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Yeats wrote:

Steam is so effective it actually has me buying games I will never play.

Sort of the inverse of piracy, I suppose.

i have the same problem
heck as an australian with our crappy download caps i havnt even been able to download them all yet

but yeah no problem at all with steam - never had a single issue and steam has always run smoothly for me (for the last 10 years or so anyways - they did have some issues at first)

Not everyone hates Steam. The average gamer on my friends list would agree its the best option out there right now. Maybe they're biased since they're obviously also using steam.

The only issue I have with Greenlight is that small or single party devs are starting to use giveaways and free key dumps to elicit votes for their game. And when the game has steam cards, well people become financially motivated to get that free copy of a junk game.

fhohj wrote:

As for whose arguments I am referring to, this is all over reddit. And lots of major youtubers have spoken out with this stuff. Some indie developers as well. All pointing the finger at Valve. I guess it's still earlier than I thought. But it's there. It's being talked about and it's not new.

Since when is Reddit any better than 4chan or any other chan. It's just an unregulated mass and a way for opinions to be mass voted on. Which means negative diatribes and complaints against existing problems will always be one of the more popular postings on such sites.

auxy wrote:

sweatshopking wrote:

steam's support is literally the worst in the industry.

This is crap. Steam has some of the very best support in the industry, you just don't hear about it -- you know why?

Because it takes two months for steam to answer a casual quick support question? I'm not even exaggerating, that's how long my most recent ticket was. Billing related tickets tend to be a week or two but that's still unacceptable when Valve can easily afford a larger support staff.

sweatshopking wrote:

I've dealt with blizzard and had it resolved in 10 minutes. literally. I've dealt with Uplay and had it resolved in minutes. steam is garbage. And, YOU CAN'T CALL STEAM. THEY DON'T HAVE PHONE SUPPORT. at least, not when I had my issues.

Funny you should mention that. I let some friends talk me into pre-ordering Diablo 3 with them. It was having constant problem after problem on top of overloaded and non-functioning authorization/login servers that was going on for two weeks. The problems were still ongoing by the time I finished a playthrough (and because playing the same game over again 4x times is a cheap way to add filler content) I gave up on the game. I then noticed a small clause in the digital download agreement that offered a free refund within the first 30 days. Call loads were heavy due to the constant problems, but once I reached someone it took three minutes to get a refund for D3 and I was impressed. It may have been an exceptionally bad game launch, but the support was quick and very nice to use. Now if we could just merge Blizzard's support with Valve's Steam service we'd be golden.

Yeats wrote:

Steam is so effective it actually has me buying games I will never play.

Sort of the inverse of piracy, I suppose.

THIS all the way. I love Steam. I recognize what it is and what it isn't. If Steam is actively working to break games or misleading people in some way, people have a reason to complain. But why would anyone buy an old game and automatically expect it work on new hardware that hadn't even been invented yet? Steam does not reprogram games. They are offering you an opportunity, but that doesn't mean you have to take advantage of it. Don't pay them money without doing your research first; there are plenty of forums out there.

My only concern with Steam is that I don't own hard copies of my game, and I could some day lose the ability to download them. But that's a risk I've chosen to take by doing business with a digital download store.

I buy games on it when I don't have a choice. I buy games elsewhere when I do.

Indie games and Early Access for the most part are entirely unappealing. Yes, I play them here and there, and usually wish I hadn't spent the money.

Honestly I don't see the point in writing or reading a freakin essay about it. It is what it is.

Kougar wrote:

Not everyone hates Steam. The average gamer on my friends list would agree its the best option out there right now. Maybe they're biased since they're obviously also using steam.

As noted, I don't have any problems with Steam itself and honestly didn't realize there were widespread non-DRM, non-R&P complaints until now. Some of this could be a genre thing though...I can see why multiplayer gamers would like Steam's integrated matchmaking stuff but us single-player guys, RPGs, heavy RTS and the like, don't gain any value at all from it and just see it as an artificial limitation that will get taken away at some point. I think Skyrim may be the the last thing I've bought on Steam, these days it's mostly GOG. I have a "rental for rental" policy that does allow for Steam purchases, but there hasn't been much on there recently that interests me and isn't available elsewhere.

Rebuttle treatise on Steam, and what Steam has become.

I like Steam. Its a super service. Buy a game, have perpetual access to said game. Games are updated as patches are released. Never have to worry about a disk becoming out of date, getting scratched. Its all very nice. People tell me that there is DRM bundled into all Steam games, but whenever I have lost internet, my games have continued to work, which I guess makes it the good kind of DRM; The kind I don't need to know about.

Furthermore, I like getting old games on sale. That's very nice too.

I've never had a support problem other than the one time I lost my account credentials... took me about 3 weeks of guessing passwords to get back in. Their account recovery system is pretty lame.

All of those things that you mentioned, I really, really have no idea what you, or reddit, or "Prestigious YouTubers" are talking about. What "support issue?"

