That’s true. I think the lack of competition has allowed Valve to drag it’s feet a bit. I mean we JUST got the ability to install games to other drives/directories.
I mean really?
Some good competition might snap them back into improving their service a bit. Unfortunately most attempts so far have been heavy handed and have fallen short, inciting nothing but scorn from most PC gamers.
No, they’re not, but they’re the closest thing there is to anyone being able to definitively say “We know they didn’t keep a copy of the game to play after they returned it” because Steam is, essentially, DRM and copy protection.
They do. For that matter, due to pricing, I rarely buy games through Steam these days even if they’re Steam activated. So I’m not really Team Valve here with this.
I just don’t think that someone’s inability to understand their computer or the terms of sale and then deciding it shouldn’t apply to them warrants a complaint to the BBB.
Stated system requirements are never accurate. They’re almost always too low for acceptable performance.
Of my 100 or so Steam games all but one cost me less than $10 and about half were $5 including the Bioshocks and Mass Effects. This would never have been possible from a brick and mortar business. I also cannot lose or damage these games. All in all its in my favor to use Steam.
Huh.
I’ve never had a problem with Steam before. I’ve used it to play dozens of games, mostly bought at a discount, some for hundreds of hours, all archived on one central service and always available. It’s been great for me, especially considering how much trouble I’ve had with CDs in the past. In fact, if you asked me to name a company that provides excellent service, I probably would have said, “Steam”. Because it is an excellent service, at least in my eyes. Had no idea so many people had a problem with it.
According to Steam’s site, there’s currently 4,854,876 “gamers online”. I won’t make the claim that every one of them is a happy gamer but 500-odd BB complaints is a vanishingly small percentage of 4.8 million (not even considering what the total people on Steam period is, not just right now).
you realize that making a refund isn’t just handing someone back their money and taking the product away? it’s gonna come with transaction costs and tons more bureaucracy
Boxed games with a plastic seal are a bit different from digital downloads that work across a service though.
I assume they care, as they’d lose a ton of my money with this policy, because I often play a game for a couple of hours, or even less, and decide I don’t care for it. Under their current policy, I know that’s a risk I’m willing to take, and I’ll explain why in a minute.
Yep, I’ve heard that too, and I figure I got a doozie of a refund, and I’m super-careful since that incident.
I think this is an excellent way to think about it. I used to be in the first-tier game market, but then I became a father, and now I’m in the discount game market. If I still had bags of money sitting around, maybe I’d be more interested in other game services. As it is, Steam offers me games for ridiculously cheap–I nearly never pay more than $10 for a game anymore, far less than I paid during the early nineties or in any other time period. Because they’re so cheap, I’m totally willing to put up with their crappy refund policy: it’s part and parcel of the service. I’d far rather they be able to keep offering dirt cheap prices and no refunds than have them able to offer refunds but charge normal prices for games.
Steam isn’t just a discount service, steam is the leading provider too. None of those other services are half as good as steam is. Steam is both the high quality and low cost outlet - I realize that’s so rare that it’s hard to consider, and you have to see it as a dichotomy.
Better customer service isn’t going to win anyone any significant market share. What percentage of people using it even require their customer services? I would imagine a tiny fraction. I’ve been using steam for almost a decade now and I’ve bought hundreds of games from them, and I’ve only had to use their customer service once, when their password reset function was screwy and I couldn’t log into my account.
It’s extremely unlikely any of the other online services will even come close to unseating steam, and customer service would be a plus but it won’t win over many people. Most people never use it.
I think Valve is one of the few corporations that’s actually good, by the way. They treat their people right, they treat their customers right, they put out high quality products, they’re very aggressive with pricing. The game publishing industry is full of nearly purely evil companies and Valve is a shining beacon in comparison.
I wish more games had demos frankly. I’ve saved myself countless hours of grief and many dollars by downloading demos to make sure they’ll play on my crappy system. The odd thing is that some games with listed requirements that look like they should never play on my system do so quite well and some games that look like I should be fine are impossible to run, so yeah, the listed specs aren’t the greatest.
I assume demos are a pretty good overhead cost to the development of a game but it’s darn nice to know for sure if it’ll run or not.
