steam hate, why?

[Jamash]

3) its not hypocrisy, you cant possibly compare a ridiculous DRM box that required you to call microsoft every single day so it wouldnt fucking unplug your console, i can set steam to offline mode from now until the heat death of the universe and i will still be able to play my games, oh and heres the real kicker, microsoft wanted to CHARGE YOU 60 BUCKS FOR THE FUCKING PRIVILEDGE.

Where are you getting this from?

Microsoft doesn't charge $60 to connect your console to the Internet or Xbox Live, and they never have done (they even supply you with either a free Ethernet cable or built in wireless so you don't have to pay extra to connect your console to Xbox Live).

Do you have some proof that Microsoft's 24 hour check in for the Xbox One also included a $60 charge for pinging a couple of hundred KB of data to Microsoft's servers once a day (or once every time you switched it on if you don't use it daily)?

 

[Eddie the head]

3. Download speeds are slow and inconsistent (this is likely a regional problem)

Maybe, but I've notice on my computer both Origin and Uplay download faster and with less lag. Could be where I live as well though.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

The idea that an update came out of nowhere and broke your game when the devs are dead makes no sense.

I was talking about a steam update breaking a game, not a game update.

 

[shintakie10]

Just read the article and it stated due to the games always on DRM(not Steam) the game was nonfunctional, even the single player component didn't work. Its pretty understandable for them to remove the game then. Not perfect, but understandable.

Personally I see where you are coming from with your arguments. I don't agree, but I see where you are coming from. In sort of order of the things you dont like.

However if there was a single player part and the only thing stopping you was the authorization required, you could easily have found ways to get around that so you can still play the single player part of your game.

On topic!

My issue with Steam is the lack of refunds garbage. They, and Uplay, are the only ones that have jack all for a refund policy unless public outcry is so incredibly loud that they can't not give refunds. Example! Buy a broken game. One of the many that Steam sells that is absolutely broken and doesn't work, like old games (say ones that GoG sells?) that would need a shit ton of tinkering to get to work. Then ask for a refund. You get checklists of garbage that they tell you to do to get the game to work. If you still can't get the game to work, too bad you're out 5-10 bucks.

Meanwhile at GoG. I buy a game and it works because they actually update the games to friggin work on new computers. I double click the exe and blamo! Playin. However! If a game doesn't work I get my money back, no questions (well, maybe 1 question) asked.

Meanwhile at Amazon. I buy a digital game and it works, but I don't enjoy it at all. I ask for a refund. Guess what happens? I get a refund, then and there. I've even gotten a 5 dollar credit on top of the refund simply because I didn't enjoy the game.

Back to Steam! I'm still tryin to get refunds for games that clearly do not work under any circumstances, let alone for a game I may not have enjoyed or that had purposely deceptive marketing on the store page that had dick all to do with the game.

 

[Doom-Slayer]

However if there was a single player part and the only thing stopping you was the authorization required, you could easily have found ways to get around that so you can still play the single player part of your game.

Technically though, that would probably fall under piracy/DRM bypassing etc etc(its a grey area) and would be unauthorized. Steam would never endorse it, so from their perspective they either have a dead game that people cannot legitimately play, or they remove it. I say they made the right call, but they probably should of done something to reimburse customers.

 

[Vivi22]

I always find the quality control complaint to be pretty humorous. Largely because there's really nothing in the way of quality control on consoles either, and they certainly don't warn you on the box when there's massive performance issues. But when Steam suffers from the exact same thing we've been dealing with for decades on all platforms it foretells the end of gaming as we know it.

Never mind the fact that Valve has taken action when they became aware of severe problems with titles in the past. Which is literally more than we can say about any other platform owner. Literally none of the others ever do anything.

 

[Tayh]

First and foremost, haters will find a way to hate things. It's the way they are. Before the past couple months, most complaints about steam were petty and just excuses to hate them. That changed a couple months ago.

Please don't assume to speak for everyone.

As for me, I hate steam for getting in-between me and my games. It's just an unnecessary complication, and I don't care for all its "social networking" crap or achievements.
It's incredibly hard to find legitimate game copies without steam drm these days, which only serves to increase my annoyance at steam and developers alike - which is sort of funny, because steam is absolutely worthless as actual drm, yet developers keep using steam as their one, exclusive publisher.
There's also the thing where valve tries to control entire communities, or at best, split them up, what with steam workshop and closed communities/chat-service doing their best to exclude any alternatives. See FO:NV/Skyrim: Nexus vs steam workshop, or Civ5: pre-established modding community vs steam workshop.

