I have been a supporter and deep appreciator of Bethesda titles for many years, from the early days of Sea Dogs, thru Morrowind, Oblvion and have been involved in both studying and modding them. I also research and study game development and 3D worlds across many genres and platforms and a wide variety of uses. The challenges of distribution and piracy and patching have been with the industry for decades. Steam was one attempt to deal with some of these issues. So was Starforce. Both are deeply flawed, deeply invasive of the users interface and deeply destructive to the trust and mutual faith that develops between responsible game developers and thoughtful and appreciative fans and gamers. This is a crisis and the solution will be to cease use of Steam by any decent developers. It is an attempt that did not work, it might have but it didn't. I hope it does not take Skyrim down with it. Any experienced and observant person will see that there are attempts being made to whitewash this and silence the concern...i agree with this poster 100 percent: Third party hosting of game reasources and espcially of any form of game editor, i was shocked to read that the Construction Set for Skyrim may be forced thru Steam, shows totaly lack of faith in the game community and contempt for our interest in supporting and improving and adding to titles through our efforts. The many thousands of greatly creative mods for Morrowind and Oblivion would have been impossible if the CS had been dependent on a faulty and flawed update process that was server dependent and required and demanded internet access. Contrary to the IT morlocks who are trying to force the entire planet into one big social network, not all of us choose to be ONLINE to do our entire lives. I am glad that the game industry realized the farce that Starforce was and I believe soon they will send Steam to the same dead end of perdition. The faults and flaws of Steam are clear. The solution is that we who ARE the gaming community will vote with our feet, as we walk away from it. Not hopefully from the games and the series like the Elder Scrolls series that we love and support but from flawed and fatal distribution strategies that serve only the third party networks....from them we should and can turn away.