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odizzido wrote:

Steam on the other hand has the right to remove all your games from you for no reason. If Valve goes under and doesn't provide a patch, you're SOL all you games are gone. If the steam servers are down...well too bad you cannot play your games ATM. In the end, you're just borrowing something from them for as long as they feel like letting you have it.

Counterpoint: what happens if your CDs or DVDs go bad? Floppy discs inevitably decay over time; you can lose the physical media, or find yourself with no way to read it (how many people today have a 5.25" floppy drive attached to their system?) And before you start talking about backups, backups are my bread and butter - and the number of people I know who don't do them at all (or who do them to media they keep at home - I'm as guilty of the latter as anyone else) is a little scary.

There are bad points about all methods of distribution. The odds of Steam capriciously removing your right to play games? Non-existent - word would get out pretty damn quick, and there goes their market. Not to mention that small claims court can be a very good friend to those who are wronged in such a manner. The loss of ability to resell or gift games you don't play is annoying, but the prices they charge are low enough to compensate for that.

I'm not saying they're perfect, but don't go making assertions like that without at least acknowledging that there's no perfection in this world.

odizzido wrote:

Steam on the other hand has the right to remove all your games from you for no reason. If Valve goes under and doesn't provide a patch, you're SOL all you games are gone. If the steam servers are down...well too bad you cannot play your games ATM. In the end, you're just borrowing something from them for as long as they feel like letting you have it.

Other than on accounts where someone has perhaps paid with stolen credit cards or something, for the rest of us they have never done this. GabeN has always said if Steam was to ever go under, they will try and make most games available. It's looking unlikely this will actually happen anytime soon, if ever.

But if it did, I've still got the games files on my PC, there's an offline mode. There's also loads of ways to play games right now that are designed for Steam, but some cleaver peeps have worked out ways to remove the Steam integration entirely - Just use Google. I would say it's not an issue, and something I never thought about.

Steam is hugely convenient for PC gaming, and I have been using it since 2003 (That's when it said I made my account. Wow, it's really that old now?). It's benefits hugely outweigh that very minor risk, should it ever happen.

I could go on about steam, but I have done it so many times now. However there is one thing that I want to mention before I stop reading this thread because so many seem to say it here. Offline mode is pretty unreliable.

Anyways I will just keep paying far less for DRM games than I do DRM free ones. Carry on.

ronch wrote:

Oh I get it. Steam is downloading right now, and it started at 98%. I think I get it. The discs contain 98% of the game and the rest need to be downloaded. Is that right? So I shouldn't feel bad about Steam, I should direct my disappointment towards the devs for putting away the last 2% of the game as well as making the game REQUIRE Steam. So if I'm stuck in some remote location in the middle of the desert and wanna play Thief, I can't because the Steam client first needs to confirm my identity. Isn't that right?

Yes, many games require an update after installing. That shouldn't be a surprise for a game that's been out for a while. In fact it's a good thing because it shows the devs care enough to fix issues that they find after the game gets released. Of course that can also be a bad thing as I recall Wolfenstein required a 10GB update on day one for anyone that bought the game on disc.

As for the remote location issue, it depends. For the initial install yes, you will likely need the Internet for at least authentication. That's just reality now as most people have some form of Internet available so the developers assume it is going to be available. Most games (but certainly not all) can run fine without having the Internet available once they are installed. With Steam you can run in offline mode. With Thief I'm not sure if you can avoid the initial requirement for the Internet. I think Square Enix is moving toward forcing you to make that initial connection to authorize all games, but they typically don't require the Internet once you make that initial install.

PenGun wrote:

odizzido wrote:

Steam is terrible for BUYING games. It's okay for renting them, though usually they try to charge purchase prices for their rentals which is a pretty crap thing to do.

I buy games from Steam. They do not rent them. I own many many GB of data and right now I have exactly one disc. A Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl disc as it was not possible to roll the steam version back to 1.0004 at that time. It is now and I would just do that, these days.

You seem to believe that you don't own something unless you have a physical thing. That is primitive, hence the knuckle dragging analogy.

odizzido wrote:

I see. No, I own the games I purchase on gog because gog can do anything they wish and I will still be able to play them.