Also, if I buy a retail game, don't make me have to install steam in order to play it. And don't make me download the game through steam WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE ON THE BLOODY DISC. If you do this, I will hate your dev studio forever and never buy another of your games.

Fuck drm. And fuck that gaben the Tyrant.
And don't even get me started on the fanboys. Those are the worst.

 

[Vivi22]

There's also the obvious risk of hackers stealing my data, that they conveniently store in a cloud for them(the bloody fools).

The odds of you losing your personal data to simple social engineering attempts to access it on the part of hackers is astronomically higher than the likelihood someone will actually be able to hack into their system, steal the data, and decrypt it in less time than it takes for both them and you to die.

4) I like to have full ownership of my games, not some "licenced" crap. After I'm done with it I want to be able to sell it at a used game store or a garage sale or give it to my friends without going through the hassle of "gifting" it via Steam.

The sad reality is that by law, you only have a license to every game you own. You don't own a copy of any of them. And you haven't been able to sell used copies of the majority of PC games for at least a decade.

6) it pushes commercials in my face every time I boot it up: "buy this 10 year old wank for just 2 euros, yeej!

You can literally turn that off in the settings and using small mode prevents you from ever having to see the store page at all. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to complain about Steam, but at least look through the options before you do. That readily solves a number of problems people have with it.

7) the constant updates stopping me from using it for a few hours every week

I don't know where you live or how shitty your internet is, but you can set when Steam updates to specific times during the day, such as when you're asleep. You can also prevent any game you want from automatically updating. Again, it's as simple as a click of the settings menu and some changes in the game properties settings.

8) It promotes a lazy attitude among developers. Used to be they'd have to release a functional game, now they just release some Day One Patch, because hey everyone is forced to connect to the Internet anyway right? (Arkham Origins and Rome Total War 2 come to mind...) Why would we bother selling a finished product?

Patches were no less common before Steam. Let's not take a revisionist view of PC gaming history please. As long as the internet has been common, so have patches. The difference is that now you don't have to go to a half dozen different sites to update the games you play regularly. That's a straight up improvement in my book.

2) sales: I couldn't care less, most of those games I can fish out of a budget bucket at my local game store for roughly the same price. And most of those games on sale are broken and/or old as fuck anyway.

Games that are as old as just a few months regularly go on sale on Steam at deep discounts, especially during Steam sales. I've seen brand new titles not even a month old pop up for as little as $10-20 during flash sales. And perhaps you're lucky enough to have an actual bargain bin you can fish some of these games out from, but last I checked, most of us who prefer playing a game on PC have a hard enough time finding stores that sell physical copies of new games. Bargain bins for PC games are basically non-existent for some very obvious reasons.

 

[Vivi22]

And fuck that gaben the Tyrant.

Haha! Tyrant. It's so cute when people misuse words.

 

[Therumancer]

A lot of people dislike STEAM because it's a form of DRM and has helped legitimize the whole digital marketplace and removing the control gamers had over their own property. Even when you buy a disc nowadays it usually just connects you to something like STEAM where it requires you to download the game from them after entering a code, the game not actually being contained on the disc (or at least not playable from it).

For all of the great sales and such, the bottom line is that using STEAM makes you dependent on STEAM. What's more as other people have pointed out STEAM, which now has millions of users that are pretty much tied to it from previous sales, has done some very ambigious things, like opening the crap floodgates through their Greenlight program which they decided to run without quality control.

What's more while Gabe promises that if STEAM ever goes down he'll find a way to ensure people can access all of their games/software without requiring it, the bottom line is that is STEAM ever dies, it will likely have spent all of it's efforts trying to save itself, not ensuring that customers are taken care of after it's death. It's just realistic. So this much-mentioned safeguard to STEAM dependency seems kind of unlikely.

Personally I use STEAM a lot, I prefer "disc in hand", but as far as needing a service for today's digital world I use them, and keep using them because I like to keep all my games and such in one place if I'm going to have to do things this way, as opposed to needing to login to a dozen different services. That said I do understand the haters and the reasons.

 

[bug_of_war]

-Ive never had to get a refund because I have never bought a game I dislike(I have over 200 games).

