so irrationally paranoid about "not owning games bought with steam". If you're going to go with that logic, you're best of just not buying anything... At all.

Software isn't something that you own. Period.

Also digital copies of games, music, movies, books can't be resold as used or pre-owned for obvious reasons.