As for Greenlight, and Steam sales, I don't "blame" steam for indie devs having trash products that don't get fixed because people buy into the beta prematurely, thereby erasing any incentive said devs have to polish/finish their game rather than covertly starting a new project. And I don't "blame" them for having trash sales. However, I have noticed a decline in the number of games that I buy. Thats just basic economics. Supply/ demand. There are people willing to pay more than I am for things. I accept that. I will continue to wait for Steam Sales that meet my marginal criteria to buy.

I think steam is costly for what you get, but the part that irk me is that its a completely locked and proprietary platform.
The DRM is strong and I'm sure some developer are ready to pay a third of their income for it, but Steam is past its days.

The game industry need join forces to implement a univeral DRM services, not tied to a single third party VS having to rely one a proprietary solution for a game developer.
And from that anyone can create clients. Valve , EA, Ubi, or any third party. including any OS integration , etc..

Steam is holding the gaming industry back, its time for it to be replaced by an open standard not under a single person grasp.

sschaem wrote:

The game industry need join forces to implement a univeral DRM services, not tied to a single third party VS having to rely one a proprietary solution for a game developer.
And from that anyone can create clients. Valve , EA, Ubi, or any third party. including any OS integration , etc..

Steam is holding the gaming industry back, its time for it to be replaced by an open standard not under a single person grasp.

Well, not that it really matters anymore but Stardock was working on Impulse Reactor to replicate most Steamworks functionality in a way that wouldn't lock the game to one platform.

It wasn't really DRM, but I think that's what you meant.

Sadly, Gamestop happened.

I like Steam and its deals. When I don't like them, I shop for a cheaper Steam key and still use Steam. I've recently begun using Steam In-home Streaming, which is pretty cool (if a bit buggy for me)

I didn't read the diatribe. I don't care for most indie titles unless I get them through a Humble Bundle. Never bought a Greenlight game and never bought an early access game, so issues with them are irrelevant to me. Not sure why some people feel the need to defend large, multi-million/billion dollar companies. Steam and Valve are big boys. They can defend themselves.

Move along, move along.

sschaem wrote:

Steam is holding the gaming industry back, its time for it to be replaced by an open standard not under a single person grasp.

I agree it might be now, but for a long time they defiantly had it right and gamers were singing their praises. Steam really pushed ahead with getting gamers onto a unified platform. Social interaction was really bad in games before Steam - Remember how you needed an account per game, or had to match make via forums and TeamSpeak? All separate services that had no correlation with each other. Then it gained support for their store, social features (and some games) cross-platform on OSX, Linux, iOS and Android alongside Windows. It looked promising.

Then large game studios start getting irritated by loosing up to 30% per-sale on anything that passes through Steam (and being forced to place/sell all content via Steamworks), and go their own way. So now we have Origin, uPlay, BattleNet and Microsoft's "thing" for Windows these days among several others. As a result, I feel we're going full circle again, with further market fragmentation of the gaming community and several social platforms once again requiring the user to have an account for each one - with no correlation between them.

Forum/Site based matchmaking clans and TeamSpeak are now more popular than ever with the gaming community after a period where many started to disappear because Steam offered everything in one place.

Valve was (once) a great game developer. Now, it's nothing more than a retail company with some major glaring omissions from their catalogue because some major players in the games industry won't do business with them anymore (Anything from EA, some Ubi games and Minecraft to name a few). They also insist on pushing ahead with Seam Box, and whichever way you cut it - I can see that just having FAIL written all over it on launch day. They are going head-on into the Xbox / PlayStation market, with an incomplete OS and very little in the way of AAA games that will run on the SteamOS version to attract anyone deeply rooted into either of the market leaders eco systems this late into the game.

Geek brings up another point worth mentioning, the matchmaking service. Before Steam came along most games used publisher-hosted/funded machines for multiplayer servers or the multiplayer matchmaking service. Or sometimes game studios would sell the service to 3rd parties such as GameSpy Arcade, which itself would subject the user to enduring ads if they didn't pay extra money for a premium account. If the publisher was the host, then depending on how well the game did the servers/service would last a few years, then it'd eventually get pulled. Sometimes it got pulled early because the game studio went under. These days EA will routinely kill the matchmaking service to a game one year after launch if the game sales didn't meet sales targets.

Steam has become a major matchmaking service provider for many games, including many that had lost multiplayer support due to age. It has assumed matchmaking service for many THQ titles in particular, as well as Firaxis just to name two I use regularly. They also provide matchmaking service for Indie games. The wiki page on games using Steam's dedicated server support list is also fairly long. Ignoring Steam's shortcomings, I think it's very safe to say Steam has provided the best matchmaking service the gaming community has seen to date. I still play eight year old games like Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, and it's awesome to know that Steam will be continuing to offer matchmaking services for old titles like these for the foreseeable future.