Steam on the other hand has the right to remove all your games from you for no reason. If Valve goes under and doesn't provide a patch, you're SOL all you games are gone. If the steam servers are down...well too bad you cannot play your games ATM. In the end, you're just borrowing something from them for as long as they feel like letting you have it.

BTW, next time you want to call someone stupid, you should probably understand the situation before you post so you don't end up looking like a fool.

You're both wrong, and right.

Steam actually calls your purchases a "subscription", or more accurately it redefines your purchases as a subscription, and they claim to have full power over your account. Make no mistake though, you're still buying your games, and they are indeed licensed to you with a personal license. The only catch being steam is managing your licenses, like they have power of attorney.

Also, lollerskates on gog ownership. You don't own your gog games any more than you do steam games, as they don't provide a method of license transference (resale), so you will be just as SOL if the servers go down, or gog sells out. Coincidentally, GOG actually DID bring their servers down as a practical joke, which REALLY pissed off the community.

Lastly, steam's offline mode is a complete joke, which probably doesn't work right on purpose. You can't use offline mode if you can't log in, and steam occasionally "loses" your password, which then requires online authentication. Valve even admitted this, and called it a "bug". Right. That "bug" has been present from around day one, so I doubt it's a bug, and more of an anti-piracy feature. AFAIK, it's still not fixed, and probably never will be, so the most people will ever get offline is a couple weeks.

Edit: supposedly the several weeks bug was fixed recently(after how many flippin years), but I haven't tested it, nor do I trust it to work flawlessly.

Hm. I thought better of you, ronch. Disappointing. (´ー｀)

sjl wrote:

Counterpoint: what happens if your CDs or DVDs go bad? Floppy discs inevitably decay over time; you can lose the physical media, or find yourself with no way to read it (how many people today have a 5.25" floppy drive attached to their system?) And before you start talking about backups, backups are my bread and butter - and the number of people I know who don't do them at all (or who do them to media they keep at home - I'm as guilty of the latter as anyone else) is a little scary.

I have CDs that still work from publishers that have long since passed. For the lulz I just popped in my Journeyman Project Turbo CD, circa 1994 and one of the older disks in my collection, and it was able to read just fine. I also know that a day is coming when the Internet as we know it will cease to exist. Ed Snowden, Heartbleed, PSN outage etc. are just the dead canary before the disaster. Sometimes I go off the grid for a while so this is not merely an academic question.

I agree that every system has its drawbacks, but we've established that I have much greater longevity than game companies and I can't fully appreciate something that will be taken away from me in the future, as Steam will. That's why I go DRM free whenever possible and will accept a disk check before internet activation.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:

Also, lollerskates on gog ownership. You don't own your gog games any more than you do steam games, as they don't provide a method of license transference (resale), so you will be just as SOL if the servers go down, or gog sells out.

sense, this statement makes none. you can hand your copy and relevant supporting data to anybody you want in resale.

Origin isn't that bad, however it's one more thing to remember and update. Hardcore Battlefield players willingly put up with it, they're used to the method anyway. And besides the newer browser-based gameserver lister/launcher is a huge improvement over BF2's app-abomination.

trackerben wrote:

Origin isn't that bad while it is chasing Steam, however it's one more thing to remember and update. Hardcore Battlefield players willingly put up with it, they're used to the method anyway. And besides the newer browser-based gameserver lister/launcher is a huge improvement over BF2's app-abomination.

how about them micro in BF4? honestly the game feels like a giant experiment at this point. if it does end up tanking I guess what they've learned with diablo is that they can just fix it later with an expansion. but the thing is, diablo is mostly alone in its genre. battlefield has cod and a number of others to worry about.

fhohj wrote:

how about them micro in BF4? honestly the game feels like a giant experiment at this point. if it does end up tanking I guess what they've learned with diablo is that they can just fix it later with an expansion. but the thing is, diablo is mostly alone in its genre. battlefield has cod and a number of others to worry about.