Actually, apparently the problem with demos is that games with demos, overall, sell less well than games without them, because the number of people who realize “Oh, hey, this game isn’t what I was looking for/any good” and then don’t buy it as the result of playing a demo outweighs the number of people who wouldn’t have bought the game, but tried the demo and then did buy it.
Basically, only people who are already interested in a game are going to play the demo, so it’s hard for it to generate interest. So you get a breakout that looks like this:
Game is bad, demo is bad: People don’t buy the game after playing the demo, and might have otherwise. Would’ve been better off not doing a demo.
Game is good, demo is bad: People don’t buy the game after playing the demo, and might have otherwise. Would’ve been better off not doing a demo.
Game is bad, demo is good: People buy the game! This is the “win” scenario for demos.
Game is good, demo is good: People buy the game, but probably would have anyway. And even then, some people probably decide it’s not what they want after all. This is a break even scenario.
So yeah. Unfortunately for us, demos aren’t really in the best interest of the developers. Sure, there are some cases where someone releases a really good demo and gets really good word of mouth they didn’t have before, it’s sortof a fringe case.
Don’t forget the weirdos who play the demo for years instead of buying the game. See: BF1942, UT2K4.
No, STEAM is crap. You may not be able to see a market for higher-tier service, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. it just means that everyone else sucks to badly to grab it.
Bwahahaha!
Seriously, Valve is evil. Or at least as evil as any other such organization. They treat customers horribly, have terrible tools, and love to force everyone to jump through their hoops. They bend over backwards to let publishers release shit, are happy to take anyone’s money for products they can’t use, and put up no fight to prevent additional idiotic DRM despite it being utterly useless. They won because they were first. It’s easy to to be the best when you have no competition.
To derail, what would you suggest such a ‘higher tier’ service have? I mean, I’d appreciate a slimmer footprint, and a better offline mode, but so far, Steam is actually ahead of me on providing things that I “want”; Their policy of sending me an email when stuff on my wish list goes on sale is devious but I can’t complain.
You might want to flesh out your point more. Just saying it’s crap is not a useful part of the conversation.
The steamworks community network goes down every other day for brief periods and that drives me nuts, but otherwise I’ve been entirely satisfied with steam. I’ve used it for a decade, I’ve got hundreds of games on there, and I’ve only had one snafu that ever required support and that got fixed.
Steamworks is a far better integrated platform than its competitors. Games for windows live is worse than nothing - nothing but hassle from that shit. Origin’s API is stupid - for example you need to run battlefield 3 on origin because it uses their API, except their API doesn’t actually do anything - it doesn’t even integrate your battlefield 3 friends list with your origin friends list - it’s just there to give a flimsy excuse to make the game an origin exclusive.
Steam is stable, runs well, is well organized, has a wide array of community features, makes staying current totally seamless, does a good job of leading you to games you might want or see what’s on sale, runs ridiculously great promotions constantly, allows developers to self-publish, gives industry-leading reimbursement rates even though their market position could allow them to charge more. They run an integrated mods workshop, discussion forums, a kickstarter-type community driven game selection process, etc.
It sounds like you’ve got a bug up your ass because you’re trying to run a modern game on a best buy computer or something and you think steam is at fault. Steam already is high tier - what competitor even comes close? What features is it lacking?
What horrible tools are you talking about? Steamworks is a free and open standard that even the smallest indy devs use regularly. Their source engine tools are regarded as some of the easiest and most powerful in all of gaming.
How are they supposed to prevent additional idiotic DRM if it’s built into the game? Let’s take company of heroes for an example, I play that all the time. Relic runs their own online service that does matchmaking, stat tracking, friends lists, etc. But also effectively DRM since your cd key was tied to your account. So I have to log in to relic online every time I launch the game. Was Valve supposed to demand that they go back and recode the entire game so that the steam version didn’t have relic online? Should they be in a separate ecosystem so that the people who had the steam version couldn’t do matchmaking with the people with the non-steam versions? Separate patching processes for the two different versions of the game? Steam is the bad guy for not forcing that to happen?
COH 2 is just going to use steamworks, because in 2013 it’s an option whereas in 2006 it wasn’t.
