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[Neyvn]

PLEASE NOTE, THIS IS A RANT. YOU ARE NOT COMMITTED TO READ....


You may look at this title and wonder what I mean.
You may look at this title and think, what is he trying to say.
You may look at this title and say to yourself, he is a fool anyway.
You may look at this title and demand me to explain myself...

Therefore I will...

The Rise and fall of my willpower against Steam and Microsoft. And how they broke my Willpower...

Since Steam first arrived on our Internet with its promise of Gaming goodness, friends of mine falling into rank and file behind those before them, throwing their money at this Gaming Giant that controls us, I fought hard against it, buying nearly all my games from the stores, or buying those from other sites, but Steam won in the end...

I had entered my local video store and discovered a game that they were selling, due to their new system, had piqued my interest greatly, I had played both of those games before and dispite being a singleplayer due to my Australian Net being shite and such I had never really played any Multi, but none the less I still bought this game for $19.95AUD. This game was 'Total War: Empires' I returned home much excited to install and enjoy this game, pulling the DVD from the casing and sturggling with my DVD drive to open I placed it in to the drive and watched it begin to install...

Then it popped up...

Steam...

The DVD IN my Computer was trying to access Steam, I had not installed it nor even made an account. But this Game I bought from a Retail Store, in a package and even on a DVD, was asking to access Steam. I though fine, No doubt for these Achievements that everyone man and his dog salivated for online, something of which never bothered me, was needed for the game to run properly. So I installed Steam, made my account and then restarted the instillation.

Then again...

It popped up...

Steam...

I was downloading the game, Steam was downloading the game from their servers, the very game that I have the DVD CD in my DVD Drive, that is part of my computer and the game itself being ON said DVD CD. But yet there it was, downloading the game at something pitiful of 54kb/s, yes my net connection speed WAS that pitiful. Now this wouldn't have been much of a bother if it was like DF, something that started small and grew or even stayed small, but this was 6 or GB of download, the friendly information pop up informed me that I would be able to play my game... Next Week....

This was stupid, I scourged the net to discover why Steam was doing this, in the end I found it, a method to actually install from the DVD, but in the end, I only spent 5hrs playing the game, my desire to play it lost with the arrival of the Foe, Steam. For the full year or so since then I had not installed or bought a single game through Steam, until a few days back, before Christmas this year in fact, I bought R.U.S.E. through a Online Gaming Store called Gamersgate, now with them I have had made many purchases, but when I tried to install R.U.S.E. it, just like Total War Empires, began to try and contact Steam...

Feed up I looked at Steam, it appeared I could put my Keycode from the purchase from Gamersgate into Steam, just like the game wanted, so I did... And it downloaded the game again, but this time Steam showed me what it could really do now that my Internet had been finally upgraded. The game came through lightning fast, not American or Euro fast, but a good Speed here in Australia, around 600kb/s. Faster then Gamersgate's download. This was my fatality. I gave Steam too much of a chance, I now have around 20+ Games purchased through Steams via their Christmas Sale, I had over $1000AUD before Christmas (after Chissy gift purchases) and now.... Nearly $200AUD is left. But $300 of it is someone elses fault...

Microsoft...

For over the last two years I have been putting up with Microsoft telling me that my Copy of WindowsXP was Pirated, which it was not, as my Computer used to be connected to a Students Classroom System, who had used their Copy to install over these systems, Naturally when i was searching for a cheep PC to upgrade due to a $900 Stimulus Packaged that our government gave out during the beginnings of the Crash a few years back, I did upgrade it, and though its no beast it at least does what I want to do. But then Microsoft tried to upgrade my OS without me knowing and pinged it as a 'pirated' copy, I had no money for a good part of the years and I missed the chance to buy my own Keycode like it was asking me to do way before dear of Windows7 came out. During my Steam Spurge I got tired and decided to accept the chance at the Keycode, I discovered something shocking, well to me anyway. Microsoft wasn't doing that anymore. If I wanted to be left alone, I would need to buy Windows7...

I continued to ignore it, but I gave in, to have to wait an extra 30seconds on startup to click a button saying later and constantly being interrupted mid game or browsing and accidentally clicking on a popup that would appear in the bottom right corner no mater if I was fullscreened or not, with it pulling me from the game or whatever I was doing to have it tell me to upgrade I said FINE!!!...