What micro in BF4? I don't play Diablo. Yes Call of Duty is the other shark in fps waters, but the last time I really enjoyed its multiplayer was in MW2. COD needs to up its vehicle play to equal Battlefield. I find BF4 gameplay on most standard maps a bit too arcade-like, while BF2's 64-player levels are mostly still unmatched.

I've posted some lengthy anti-stream rhetoric in daily comments, and it's almost always met with some pretty hard pro-Steam rhetoric which usually bleeds over to fanatical support. So there's that for you. I always believed Steam could be truly great instead of mediocre.

Steam is an OK platform delivery system but has a lot of issues, whether it's with the official server support for games, the (somewhat less now) hideous interface and god-awful navigation-quasi-browser which is the desktop App, the confusing user-interface for almost every aspect of it, the non-existent customer support (which is based on the company which makes the product and the they're organized, which is a completely separate argument on why Valve is a cruddy company, met with even stronger resistance), a large disassociation and disconnect between similar games with different features (deluxe & DLC versions), poor file management of the folder architecture, and game management which leaves a lot to be desired.

There are positive aspects to Steam found above, but there's a lot more negative than there is positive. The biggest reason to like Steam is the convenience and relatively cheap prices it brings to the gaming market. It's the Walmart of game shopping, and depending on your tastes I think a lot of people would say that's not a great thing.

Steam was built many years and it was a bit primitive for it's time back then and it's one "major" overhaul about...4 years ago was a far cry from what it deserves. They've pretty much duct-taped new modules to the RV and added LED lights to the hood and sell it as state-of-the-art. Again, this goes back to the philosophy of the company behind it and their track record with these things.

I'm not making a direct comparison because there are some differences, but for the features Origin has it does better and it's much more modern. Steam has a lot more features in their package (community, workshop, green-light, and oh: the catalog!, etc), which overall make it a better choice, but what Origin does have of Steam it seems to almost always be superior.

If Steam was completely overhauled to bring, fix, patch, provide all the features that are missing or broken, the system would be stellar. The really sad thing is a lot of people like it but the software doesn't get the attention it really deserves for what it could be. It's worse because the company behind it has more money than God to do what should be done for the software, but it's never a priority. Though it seems highly unlikely, this is a fine example of a commercial product which is used by the masses until one day a silent-competitor takes reigns as number one because the forerunner got lazy in keeping up with the times.

dashbarron wrote:

I've posted some lengthy anti-stream rhetoric in daily comments, and it's almost always met with some pretty hard pro-Steam rhetoric which usually bleeds over to fanatical support.

It's probably because your complaints are dumb.

bthylafh wrote:

It's probably because your complaints are dumb.

I saw one valid complaint: Valve's support is basically nonexistent. This is true. In my opinion its the biggest issue Steam has and one that I think could come to a head with SteamOS/Steam Machines in the next year or so.

Beyond that, I saw lots of bashing of Valve the company and some very vague UI complaints. Otherwise, like most Steam-hate it seems more focused around a strong dislike of Valve rather than issues with Steam the complainer can speak to directly. I mean, calling Steam the Wal-Mart of game delivery reeks of personal bias and makes no sense when Steam is without a doubt the most full featured and complete digital game distribution system.

Well how often do you hear about issues where you actually need Valve's support? I'm not excusing poor performance, but customer support is something that comes up either when you need it or when someone else does it significantly better. As long as Steam continues to work, there aren't going to hear much about it.

And now is good a time as any to praise EA for their updates in customer support including a solid return policy for digital purchases. That might be a great way for EA to distinguish themselves and carve out a permenant place in the market (as opposed to something people just deal with to play EA games).

Back to dashbarron's post, it basically boils down to, "Steam would be perfect if they do exactly what I want!"

slowriot wrote:

I saw one valid complaint: Valve's support is basically nonexistent.

That's the only thing that rings true for me. I don't have any complaints about the Steam software, I've never had an issue with it or personally known anyone who has but I've read a couple of stories on forums about long waits for a response. Origin I've had problems with it stopping game downloads every 100MB and crashing sporadically. Support from EA for this problem wasn't exactly stellar either.

superjawes wrote:

And now is good a time as any to praise EA for their updates in customer support including a solid return policy for digital purchases. That might be a great way for EA to distinguish themselves and carve out a permenant place in the market (as opposed to something people just deal with to play EA games).

