I dunno, I like Steam for the fire-and-forget nature of reinstalling my gaming life after a computer upgrade or reinstall, that’s worth all the minor inconveniences for me.
I’m working with the seller, who is being extremely helpful, and so I’m not really upset with him or her.
I have been out of the loop when it comes to PC gaming for the last several years so I have never used Steam. How does it work? Do you have to be connected online all the time when you play the game or just once to register it the first time? In truth all the shenanigans associated with PC gaming are just keeping me from bothering with the newer games at all. Especially since I have a dozen or so perfectly decent games from 5-10 years ago which I haven’t played that much. I think my most recent game is Civilization 4; fortunately that works without any problems and given my limited gaming time could probably last me several years.
Once installed and registered, you can play a game in offline mode. I had to play Football Manager 2009 like that for a while because Steam wouldn’t connect. I’m not sure if you lose any functionality other than the inability to update the game.
When it’s working smoothly Steam is pretty nice, I’ll admit. It allows you to play games without messing around with CDs, it enables you to update games at the click of a button. It’s just a pain when you install a game and it has connection problems when registering and updating, which seems to happen to me quite often with CD installs (UK server).
It’s a massive improvement over Securom which doesn’t play well with my CD drive at all. If my CD drive goes idle for a few minutes it forgets there’s a disk in there and wont register it until I open and close it again. I don’t have, have never had, any CD cloning, copying or burning software installed. I use a USB stick for any kind of file transfer now.
Both do bugger all to stop piracy.
And I dislike it because it’s a fucking unnecessary inconvenience.
Seriously - you can only install games in the Steam directory. Want to spread them over different partitions ? Hmmm nope, no can do. Wanna move the directory because your disk is cramped ? Well shucks. Guess y’all have to uninstall every last one of your games and re-download them. Want to play offline ? Gotta jump through hoops, if the game is even willing to launch at all.
Oh, and the autopatching, too. I hate that. What if I liked that particular imbalance or bug or whatever ? What if my favorite mod doesn’t run with the new patch yet ? I’m bleeped in the bleeping bleep, that what.
And of course, it is one more supplier of spam, glorious spam. Like the was a serious shortage of that. Not only through the (junk) email adress you give when you register, but thanks to those awesome helpful “news !!” popups every time you launch a Steam game. I hate fucking Steam, I really do.
I agree that the concept of legit buying, downloading and playing a game in the space of one night is pretty cool and nifty, and does help against piracy in the sense of equivalent convenience, but the extraneous bullshit layed on top of that basic function still weighs heavily against Steam in my book. It’s leagues ahead of Secu “Ooops, I just nuked your CD drive and wrote shit in your BIOS, kthxbye !” Rom, Starforce and the likes, but still, I really, really hope a competitor shows up, soon.
Some kind of open source, free software, bare bones & no chrome alternative put together by a bunch of Linux geeks just to stick it to the man. That’d be truly glorious.
Hey - that sucks, man. I guess you could always not use it.
I’ve been using Steam for years without so much as a hitch, across several computers and I just finished moving my directory onto a new, spacious hard drive. E:TW runs as flawlessly for me as can be expected.
Dead Badger has it pretty spot on - it’s more a matter of convenience than conscience. Purchasing a game on Steam means it’ll download 2Mb/s, work perfectly when it arrives, and instant gratification is worth the $50.
For those saying Steam doesn’t prevent piracy - well, there probably aren’t too many cracked copies of Team Fortress 2 online right now.
Pardon my french, but that’s a shit argument. There weren’t many cracked copies of Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2142 online either, Steam or no Steam. And not of WoW or any other game that relies on online servers, because, duh, they are played on un-cracked SERVERS.
There’s loads of cracked Half-life 2 copies out there, however. Which pretty much ruins your argument.
I refused one of my Winterfest gifts because I really didn’t want to deal with the BS. Seriously. I told my daughter that she needed to return this game and get her money back, because I lose my patience readily enough when I install something that doesn’t require a BSc in information technology.
Yes, I did thank her for the thought she put into the gift. It did sound like something I would really enjoy. I just didn’t want the hassle.
Glad I read this thread. That’s one permanently lost sale from me and i’ve been a fan of the TW series since the day of Shogun’s release.
I will stick with Civilization thanks- I have no need for the BS.
I love Steam. I hate going to stores and I hate buying superfluous boxed crap that I don’t want or need. I hate wanky $110-$120 “collectors editions” with cheap useless toys and gimmicky half-arsed artwork/maps/whatever, and I particularly hate it when the retailer only stocks them instead of the regular editions.
The prices on Steam are pretty damn good compared to retail stores, most of the time half price and the download at 2 MB/s means I generally get the game pretty quickly. Plus it manages all updates and patches. Love it. All in all Steam has increased my game buying habits massively - I’ve bought aboutt 20 games (via Steam) in the last 6 months compared to 5 from stores in the previous 4 years.
Having said that, I think it’s totally stupid for the makers of your game to sell a boxed retail version that depends on Steam. It completely ignores 99% of the reason to use Steam in the first place. Don’t hate Steam, hate the moron publishers and even more so, hate the scumbag you cheated you out of money by selling it “secondhand”.
Steam isn’t cheap for those of us in the UK. Empire: Total War is £40 on Steam, I paid £30 for a retail copy on the day of release, it’s £25 on Amazon atm. Drakensang is £30 on Steam, £18 on Play.co.uk. Football Manager is £30 on Steam, £18 on Amazon. Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2 is £35 on Steam, £22 on Amazon. Those are just the last 4 games I purchased.
Steam constantly charges £30-£40 for new releases, I’ve never paid more than £30 in a shop.
I will spread my hate around (there’s plenty of it, and I can make more as needed) but I think that the “scumbag” was innocent in this case. He is, after all, trying to work this out with the OP.
Just this week I discovered that I liked an author, by buying one of his novels secondhand. I also discovered that I didn’t like another author, again from a secondhand purchase. I liked Civ III, so I bought Civ IV. Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by discouraging or eliminating the secondhand market. And, of course, as I said earlier, I will just have to manage to get along without any software that comes with Steam.
I will chime in with the Steam hate too. I remember buying the boxed half life 2 at gamestop and coming home to find out I had to download some files from steam and decrypt or some such. of course my cable was out. I had to wait 2 days till I got my cable back to install and play.
I never got that piece of shit steam to run offline either, which meant I could not play a single player game unless I was connected online. even after checking the box that supposedly let you do that. I finally said fuck it got the cracked copy and enjoyed my game. and just cus they pissed me off I pirated episode 2.
Why you would need an online connection for single player game is beyond me. and dont give me that shit “oh it just registers your game and then you don’t have to be online” bullshit more times than not steam throws a hissy fit it can not find a connection. I suppose if you are connected all the time it is great, but I am not and don’t see why I should be for a freakin’ single player game.
A note: Yeah, there’s plenty of cracked WoW around. You never heard of a private server?