I started to look into buying it, and discovered that I would have to mail order it...

From AMERICA,

That would take a month or more, more annoyances as I waited, so the next time I went up the coast to the Malls we have, there I did it. I bought your damn OS Microsoft, it cost me $300AUD to do so, I have wiped my PC to install it like you wanted me to do, I am now having to search the web for all those things I couldn't move to my External...

You have my money now you Greedy Monsters, take it. There will be more later, but for now, let me nurse my broken wallet. Let me bring him back to life. You both have emptied my Bank Balance using my willpower against me, and for that I am defeated. But some day I will return to my full power and rise back up against you...


I Hope....

[Phmcw]

Free yourself brother, I resent your pain.
Don't surrender to tyranny, there is other ways: The path of light, or the path of darkness.
You could follow the path of light, of life, of goodness. Embrace the pidgin, run with the gnu, and stop the gaming forever.
Or follow the other path, the darker path. The  path of whisper on obscure forum, and of chain burned and broken.
Rise brother, there still is hope.

[Eugenitor]

The best way to avoid Microsoft bitching that you have a pirated copy of XP is to pirate XP.

The best way to avoid Steam is to pirate the Steam games and let the cracked fake Steam .dlls do their nothing.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

[JoshuaFH]

Spoiler: retroactively deemed irrelevant (click to show/hide)

I hardly indulge in most new gaming nowadays, not because I resent the way the gaming market is constructed, which I do, but it's because I simply do not have the money to support a hobby as expensive as gaming.

I have a friend that has an Xbox 360, and he uses the Xbox Live feature. He frequently complains that certain 'updates' simply won't work for certain games, and some games simply refuse to work altogether without certain updates. Also, certain downloaded games simply stop working for no reason occasionally, even though he swears that he bought them some time ago.

Sometimes I think I'm blessed that I don't support the modern gaming industry, and that I only buy older games for my GBA and PS2. I'm still very happy with this state of affairs.

That's a real shame, perhaps you should write a particularly indignant letter to Steam to let them know how you feel. It probably won't accomplish anything, but it's always good to get your voice out.

[Eugenitor]

I have a friend that has an Xbox 360, and he uses the Xbox Live feature. He frequently complains that certain 'updates' simply won't work for certain games, and some games simply refuse to work altogether without certain updates. Also, certain downloaded games simply stop working for no reason occasionally, even though he swears that he bought them some time ago.

Don't mean to turn this into a console war, but the PS3 simply doesn't have this kind of problem.

[Omegastick]

I, personally, have tried to keep away from Steam ever since a certain incident happened for which I shall never forgive them.

This was about four years ago, when Steam was becoming a massive thing. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to share his Steam copy of the game Portal and, unknowing of the wrath of Steam for this sort of thing, I gleefully accepted. I installed steam and downloaded the game, loving it for the time I played on it. Alas, I felt that I was cheating Steam by sharing the game with my friend, so I bought a digital copy off of them I used that account as my own - seeing as my friend never went on it - and bought and downloaded over £200 of games over the next year via Steam. One day, however, I couldn't log in to Steam and my friend phoned me up, complaining that he had no access either. I promptly got on the case, emailing Steam support for a good few months trying to get a coherent answer out of them and eventually they gave me the account back. I got my friend to make his own account and played videogames on Steam for another month or two. Suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever, my account was locked again. I contacted Steam support and they said that I had been the victim of a scam (which, I assure you, I hadn't) or something similar and they had locked the account to stop the scammer from being able to access my account. It took another few months for me to get the account back and I logged on to the server to look at my games and upon clicking my 'games' tab I found something deeply disturbing. My £200 of games was gone.

I demanded them back from Steam but they said something along the lines of 'We'll give you your games back when you give us the activation code to Portal'. Now, those of you who have been paying attention may notice that this was the game which my friend shared with my and I bought a digital copy of. This meant that my friend who, at this point, had moved far away needed to send me the key to the game. I contacted him and he no longer had the game!

"Never mind!" I thought, "I have bought a digital copy of the game, that should get me my games back!"

It didn't, to this very day Steam refuse to give me back my £200 of games despite the fact that I legally own every one.