Yup.

We should also mention Origin's new "Game Time" promotion in which you get to play an entire game for 48 hours for FREE. I played Titanfall a lot this past weekend under that program, all of which helped me decide whether or not to buy it. I ultimately didn't, but that kind of thing is unprecedented and EA should be commended for it.

Glorious wrote:

Yup.

We should also mention Origin's new "Game Time" promotion in which you get to play an entire game for 48 hours for FREE. I played Titanfall a lot this past weekend under that program, all of which helped me decide whether or not to buy it. I ultimately didn't, but that kind of thing is unprecedented and EA should be commended for it.

I think the Game Time promotion is a nice improvement over the "Free Weekend" concept seen on Steam. But I also imagine it's much easier to have such promotions when EA publishes all the games on Origin, and Valve publishes only their own which is a tiny, tiny fraction of what's on Steam.

This leads me into more reasons why comparing Steam and Origin is a massive stretch. In many respects Steam is as much a service for 3rd party publishers/developers as it is a service to gamers. The design of both reflect this significantly. As do some of the issues people have with Steam. When I read comment's like dashbarron's for instance I'm left wondering if he even understands/knows that Valve is not the publisher/rights owner/etc of all the games available via Steam.

slowriot wrote:

This leads me into more reasons why comparing Steam and Origin is a massive stretch. In many respects Steam is as much a service for 3rd party publishers/developers as it is a service to gamers. The design of both reflect this significantly. As do some of the issues people have with Steam. When I read comment's like dashbarron's for instance I'm left wondering if he even understands/knows that Valve is not the publisher/rights owner/etc of all the games available via Steam.

Yeah, that is a REALLY good point to make!

Like you said about dashbarron's complaints for instance, official server support isn't really a steam issue, and we have to likewise separate "customer support" between support for the steam client and valve-published games and games by other publishers & developers. It isn't always a clear line, but the distinction is definitely there.

Here, I'll throw out some hate for Origin- at sometime in the last month or so, something has changed that won't allow either Mass Effect 2 or Mass Effect 3 to properly launch. I've done everything, and I don't give up easily- been at it off and on for over two weeks now- but I just picked up the last two apparently very large DLCs for ME3 for my second run, and not being able to access them is really starting to piss me off. There's no reason for an issue like this to randomly occur, and Google searches find people with the same issue from the week of release on.


(my problem is this- I start the game, from Origin or from a shortcut to the relevant .exe, in admin mode or not, and the games load up 23MB-27MB, use ~33% of the CPU, and do nothing else)

Airmantharp wrote:

Here, I'll throw out some hate for Origin

Uh, we had an "I hate Origin" thread right here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=94048

Unfortunately, it got a touch unruly and was locked! I feel your pain though, but I've had similar launch issues with Origin in the past. I think it was caused by either enrolling in the Beta program for the client or things having a moment. I just deleted the game and re-installed it and the problem went away.

Now, bringing it back to Steam. I have to agree with the comments about support - It's awful. I was shocked to find the support system isn't linked to your Steam log-in details and needs an all new account. someone needs to streamline that a bit more, as it's a standing joke. To echo some comments further up regarding it's interface and the like too, I'm personally not bothered much how it looks? Yeah, it's not as modern looking today was it was after it's big update about 4 years back, but Steam's UI is at the very least serviceable. I can find what I want and it delivers the games + updates. That's it's core purpose and it works, so why complain? I think Origin's advert laden mess is a LOT worse than Steam, but I've been there already in another thread.

I just wanted to spread some hate .

Overall I find that both Steam and Origin do their job properly- I have no issues with BF3 or BF4, or the Hardline beta, and I was able to get DA2 up just to prove to myself that it isn't a 'Bioware' thing; but the ME series all use UE3, so it seems like there might be an issue there. I just can't fathom what I need to do next, and I figure I'd might as well ask at this point.

Yeah, I'll defend the utility and quality of Steam all day long, but Valve's parallel support system really is a steaming pile.

puppetworx wrote:

DVDs SUCK!

