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[Jopax]

I never really got the whole "running in the background" thing, do you just run all the launchers at start-up and leave them running? Why, just fire them up when you want to play a specific game and shut it off when you're done.

Also some of the hate Epic gets is a bit deserved imo. They kinda poached certain titles (the whole Metro mess) thus forcing people to use an inferior platform (and right now it is vastly inferior to all the others, despite any issues they might have). Imo, the correct approach would've been to entice folks with a better deal or some perks, you build customer goodwill with carrots, not sticks.

[MrWiggles]

You build customers with content. How Metro parent company handle it exit of Steam, was their own fault not Epic. I very much doubt Epic was like, 'So, make sure when you're leaving Steam to shit the bed really good. If you dont do that, then this deal is a no go. Its gotta be handled just super bad. Or no deal. Now dont go overboard, dont go NordicTHQ bad.'

[wierd]

I never really got the whole "running in the background" thing, do you just run all the launchers at start-up and leave them running? Why, just fire them up when you want to play a specific game and shut it off when you're done.

Also some of the hate Epic gets is a bit deserved imo. They kinda poached certain titles (the whole Metro mess) thus forcing people to use an inferior platform (and right now it is vastly inferior to all the others, despite any issues they might have). Imo, the correct approach would've been to entice folks with a better deal or some perks, you build customer goodwill with carrots, not sticks.

Take for instance, the blizzard store/launcher.

You CANNOT launch any game obtained through that horrendous bit of unholy software without it being open, and it bitches mightily if it cannot communicate with the mothership.  This is one of those always-on things I mentioned earlier that I am willing to pay extra to avoid forever, and which makes pirate offers superior ones.

Steam is the same way.

Now, Say for a moment you sit down from having a horribly shitty day at work dealing with horribly shitty people, and your patience is already negative.  You just want to grab your control method of choice, and blow some shit up.

But no. You have to open the god-damn store app, wait for it to load all its bullshit internet widgets (or in the case of STEAM, Download and install *YET ANOTHER* 200+ MB update and then install it) THEN load your game.  You have to keep track of which damned store goes with what game, when it COULD be as simple as "Pick from start menu-- DONE!" like it USED to be back in the glory days of PC gaming.  Then there is also the issue of "OH, OUR STORE IS SO FUCKING AWESOME, WE *KNOW* you *WANT* it to autostart every time you start your computer! Howe ELSE will you get all that "Friend and contact" integration!?" (like STEAM, and blizzard stores do). Fuck that. FUck it with treble hooks on a gaffing stick.

This is the thing. At least for me anyway.

[Jopax]

You do realise you can turn off the launch-on-startup thing, right?

As for the rest, stick to GoG if you don't need any of the extra stuff most launchers offer these days, won't get a number of new releases that way, but most of them are integrated with such stuff anyways :S

[scourge728]

Either I'm not receiving these updates steam supposedly has, or they are going so fast I'm just not noticing them happen

[itisnotlogical]

The majority of updates to anything on any hardware I own happen in the background while I'm at work. The only time I've noticed an update in the past several months is when my Internet was briefly off, interrupting any updates in progress.

[wierd]

Suppose the following:

You have shit-unstable internet because you live in the USA. (I would normally say BFE here, but let's face it, the ISP bullshit in the USA is endemic everywhere, especially in dense urban settings. See also, how shit bad comcast cable is in a place like san Francisco.) Because of this, your modem/router loses the channel and drops off until you physically reboot it. (because the channel is grossly oversubscribed, and people hog the thing during the day, making you drop off)

In addition to the above, you also dont like having services running that you dont need running, because doing so increases the power consumption of the system at nominal "idle", and you aren't made of freaking money.  To add to that, you use several different store fronts, and *ALL* of them want to run at the same damn time, because none of them want to compromise on their vision of being your ONE AND ONLY online game community platform, and they dont want to work together *AT ALL*, so you disable the "start at startup" bullshit, and only start one when you want to play a game from one.

It takes you awhile to come back to a title that is hosted by a different store, because you have to lose interest in the one you are currently enamored with.

And now---

We come to the situation I opened with above---  You are bitchy, angry, and in dire need of de-stressing.  You *JUST* want to blow some shit up.