Just thought I jump in here and point out that people don't get refunds just because they don't like games. There are some situations where games do no work, and because of that people deserve to get their money back as the product they purchased was faulty. I have 2 personal example of Steam selling me a faulty game. The first was Sniper Ghost Warrior, I bought it through steam, downloaded it and then the game just did not work. At all. Black screen for a few seconds then just immediate x out to the desktop. There were no mods or fixes to it, it was legitimately a broken product and it took me 2 months to finally get a refund, a long with an email stating, "This is the one and only time we will do this for your account". The second game was Vampire the Masquerade, it was steam holiday sales and I was bored, so I looked at the list of games for 5 dollars and found a game that as far as the steam page showed was fun and easy to play. It wasn't until after I purchased it and tried opening it did I realise that the game did not fucking work at all. When I looked around to see why it was broken I found out I had to download a mod to make the game playable. I'm sorry, but that is fucked, Steam's lack of quality control insured that people would waste their money on paying for a broken product which they themselves had to then figure out how to get it working. It's like paying for dinner at a restraunt and then getting raw food and told that I have to cook it. So yeah, whilst this hasn't effected you at least have the understanding that people want the ability to get a refund so as that they feel safe when purchasing a game.

I don't hate Steam or Valve, I find Steam to be about as good as Origin (you know, that thing that EA which has a refund/returns policy). The problem I have with Steam is that they seem to get most of their good praise simply because they have cheap games sometimes. People gloss over their average/crappy features and it's basically a reversal of what people do to EA.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

I played Kotor 2 and played it through Steam. I tried playing it last week, so many issues, it wouldnt load and Steam passed the buck. Sorry but when i buy something, i expect it to work. Wasnt this the whole point with PC? Took me ages to find out a way to fix and play it which now seems only without cut scenes. What bullshit. If a shop sold a faulty game, the shop is responsible. Its why i stick with gog. Once you download the game, its yours. With steam, there is bullshit DRM and you dont own it, just like with Kotor 2, i bought it but couldnt play it.

 

[Tiger King]

I don't dislike steam, but I hate how if you click a catagory, say...RPG and scroll through the list and select a game you think looks interesting, if you then go back to the list of games you have to start from the top and click 'show more'.

Is this just me being rubbish at being a pc user or does anyone agree with me?

Otherwise I have no problems with steam. It's leaps and bounds ahead of Xbox live (where games that have been out for years are still tacked at full price!)

 

[DoPo]

1) I don't want some shady American company to have my personal and/or bank account data. USA laws for corporations are practically non-existent and online companies especially have been reported numerous times as directly giving data to the NSA. There's also the obvious risk of hackers stealing my data, that they conveniently store in a cloud for them(the bloody fools).

You can decide to not save your payment details.

3) It's a fucking resource hog, I've actually had to block it in every way possible on my computer, to avoid it using unnecessary bandwidth and RAM

I can't find anything legit to post about the resource sucking part but know that it is always running in the background, even if you haven't opened the program, and consumes approximately 17,960K (+/- 3K) memory while running in the background on my rig.

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.

6) it pushes commercials in my face every time I boot it up: "buy this 10 year old wank for just 2 euros, yeej!

As it has been explained, you can turn this off. It is an option. It has always been an option.

 

[Elfgore]

snip

I never said I spoke for everyone, I spoke for myself and my opinions. I also said MOST complaints, not all.

Your points are actually examples of perfectly fine complaints.

 

[Zipa]

I played Kotor 2 and played it through Steam. I tried playing it last week, so many issues, it wouldnt load and Steam passed the buck. Sorry but when i buy something, i expect it to work. Wasnt this the whole point with PC? Took me ages to find out a way to fix and play it which now seems only without cut scenes. What bullshit. If a shop sold a faulty game, the shop is responsible. Its why i stick with gog. Once you download the game, its yours. With steam, there is bullshit DRM and you dont own it, just like with Kotor 2, i bought it but couldnt play it.

I hate to say it but it sounds like a hardware issue to me not a Valve issue, I have KOTOR 2 on Steam and other than it running in a smaller resolution than id like because of its age it works just as fine as when I owned the physical copy when it first came out. You may just be unfortunate with KOTOR 2, I have had similar experiences with other games where friends can run it but my PC refused to.

OT: I like Steam and it is worthy of its throne, they made PC gaming relevant again in a time when everyone from Microsoft to publishers were abandoning ship like crazy.