As far as taking anyone’s money for products they can’t use - I’ve never actually run into this problem despite owning hundreds of games. It makes me wonder what people are doing that they can’t run the games. Are they trying to run games well below the requirements? It would be nice if they gave refunds for unplayed products I guess, but it just seems like a situation that wouldn’t come up very often.
This is the internet. Being first isn’t what keeps steam where it is. Where is myspace now, for example? They’re first because they’re the best. Their API is the best, their price is the best, their client is the best. What’s even close?
Handful of ideas I came up with while writing this very post as I’m typing it right now:
(1) Integrated checks on computer hardware and match that with a likely profile for customers so they can be more sure they can play certain games.
(2) Better information about what a game is or does; More reliable linking to information and external data sources
(3) Much less hassle for gifts, friends and so forth.
(4) Occaisional freebies for customers.
(5) Stop using STEAM as a crappy web browser.
(6) Either banning external DRM/user checks or forcing integration, so you don’t have to have separate accounts - SenorBeef doesn’t understand is that you don’t evade Origin, GFWL, or whatever crap Ubi is using these days, by going on STEAM. You can choose not to buy those games, but that doesn’t get you anything extra.
(7) Allowing purchasers of older games to register them with your service (obviously that wouldn’t be directly profitable, but would be very convenient and might be enough alone to get users like me onboard).
(8) Clearer online/offline options. STEAM still has issues with that.
(9) Use counter-cyclical sales to beat STEAM at its own game.
(10) Game-by-game update options; not forced downloads to stay “current” when you don’t want to.
(11) Better download speeds; STEAM stifles its data flow and often will stop the stream entirely when it wants to.
(12) Better organization and more aggressive integration of mod opportunities.
(13) Multimedia services.
(14) Better indie support - despite Senorbeef’s apparent admiration for Greenlight, STEAM itself seems rather ashamed of it and is planning to get rid of it and/or replace it in some fashion.
I don’t really care to have a running argument on the subject, but it’s worth noting that both Microsoft and Sony arguably had superior platforms at one time, but did nothing with them. They could easily have taken the lead and simply didn’t invest anything. By completely laser-focusing on their core console demographic, they missed the huge opportunities outside that vision. STEAM doesn’t offer much in the way of actual service, and so there’s a significant potential market opportunity. However, all possible competitors are similarly blinded by the idea of doing a crap STEAM rip-off where they get to pimp their own games almost exclusively. There’s nothing inherent in Origin which means it can’t compete; EA simply doesn’t care to invest in doing so. While criticism of Ori is easy (and fun), it actually has several significant points in its favor. It could take over and become a market leader; EA won’t because they’re kinda idiots. Microsoft and Sony could build their tech into cross-platform services that mix multimedia, games, and multiplatform service/software ideas. They won’t because they’re blind to what’s happening outside their realities.
But there’s a substantial market opportunity for someone to take over.
For what, to protect you from yourself? It would only be an automated way of doing what the user already could do by simply looking at the system requirements. If you have a 1.8ghz dual core and a game says minimum 2.4ghz quad core, right there on the game page, is that really steam’s fault?
What sort of information do you need? It comes with a description, pictures and videos, a metacritic score with links to all the professional reviews, a list of your friends that play the games, all the DLC the game has, links to the game’s official website, links to the game manual, requirements, forums for the game, news/updates - what information is missing?
I have no idea how you’re having a hassle with gifts. You buy them and either select someone to gift it to from your friends list, an e-mail address, or just store it in your inventory for later.
They do have giveaways during special sales and stuff. The entitled retarded people would bitch about the exact nature of the giveaways as if they were somehow being victimized by not getting exactly what they wanted how they wanted, and I think that influenced them to stop bothering. Idiots.
Do you mean the overlay? I use that thing all the time. Why in the world would you not want to be able to have that?
You failed to answer my question. Is steam supposed to demand that companies make separate steam versions of their games and create separate matchmaking/friends/etc for them? All your requirement would do was force a lot of games not to be sold on steam. Your issue is with the publishers here, not steam. They’re the ones putting in their own system. Although pretty much everyone except EA and UBI are going to steamworks anyway because it’s just a better system.