You turn on your computer; The internet is broken-- A --FUCKING -GAIN .  You go downstairs, reboot the modem, wait for signal to be restored.  you go back upstairs. You are now even more angry than before.

You start steam.  It's been awhile since you played a steam game; Say you have been clobbering starcraft II again for a nostalgia kick, but now you want some FPS action.  You've spent the past week or so using the blizzard launcher, and kept steam off.

"OH! We updated our client *AGAIN* for no fucking reason! You cant play your FPS title without online verification, because you could be a FILTHY PIRATE--- And we cant let you do that on an OUTDATED CLIENT now CAN WE!? OH NO NO NO!!  200mb download or no games for you! What!? Start in OFFLINE mode? BUT I DETECT INTERNET! HERESY!"

Your eye twitches a little as you notice the boring steam update window progress...


Again, you have shit internet, and or-- the steam back-end is being raped by something or maybe you pissed of jesus-- who knows. But that 200mb download takes AGES...  Then it finally installs.  You decide that you need to get a sandwich or something while you wait.

Finally it finishes, and you start your game... NOPE! GAME UPDATE!  You can't play an outdated patch-level! YOU HEATHEN, HOW COULD YOU!? 500mb to 1gb download! GO SUCK IT.


enraged, you throw the keyboard angry german kid style, and just turn on your xbox.

"A CONSOLE UPDATE IS AVAILABLE! Do you want to install it now?"

FUCK NO.

You pop in a game disc.

"A title update is available! Do you want to update now!?"

NO. JUST NO. NO UPDATES. SHOOTY.. **NAAOOW**

Game starts.

Finally, you shoot some things. You do this for awhile, until you once again remember why you prefer PC games, and that is that you get to use mods and have more freedom; you come back to your PC, and notice it has *FINALLY* updated its shit.  Steam pops up its "news" page which is really just a bunch of adverts.  You close it.

You look at the clock.  you realize you really dont have any more time to play tonight because you have to work with shit people being shitty AGAIN early tomorrow.

You curse the always online world for its dickery one more time, and swear fatwa against whoever it was who decided this was a perfectly good idea for everything game related, then go to bed.

[MrRoboto75]

Its worse on PS4.  Not only do you need to update the console and the games, but every game needs to be installed PC-style.  The hard drive can hold maybe 5 games, and installation can take an hour for one game.

[Bumber]

You turn on your computer; The internet is broken-- A --FUCKING -GAIN .  You go downstairs, reboot the modem, wait for signal to be restored.

[...]

What!? Start in OFFLINE mode? BUT I DETECT INTERNET! HERESY!"

Hmm... I feel there might be a simple solution here.

I mean, at least Steam has an offline mode. Avoiding the terrible DRM of the era was one of Steam's main selling points.

[Kagus]

Durr?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Steam is easy as hell to use and incredibly convenient without being intrusive. Honestly, I do not understand how people have so much trouble with it. It had SOME problems back in what? 2009??? A decade later I much prefer using Steam to anything else, including going buying games at Best Buy or Gamestop.

Also for the record there are multiple ways to avoid updating games on Steam. You could revert to earlier patches or simply turn off wi-fi for a bit.

EDIT: and imo, if a 200mb update takes you all night that's not Steam's fault.

[thompson]

Suppose the following:

You have shit-unstable internet because you live in the USA. (I would normally say BFE here, but let's face it, the ISP bullshit in the USA is endemic everywhere, especially in dense urban settings. See also, how shit bad comcast cable is in a place like san Francisco.) Because of this, your modem/router loses the channel and drops off until you physically reboot it. (because the channel is grossly oversubscribed, and people hog the thing during the day, making you drop off)

In addition to the above, you also dont like having services running that you dont need running, because doing so increases the power consumption of the system at nominal "idle", and you aren't made of freaking money.  To add to that, you use several different store fronts, and *ALL* of them want to run at the same damn time, because none of them want to compromise on their vision of being your ONE AND ONLY online game community platform, and they dont want to work together *AT ALL*, so you disable the "start at startup" bullshit, and only start one when you want to play a game from one.

It takes you awhile to come back to a title that is hosted by a different store, because you have to lose interest in the one you are currently enamored with.

And now---

We come to the situation I opened with above---  You are bitchy, angry, and in dire need of de-stressing.  You *JUST* want to blow some shit up.