I really like Steam and I hate discs. I have a COD:MW DVD under my desk but I can't even install the game because the medium has degraded and has unreadable sectors. Unfortunately the game is from before the era that it came with Steam and the product key doesn't activate on Steam. Hence I have no way to play the game again without buying another copy.

I removed my DVD drive a few months back after realizing I haven't used it in over a year. I certainly dislike DVDs more than I dislike Steam.

That's CD rot. Typically occurs when you store DVDs and CDs in high humidity/temperature areas, or areas that fluctuate in their climate.

When you have a 250GB data cap, you will prefer to use DVDs for obvious reasons. Unless if you want to give up on using Netflix and Youtube for a month.

Airmantharp wrote:

Here, I'll throw out some hate for Origin- at sometime in the last month or so, something has changed that won't allow either Mass Effect 2 or Mass Effect 3 to properly launch. I've done everything, and I don't give up easily- been at it off and on for over two weeks now- but I just picked up the last two apparently very large DLCs for ME3 for my second run, and not being able to access them is really starting to piss me off. There's no reason for an issue like this to randomly occur, and Google searches find people with the same issue from the week of release on.


(my problem is this- I start the game, from Origin or from a shortcut to the relevant .exe, in admin mode or not, and the games load up 23MB-27MB, use ~33% of the CPU, and do nothing else)

Things like that rarely happen without antivirus interference.

The only time I had a problem with Origin it was with ME3 actually. And the fact that Origin didn't put out a decent error message. After about 6-8 weeks of too and frow with some live / e-mail support, after uninstalling Origin and the game completely (after saving savegames) it said I was lacking entitlements to the game and DLC and got new codes reissued. Then it worked properly. The origin of the problem was that for some reason, one of the weekend ops reward packs in ME3 seemingly overwrote all my ME3 and DLC entitlements when it got issued. That was a bioware integration issue. Origins fault was that since it had all data cached, it couldn't get that there was no backend entitlements left until a complete uninstall had been done and I was trying to re-download.

I actually tried to use Origins live chat feature, which works for easy stuff as, I'm lacking this and that entitlement from this game and they can reissue such things just fine. But to get the above resolved I had to call the support number...

Here is where Steam is a steaming pile though.
* Origin actually has a support phone number with a local contact speaking the local language that can fix and reissue stuff like above.
* Steam, has a mail-address / Support forum, where you have a 2-3 day e-mail turn around where you get scripted answers that have no relevance to the issue at hand until you get past the scripted question. With problems within game's it's clearly not Valve's support, but when they problem is with billing or the actually sales platform, then it's clearly Valves business, and when you think about the fact that many people have hundreds of games tied into Steam, and god knows how much money spent, having a dinky scripted E-mail support doesn't cut it.

As for the fact the support forum has a separate login, that is NOT a problem. Otherwise, how would they be able to handle hijacked Steam accounts, which has become more prevalent in the last years, at least for those not using the extra authentication.

I trust Gabe with the whole "if Steam ever shuts down we'll un-DRM your games" thing. I'm not sure we can trust whoever his successor might be.

Here's to a long, healthy, and happy life for Gabe.

I would trust Gabe with the decisions, but the problem is that if something for some reason would happen to your account, you have an script email piece to convince that you should have access to your games.

Savyg wrote:

Things like that rarely happen without antivirus interference.

And you're absolutely correct; my AV was doing something to it. Of course, the AV had no logs to show what it was doing, and the game provided no logs, and there were no logs from Origin (which was oblivious).

The solution was to go back into the AV and add whole folders to the exception list in addition to the .exe exceptions that I already added, and then to restart the system. So thanks! I didn't get much sleep last night .

Airmantharp wrote:

And you're absolutely correct; my AV was doing something to it. Of course, the AV had no logs to show what it was doing, and the game provided no logs, and there were no logs from Origin (which was oblivious).

The solution was to go back into the AV and add whole folders to the exception list in addition to the .exe exceptions that I already added, and then to restart the system. So thanks! I didn't get much sleep last night .

Bitdefender? (Just guessing...previous experience heh.)