They have little control over this. How would steam know that your 10 year old cd key from some retail game you bought matches a game it has? Publishers give steam batches of cd keys to sell games from, steam can only work with what it knows. In the cases that steam does have that information, they do indeed let you take retail products or products bought from other services and register them on steam. There’s almost certainly some sort of contractual issue here too - I doubt steam could just go ahead and let you download and install some decade old game from a cd key you have unless they have an explicit publishing agreement that covers it.
I don’t really use offline mode but I’ve heard it can be difficult so I’ll give you htat
Not a fault of steam, so I won’t cover it
Yeah, I don’t see it being useful all that often but I guess it’s a valid complaint, wouldn’t hurt to turn off auto-updating for specific games. I do see there’s an option in the game properties for “do not automatically update this game”, but I assume that’s a bandwidth management thing and that before you play it again it would have to update, right?
I was actually pretty impressed this year from the bandwidth steam had during the winter sale. Usually it slows to a crawl as millions of people download huge new games, but this year I was able to stay up past 2MB/s the whole time. I usually DL from steam at 2.5-3.2MB/s so I don’t think steam is lacking in that department. Although Origin is ridiculously fast - I often get games from Origin at 4.5MB/s.
What about steam workshop is lacking?
Like what, selling TV shows and music?
I don’t really know how greenlight works, I don’t pay attention to it, but since no one else has anything like it, it’s hard to take as a criticism against steam. Interviews with indie devs in multiple places say that steam is by far the best route to go for an indie dev - they keep more of the money, and the terms and control are less onerous than with other distributors.
It’s very unlikely anyone is going to pass them up anytime in the next few years. Who are the candidates? EA? Origin is shitty software with shitty design philosophy and focuses mostly on EA games. Even if they expand outwards, EA has some of the most customer-unfriendly practices in the industry.
D2D/Gamefly, Gamersgate, etc.? These guys are all okay, but they’re clearly second tier. They have worse prices than steam and their clients are very minimalistic. Once in a while they’ll have a better deal on steam than something
Microsoft or Sony? Please, they control their own little worlds, there’s no competition. Even though regular sales actually increase profits, they’re too hard headed to accept this and will cling to the notion that they’re damaging the value of their games by not charging you out the ass for them at all times. And what are you going to do? They have total control of their systems. With always-online systems in the next gen, you may not even be able to go the used route.
This sortof works for CPUs, but video cards are an endless death by alphabet soup, so there’s really nothing useful to be taken from the “requirements” here at this point. Fine, you can get the processor right (up to a point, since a lot of processors aren’t really measured by convenient GHz/MHz anymore. Is my quad core 3GHz better than someone else’s 3.6GHz dual core?) But do you know what vertex shader version your video card has? Maybe, but should the average person need to know that to be able to run a game? No.
This functionality already exists as “can you run it” and it needs to become part of the larger PC gaming ecosystem if PC gaming enthusiasts are serious about getting the everyman into their hobby. Treating people like they’re braindamaged because they can’t remember if they bought a “02G-P3-2629-KR GeForce GT 620” or a “03G-P4-2667-KR GeForce GTX 660” video card? Are you serious? Do you really wonder why PC gaming still has a reputation for being for enthusiasts?
On the other hand, totally agree here. Gifting on Steam is about as easy as I can imagine it being. Buy the game. Click “This is a gift” and put in either their steam name or email. What’s the ‘hassle’?
I think he means the fact that you can view the “Steam Store” through the Steam client, and good god, it’s awful by comparison to using a browser, so yes.
They definitely do allow you to register stuff bought through other services RECENTLY, but yes, for older titles, all the stipulations you mention apply.
I actually prefer GamersGate because there IS NO CLIENT. Why do I want a client? It’s not like Steam offers meaningful matchmaking. x.x OTOH, the Gamersgate STORE is a POS for no readily good identiable reason.
This on the other hand is blatant misinformation. There are a bunch of games for sale RIGHT NOW on XBL for 50+% off. They’re not as frequent as Steam or as crazy large (75+% off Sales always strike me as a little nuts, but whatever.) but they definitely do exist and happen regularly.