You turn on your computer; The internet is broken-- A --FUCKING -GAIN .  You go downstairs, reboot the modem, wait for signal to be restored.  you go back upstairs. You are now even more angry than before.

You start steam.  It's been awhile since you played a steam game; Say you have been clobbering starcraft II again for a nostalgia kick, but now you want some FPS action.  You've spent the past week or so using the blizzard launcher, and kept steam off.

"OH! We updated our client *AGAIN* for no fucking reason! You cant play your FPS title without online verification, because you could be a FILTHY PIRATE--- And we cant let you do that on an OUTDATED CLIENT now CAN WE!? OH NO NO NO!!  200mb download or no games for you! What!? Start in OFFLINE mode? BUT I DETECT INTERNET! HERESY!"

Your eye twitches a little as you notice the boring steam update window progress...


Again, you have shit internet, and or-- the steam back-end is being raped by something or maybe you pissed of jesus-- who knows. But that 200mb download takes AGES...  Then it finally installs.  You decide that you need to get a sandwich or something while you wait.

Finally it finishes, and you start your game... NOPE! GAME UPDATE!  You can't play an outdated patch-level! YOU HEATHEN, HOW COULD YOU!? 500mb to 1gb download! GO SUCK IT.


enraged, you throw the keyboard angry german kid style, and just turn on your xbox.

"A CONSOLE UPDATE IS AVAILABLE! Do you want to install it now?"

FUCK NO.

You pop in a game disc.

"A title update is available! Do you want to update now!?"

NO. JUST NO. NO UPDATES. SHOOTY.. **NAAOOW**

Game starts.

Finally, you shoot some things. You do this for awhile, until you once again remember why you prefer PC games, and that is that you get to use mods and have more freedom; you come back to your PC, and notice it has *FINALLY* updated its shit.  Steam pops up its "news" page which is really just a bunch of adverts.  You close it.

You look at the clock.  you realize you really dont have any more time to play tonight because you have to work with shit people being shitty AGAIN early tomorrow.

You curse the always online world for its dickery one more time, and swear fatwa against whoever it was who decided this was a perfectly good idea for everything game related, then go to bed.

You silly, silly man. I always set steam to automatically run in offline mode. If I want it to go online I explicitly tell it to. No downloads that way.

[MrWiggles]

Also the fualt of your shit internet isn't the fualt of digital stores or updates. Your complaining about free after purchase support.

[wierd]

The POLITE way to handle it:

"Do you want to update? Y/N"

Rather than "OMG! A patch level behind! AUTOPATCH NAAOOW!"

along with "You know, it's only been A WEEK since we updated the client. Let's not roll out a new client quite so fast, M'kay?"  Realy, you do not need to update the client to sell some new feature of the webstore. that is done with the web backend, not necessarily the client.  They really should try to minimize disruption through bullshit updates with paper-thin reasons for being pushed. "We mispelled a word!! Gotta push a 200mb download!" is bullshit yo. You can do that with a 12k patch program, if you absolutely MUST fix it.


The real issue here, is that the service provider here is not considering the user base's actual needs, or that they have finite time. Forcing people to NOT PLAY when they want to, by mandating updates for spurious and obtuse reasons, is contributing to how they are going out of business now, because people cannot magic more time out of nothing to play their games.

People play video games for two basic reasons:  Enjoyment (which would include social interaction things), and stress relief/catharsis.  For the latter category, horking another 2gb download because you added a temporary holiday whizzbang that is totally optional and meaningless to single player play-- is toxic as fuck.

These annoyances could be solved through the simple act of ASKING the player if they want to install it, and not mandating its installation.  end of story.

[MrWiggles]

Oh right. You are the only golden  arbiter of what is silly an obtuse and have maximum intimate knowledge how these update schemes work behind scence and knows how they can be structured to suit your standards. If you can't see their use they cannot have any. And they could never wver be part of a greator whole.  There can't ever be server stability  or sychonization , load order issues or collusion issues. The  article listed while interesting isn't about a singular person time to enjoy but the market in arggarate on how the time which could be spent playing isn't being spent playing. They are choosing other means to engage. That time watching esports could be spent playing.  But since your all of us the one golden arbiter on how these update works what makes them worthwhile. It definitely doesn't say it's because of digital marketing places or after market support patches.