What's the beef with Steam?

[Zephyr102]

My only 'beef' with Steam is that being in New Zealand, the 'broadband' is like America's Dial Up and I'm a 15 gig broadband speed limit per month which means my download speed is around 20kp - 31kp and after the 15 gigs is downloaded I get switched to 'dial up' which is 2kp - 4 kp and it's more frustrating than the gods to have to download a over 3 gig game because it takes soooooo long and I have to wonder why why can't I download from the disk instead?

 

Ouch- I probably wouldn't have ANY of my Direct2Drive-type games if I had to work at those speeds.

 

@ the indie convo- Audiosurf and Gary's Mod are two of the best things I've ever bought for under $10 a pop. Replay til your thumbs fall off, then learn to play with your toes. :P

[Arthmoor]

My beef with Steam - totally despise having something sitting around in the background eating up CPU and network resources while I'm trying to play a game. I may have a solid rig, but Bethesda's games push even what I have to the very brink even when it's the only task running. So I don't want Valve's spyware app sitting there doing God knows what.

[ita]

Sure, the publisher/devs set the price and have the right to charge what they want for their products, no arguments there. What I fail to understand is why a physical product is cheaper than its digital counterpart on Steam. A game distributed via Steam doesn't require paying a pressing plant to make DVDs and boxes, there's no cost for printing manuals et.c. so, in theory, the Steam version should be cheaper or at least equal in price to a game released on DVD.

 

Also, is it just me or does Valve seem to think that 1 Euro is equal in value to 1 US Dollar? They're not.

 

I'm no Valve hater. Steam isn't a bad service, as mentioned they do have an excellent selection of indie games and good deals from time to time, but due to the price issues on most of their products I won't see myself buying stuff through Steam anytime soon.

[Zephyr102]

Good point on the pricing- you'd think less materials would mean less money out of our pockets. But with greed being what it is, things rarely seem to work that way. :| The euro deal makes even less sense- not setting up a computer service to account for exchange rates is just lazy. Edited December 12, 2010 by DJZephyr

[ita]

Heh, maybe they thought "hey, let's just change the currency sign from $ to €, it's not like those Eurotrash will ever notice" ;D

[micalov]

and its great amoungst other things steam updated New vegas even after checking dont auto upadte about 3 times! :/ now the friggin thing wont work with NVSE.

[RZ1029]

Just give 'em a day or two, or uninstall the patch if you're really that worried about it.

[TucoBenedictoPacifico]

Steam is fine, sometimes even great (like with multiplayer games which use it actively as platform and Steamwork based games, with cloud saving for savegames and settings).

 

Complaints about it mostly are made by people who don't know what are talking about.

Like for the "autoupdates when I don't want them" which anyone can disable from the options panel.

Edited December 17, 2010 by TucoBenedictoPacifico

[ThomasKra]

<snippity>

 

Well, apart from that option being completely broken, yes, indeed.

 

It doesn't use much memory (however, with a heavily modded Bethsoft game, that memory will matter at some point), is a great distribution platform for Indie games, and supplies an excellent online multiplayer, but when it comes to SP only games, Steam is unnecessarily rigid with its restrictions at times. For one thing, it has almost no support for total conversions due to the fact that it will only recognize one installation of any game at a time, there is no way to de-isolate your games from Steam if you want to run them from somewhere besides the Steam directory.

 

Finally, if your Steam account gets banned from the service, it junks every Steam game you own tied to that account. You have to be logged into the Steam Network in order to play any games that use Steam, and only on the account you registered the game to. If you can't log in... any games tied to that account are gone. Forever. No contingencies or fallbacks, that's it. You could instantly lose several hundred dollars worth of software with a single button push, even consoles are more lenient than this.

 

Don't get me wrong, I think Steam's a great idea, it just needs some MAJOR tweaking.

Edited December 17, 2010 by Thomas Kaira

[Azrael120782]

To me,I HATE steam.Ive had more problems than its worth.

 

1.I tried hooking my brother up with Steam so I could play L4D with him.his Ecopy wouldnt work and my hard copy wouldnt either.Waste of 40 bucks.Even using his serial key,it demanded I enter a valid key.

2.It runs in the BG.I dont like that.I dont like having anything sapping resources.

3.its a PITA to install games into other directories.

4.The Cloud is nice,but losing all my software because someone didnt like me? Sorry but no.

 

Ive had autoupdates kick in several times.I like surfing Steam for awesome deals(got PoRtal for free!) but I wish it was an option,not a mandate.it would be best if you wanted it it was there,but if not,you dont have to use it.