It doesn't mean it is perfect though, none of the digital distribution platforms are, Steam need;


They need a refund policy of some kind like Origin's.

They need better QC of what is put on the system, I have been watching Jim Sterling play a few of them and they range from shit to downright unplayable.

They need to have a separate tab for new releases and old games from like the early 2000s and so on being released for the first time on Steam, often these games are pushing down the new releases on the store front.

Regional pricing needs doing properly, the $1 = 1 of local currency is unacceptable.

They need to get better at support tickets.

There are more I am sure but those are the ones that come to mind.

Also what are you people using Steam on if it is hogging resources, its using 43 Meg on my pc as I type this. ( I have friends chat open so its not idling)

 

[Laughing Man]

as we all know steam is one of the best things to happen to PC gaming, and is almost universally loved for being an all around awesome digital distribution platform... and yet theres still people who hate it for some reason

That first statement is the reason why, but let me be clear, I do not hate Steam but given how long it has been in the game, how long it has been about the platform should be a much much better than it is.

The question why people hate Steam is fairly obvious, their are a good number of reasons to hate or dislike the service.

- It's slow, pathetically slow compared to just about every other DD service out there. I am not taling about actual download speeds, though they can be heavily affected. I am talking about the interface the navigation it is all so horrible and to think anyone would use this service as their launch platform (the Steamboxes) I just can't understand why anyone would do that.

- It's not exactly stable, watch what happens whenever any sort of Sale occurs, the entire system goes tits up and stays at tits up station during certain key times for the duration of those sales (i.e when the sales update)

- It's bloated, both in terms of the amount of junk that can be bought over it but also in terms of the amount of total wank that has been added; trading cards, steam achievements fucking please!

- When was the interface actually given ANY sort of major overhaul? To date I can think of 3 significant updates, the original launch , the switch to the current interface and the addition of big picture. If it was perfect then fine but it isn't so 3 significant updates in over a decade is frankly pathetic.

The reasons to not like Steam are quite clear the question should be why do some people think Steam is the best thing ever to happen to PC, why do they defend it to the hilt even when the flaws are obvious.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

I played Kotor 2 and played it through Steam. I tried playing it last week, so many issues, it wouldnt load and Steam passed the buck. Sorry but when i buy something, i expect it to work. Wasnt this the whole point with PC? Took me ages to find out a way to fix and play it which now seems only without cut scenes. What bullshit. If a shop sold a faulty game, the shop is responsible. Its why i stick with gog. Once you download the game, its yours. With steam, there is bullshit DRM and you dont own it, just like with Kotor 2, i bought it but couldnt play it.

I hate to say it but it sounds like a hardware issue to me not a Valve issue, I have KOTOR 2 on Steam and other than it running in a smaller resolution than id like because of its age it works just as fine as when I owned the physical copy when it first came out. You may just be unfortunate with KOTOR 2, I have had similar experiences with other games where friends can run it but my PC refused to.

OT: I like Steam and it is worthy of its throne, they made PC gaming relevant again in a time when everyone from Microsoft to publishers were abandoning ship like crazy.

It doesn't mean it is perfect though, none of the digital distribution platforms are, Steam need;


They need a refund policy of some kind like Origin's.

They need better QC of what is put on the system, I have been watching Jim Sterling play a few of them and they range from shit to downright unplayable.

They need to have a separate tab for new releases and old games from like the early 2000s and so on being released for the first time on Steam, often these games are pushing down the new releases on the store front.

Regional pricing needs doing properly, the $1 = 1 of local currency is unacceptable.

They need to get better at support tickets.

There are more I am sure but those are the ones that come to mind.

Also what are you people using Steam on if it is hogging resources, its using 43 Meg on my pc as I type this. ( I have friends chat open so its not idling)

No, it played fine before. Then a few months later it didnt work and would shut off at the start screen. Had to search for ways to fix it online. Also Steam only deals with valve games. Anything else it passes the buck to other companies like disney for Kotor. Now On the site steam sent me their is no area to get help for kotar 2. So fuck steam. I buy from steam, then its their responsibility, especially when the game worked find last time i played it. I fixed the issue but still, Steam screwed up though it is the only problem ive had so could just be the cross over when disney bought SW.

Only other thing with steam is prices, Gog dont have the massive amount of games as Steam. But they are DRM free and cheaper in comparison. Its why i bought the Soul Reaver games there.