This, my friends, is why I stay away from anything DRM related (excluding Cortex Command).

[Tellemurius]

I have a friend that has an Xbox 360, and he uses the Xbox Live feature. He frequently complains that certain 'updates' simply won't work for certain games, and some games simply refuse to work altogether without certain updates. Also, certain downloaded games simply stop working for no reason occasionally, even though he swears that he bought them some time ago.

Don't mean to turn this into a console war, but the PS3 simply doesn't have this kind of problem.

sony has released updates which knocked people off their network, NO Problems with my wii .

if you are feeling really ripped off man go pirate.

[ECrownofFire]

I, personally, have tried to keep away from Steam ever since a certain incident happened for which I shall never forgive them.

This was about four years ago, when Steam was becoming a massive thing. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to share his Steam copy of the game Portal and, unknowing of the wrath of Steam for this sort of thing, I gleefully accepted. I installed steam and downloaded the game, loving it for the time I played on it. Alas, I felt that I was cheating Steam by sharing the game with my friend, so I bought a digital copy off of them I used that account as my own - seeing as my friend never went on it - and bought and downloaded over £200 of games over the next year via Steam. One day, however, I couldn't log in to Steam and my friend phoned me up, complaining that he had no access either. I promptly got on the case, emailing Steam support for a good few months trying to get a coherent answer out of them and eventually they gave me the account back. I got my friend to make his own account and played videogames on Steam for another month or two. Suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever, my account was locked again. I contacted Steam support and they said that I had been the victim of a scam (which, I assure you, I hadn't) or something similar and they had locked the account to stop the scammer from being able to access my account. It took another few months for me to get the account back and I logged on to the server to look at my games and upon clicking my 'games' tab I found something deeply disturbing. My £200 of games was gone.

I demanded them back from Steam but they said something along the lines of 'We'll give you your games back when you give us the activation code to Portal'. Now, those of you who have been paying attention may notice that this was the game which my friend shared with my and I bought a digital copy of. This meant that my friend who, at this point, had moved far away needed to send me the key to the game. I contacted him and he no longer had the game!

"Never mind!" I thought, "I have bought a digital copy of the game, that should get me my games back!"

It didn't, to this very day Steam refuse to give me back my £200 of games despite the fact that I legally own every one.

This, my friends, is why I stay away from anything DRM related (excluding Cortex Command).

This, my friends, is why you don't share games with others. It's pretty clear to me what happened. Your friend shared a game with you, you accepted it, and you both got in trouble for it. Now you're out of £200. Generally speaking, you NEVER share games with any kind of DRM at all. Come on, this is how it works. I don't approve of it (the DRM), but it was your own fault. Don't blame Steam for what you did. They're using their DRM (albeit in a dickish manner, but how do they know it was just your friend?), that's how it works. If you don't want this to happen, you don't do stuff like this. That "scammer" (according to Steam) was probably your friend trying to get on the account. Now your games are gone, and you have only yourself to blame. I'm sorry if this comes off as overly caustic, but that's just how it is. I hate it and want to change it too, but I don't directly do things against it, precisely because of things like this.

How do you even get away from DRM without pirating everything anyway? Even older games that only require a CD is still technically DRM.

[malimbar04]

I, personally, have tried to keep away from Steam ever since a certain incident happened for which I shall never forgive them.

This was about four years ago, when Steam was becoming a massive thing. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to share his Steam copy of the game Portal and, unknowing of the wrath of Steam for this sort of thing, I gleefully accepted. I installed steam and downloaded the game, loving it for the time I played on it. Alas, I felt that I was cheating Steam by sharing the game with my friend, so I bought a digital copy off of them I used that account as my own - seeing as my friend never went on it - and bought and downloaded over £200 of games over the next year via Steam. One day, however, I couldn't log in to Steam and my friend phoned me up, complaining that he had no access either. I promptly got on the case, emailing Steam support for a good few months trying to get a coherent answer out of them and eventually they gave me the account back. I got my friend to make his own account and played videogames on Steam for another month or two. Suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever, my account was locked again. I contacted Steam support and they said that I had been the victim of a scam (which, I assure you, I hadn't) or something similar and they had locked the account to stop the scammer from being able to access my account. It took another few months for me to get the account back and I logged on to the server to look at my games and upon clicking my 'games' tab I found something deeply disturbing. My £200 of games was gone.

