ysbreker

Steam - Why do you hate/dislike it so much?

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I like having physical copies of the games (with box/manual/artwork), so I probably won't buy anything on Steam. When I got HL2 I played it for a little bit, and it was fine. Then a couple months later my sister was over, and I wanted her to play the beginning. I open it up (nothing had changed on my computer, of course), and I had to sit through half an hour of updates and at least one restart. Thanks a lot, it worked fine before. I was more than a little annoyed.

Aside from that, I haven't used Steam much. I have yet to install HL2 Ep1.

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I like that I can buy a game at home, load up steam on my work PC and play all my games there too. That rules.

That's why I love steam.

I replaced about 70% of my PC's components 6 months ago. Right before I went to bed the night I set it up, I installed Steam and signed in. I woke up the next morning and my entire Valve software library was sitting there 100% ready to go. So awesome.

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I think the "meta-observation" I would make, having read this thread, is that the problems people have with Steam are things you run into very infrequently, whereas the benefits are there on a daily and weekly basis.

EULA issues (aside from 2nd-hand-sales) are mostly idealogical - I don't see any of those problems actually providing real obstacles to users the vast majority of the time, and things like losing account details and "big updates right when I want to play" are exceptions rather than rules to its use. By contrast, the great server browser, the never needing to worry about a patch, the never needing to worry where my CDs are, etc are all things that make PC gaming much more enjoyable to me.

I can see why those things bother people (it's human nature to be more concerned by low probability, high cost events, see: terrorism), but as far as I'm concerned, the overall sum of good and bad comes out to a significant positive.

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I've never used Steam, but I dislike all forms of 'Digital Rights Management', so I dislike it. Granted, video games have always had DRM in the form of making sure a CD is in the driver, etc., and I can tolerate that, even while I object to it.

But the whole "ET Phone Home" aspect of services like Steam is, for the moment, a little much to take. The more that companies treat me like I'm already a criminal, the more inclined I am to simply be a criminal and pirate their software.

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I've never used Steam, but I dislike all forms of 'Digital Rights Management', so I dislike it. Granted, video games have always had DRM in the form of making sure a CD is in the driver, etc., and I can tolerate that, even while I object to it.

But the whole "ET Phone Home" aspect of services like Steam is, for the moment, a little much to take. The more that companies treat me like I'm already a criminal, the more inclined I am to simply be a criminal and pirate their software.

I agree with everything you've said there, in the abstract, but I don't feel that way about Steam for some reason.

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Maybe it's because you've played their games, and the communication of the artwork on some level has communicated a deep understanding of the honest Valve ethos that somehow can't be faked.

So you are willing to trust them far more than you would a faceless marketing company.

That's what happened to me, anyway.

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Seriously, honest Valve ethos, what the fuck? I like Steam, how well it works and how I don't have to look for my HL2 discs when I want to replay it, but Valve is just a developer that decided to moonlight as a publisher.

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tagging along on steam-like applications

Triton ( http://www.playtriton.com/ ) is a piece of shit. Their EULA and other handling is much better than Steam, e.g. the legal side of it. But their client software is a real piece of shit.

Why must everything have a crappy non standard skinned GUI.

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Seriously, honest Valve ethos, what the fuck?

Well, it's like when you buy a CD off a band at one of their gigs. You know?

I was just being facetious. But you're more willing to trust someone if they give you a bit of themselves, and experiencing their game goes a bit towards that.

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Practically, I love steam. Constant updates (which can be paused I believe), demos, trailers, the information gathering (why is it bad that a software developer wants to know what kind of computers their customers use? Not big brotherish at all, just smart business that helps them make better games), having your games without discs, etc. Heck, I even like the design.

I, however, have not read the EULA thus don't know everything. I doubt Gabe has any nefarious plans though, I like the big guy.

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