I was wary of services like Steam, but SenorBeef’s annual holiday sale threads kept catching my eye and eventually the savings was too good to pass up. In the 15 months or so that I’ve been buying games thru Steam, I have no complaints. None.
I don’t buy games that don’t match my system specs; I always check them before I buy.
Gifting a game couldn’t be easier.
And I just don’t buy anything that seems like the cost is more than the enjoyment I’ll get out of it. Have I bought games I didn’t like? Sure. But since the vast majority of those cost me less than $10 each and I played them for an hour or two, the risk v. reward factor was still heavily in my favor.
I stayed away from Steam for several years because I was not on board with the idea of digital distribution. Once it became clear that Steam wasn’t going anywhere, though, I reluctantly signed on.
Seriously, the service is great. The DRM is frustrating, but it’s frustrating on an intellectual level. In the real world, I’m always online anyway and I don’t share a steam account with anyone.
The steam overlay is lightweight enough that there are some games that I actually run through Steam even though they weren’t purchased through it. I like being able to pop open the chat service without alt-tabbing all the way back to Windows.
But most of all, other companies haven’t managed to do it better. They aren’t even competing. Origin is a pile of crap that only exists through a monopoly on EA games. Stardock looked, for about 15 minutes, like they were going to make a serious run at providing legit competition but then sold out to Gamestop.
The worst thing about Steam is that they keep having sales that I “can’t afford to pass up,” and I have a couple dozen games that I picked up for a buck or two that I haven’t played for more than 45 minutes.
My only problem with Steam is that every so often it goes into a never-ending cycle of validating game files.
My only problem with Valve is that they sometimes don’t bother fixing minor glitches in their own game titles (Team Fortress 2 STILL has that semi-annoying “wrong team color” glitch that’s been around for a couple of years, but game-play affecting glitches do get patched out fairly quickly).
I’m actually really confused by this assertion, because I’ve seen LOTS of devs lately saying “If you bought the game on Steam, we’re sorry, but you have to have Steam running. The other versions are DRM free.”
So either A) Paradox has some special arrangement (unlikely) B) Paradox USED to be able to do this but has since been integrated with everyone else or C) This “feature” is so poorly documented that most devs don’t even know they can do it.
My only “serious” gripe with Steam is that they’ve been updating a LOT lately. Long arsed downloads that require serious install periods during which I can do nothing related to gaming. Not exactly the “You’ll never have to boot up your console and wait while it updates” Nirvana I’d been lead to expect from PC gaming.
That’s weird. I think once a couple of weeks ago I got a popup box that said a Steam client update was ready to install but I had to restart Steam for it to take effect. I never noticed the download and the restart took like 7 seconds. Maybe it’s a Mac v. PC thing with how the OS updates things? (I use a Mac.)
No, I get THOSE all the time; The ones I’m talking about are the ones that require Steam to actually shut all the way down and run an actual, “show a bar graph” installer that can take a surprising amount of time to do its thing. I’m pretty sure I’ve had 3 or more of those in the past two months, though I do run Steam on a second box occasionally, so it’s possible one of the updates was a “dupe” on the different box, but still.
All current Paradox-written (ie PDS) games on Steam do not require Steam to be running. Off the top of my head that would include EU3, CK2, HoI3, MotE, Sengoku, Victoria2 … basically all PDS games for the last 2 years or so.
However it does not apply to games Paradox publish but didn’t write, such as CIM2 which errors if Steam isn’t running, or Warlock which fires up Steam if you just run the game.exe .
"Factors that lowered Valve Corporation’s rating include:
Failure to respond to 387 complaints filed against business.
21 complaints filed against business that were not resolved.
Overall complaint history with BBB.
“On June 25, 2013, BBB recognized a pattern of complaints from consumers regarding product, service and customer service issues. Consumers allege the games they purchase from Valve Corporation or Steam malfunction, do not work or have an invalid CD key. Consumers also claim the company blocks users from accessing their library of games. Consumers further allege they attempt to contact the company for assistance, but Valve Corporation fails to correct the gaming issues, does not correct credit card charges or issue a refund, or does not respond at all.”
Valve has a well-established record of delivering a non-working Steam service and simply pocketing their customers’ money with no redress. Out of our ArmA team of 11 members, we have 2 for whom the Steam service simply does not work after repeatedly trying every measure recommended by Steam technical support and online sources. These are not kids either - they are adults and professional engineers with more than two decades of experience in computers and networks.
Those are the facts. Do you still want to make that bet?
Complaints about game performance fall directly into that first listed (and bolded) complaint. Complaints about “…and Steam wouldn’t give me my money back” fall into the second bolded section. So, yeah, I’d still bet that makes up a considerable sum. Even now, a year later when you decided to resurrect this thread.
And of course it’s supposition. That’s the whole point of saying “I bet” – “I have no immediate evidence but am willing to guess that…”
Only grownups are going to go through the trouble of filing a complaint with a government agency. The complainers venting in online bulletin boards are the kids.
You admitted you were wrong about international companies not bothering with BBB accreditation.
Your claim that companies can buy their way out of customer complaints with the BBB is disingenuous at best.
Your post sounds like it’s from a spin doctor for Valve.
“I would bet a considerable sum that most of those boil down to ‘I bought Skyrim and it only got 12fps on my Win98 computer and Steam wouldn’t give me my money back’ or ‘SpecOps was only 7 hours and it sucks but Steam wouldn’t give me a refund.’”
Your original post was a gross mischaracterization of the real issues with the Steam service as customers trying to blame Steam for user hardware inadequacies or the nature of the game itself. The facts on the BBB website prove that the real problems customers have reported with the Steam service are:
The Steam service does not work at all and not even Steam technical support can get it to work;
Customers lose access to their Steam game libraries and Valve refuses to do anything to restore it.
In all cases, Valve simply pockets their customers’ money with no redress. That is why the BB concludes with their warning to read the Steam EULA. The BBB is telling readers:
“Valve promises to rip you off. Believe them. These customers prove that Valve means it.”
Your original post is captured in black & white along with its refutation. Any properly impartial arbitrator would conclude that you lost your bet.
The BBB report doesn’t “prove” anything at all. It merely lists some complaints, presumably in descending order of receiving them, with the top complaint being game issues. Having spent considerable time on the Steam forums, I can make a pretty educated guess that most “game issues” are on the customer side – inadequate hardware or unrealistic expectations. If you want to refute that, you need actual evidence of what all those BBB complaints actually were instead of vague broad descriptions. If you want to just say you don’t think I’m right and admit that it’s just your opinion, that’s fine.
And never too early for reading far more into a BBB report than it actually says and then telling everyone that you have “the truth”, eh?
Also, once again, the number of BBB complaints based against the number of Steam users puts the complaint rate at well less than .01%
We can guess that a number of users have encountered problems that they never filed BBB reports for, of course, but still… ten times that for 0.1%? A hundred times that for 1%? No matter what, your ArmA group is obviously not representative of the average Steam user if nearly 20% of them are incapable of getting Steam to work (as it’s working for tens of thousands of ArmA players this very moment).
When a fraction of a percent is having problems, the odds are that it’s not the product that’s at fault but rather a customer problem. That the techs couldn’t magically fix your friends’ faulty equipment over the internet isn’t Valve’s fault. The best customer service techs in the world aren’t going to get Steam to work on a toaster oven. No, I don’t think Valve should be offering refunds for that.