I demanded them back from Steam but they said something along the lines of 'We'll give you your games back when you give us the activation code to Portal'. Now, those of you who have been paying attention may notice that this was the game which my friend shared with my and I bought a digital copy of. This meant that my friend who, at this point, had moved far away needed to send me the key to the game. I contacted him and he no longer had the game!

"Never mind!" I thought, "I have bought a digital copy of the game, that should get me my games back!"

It didn't, to this very day Steam refuse to give me back my £200 of games despite the fact that I legally own every one.

This, my friends, is why I stay away from anything DRM related (excluding Cortex Command).

This, my friends, is why you don't share games with others. It's pretty clear to me what happened. Your friend shared a game with you, you accepted it, and you both got in trouble for it. Now you're out of £200. Generally speaking, you NEVER share games with any kind of DRM at all. Come on, this is how it works. I don't approve of it (the DRM), but it was your own fault. Don't blame Steam for what you did. They're using their DRM (albeit in a dickish manner, but how do they know it was just your friend?), that's how it works. If you don't want this to happen, you don't do stuff like this. That "scammer" (according to Steam) was probably your friend trying to get on the account. Now your games are gone, and you have only yourself to blame. I'm sorry if this comes off as overly caustic, but that's just how it is. I hate it and want to change it too, but I don't directly do things against it, precisely because of things like this.

How do you even get away from DRM without pirating everything anyway? Even older games that only require a CD is still technically DRM.

Let me rephrase this post:
They're dickish! But it's your fault!

While DRM is occasionally so meaningless that I don't care about it, occasionally it is also so absurd that I want to rant about it too. It is extremely annoying it is to have to do things that are technically illegal in order play a game you own.

[Jay]

I don't understand the hate for Steam.
Some retail games require it.  So what?

They do not force you to download the game from the server if you have the disc; only updates.
Install it from the disc after you install Steam and register your key.
Don't click Install on Steam itself.  It doesn't even look at the disc drive when you do that, as that is for games sans physical media.
Valve's games themselves are pretty good about installing correctly from disc with Steam, other publishers it seems not-so-much.
A vast majority of my Steam library is comprised of games that I do not own a physical disc for.  And that's okay, because I can download and install them as many times as I want on as many systems as I want, at uncapped (on their end -- will slow down with your connection and server load obviously) download speeds, as long as I have the Steam software on that system.  Which is also okay, because it really doesn't use any resources whatsoever on any somewhat modern computer.  If I don't have the rights to install the software on a system, I probably shouldn't be trying to install game X either.

Steam really is the most useful DRM out there, if it is used correctly.

RE: Microsoft --
You might not have done the pirating personally, but I've used official student versions of Windows before (despite the fact that I'm not a student..  nevermind that), and never seen anything of that sort, so I suspect what you had was not truly legitimate.

[ECrownofFire]

I, personally, have tried to keep away from Steam ever since a certain incident happened for which I shall never forgive them.

This was about four years ago, when Steam was becoming a massive thing. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to share his Steam copy of the game Portal and, unknowing of the wrath of Steam for this sort of thing, I gleefully accepted. I installed steam and downloaded the game, loving it for the time I played on it. Alas, I felt that I was cheating Steam by sharing the game with my friend, so I bought a digital copy off of them I used that account as my own - seeing as my friend never went on it - and bought and downloaded over £200 of games over the next year via Steam. One day, however, I couldn't log in to Steam and my friend phoned me up, complaining that he had no access either. I promptly got on the case, emailing Steam support for a good few months trying to get a coherent answer out of them and eventually they gave me the account back. I got my friend to make his own account and played videogames on Steam for another month or two. Suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever, my account was locked again. I contacted Steam support and they said that I had been the victim of a scam (which, I assure you, I hadn't) or something similar and they had locked the account to stop the scammer from being able to access my account. It took another few months for me to get the account back and I logged on to the server to look at my games and upon clicking my 'games' tab I found something deeply disturbing. My £200 of games was gone.

I demanded them back from Steam but they said something along the lines of 'We'll give you your games back when you give us the activation code to Portal'. Now, those of you who have been paying attention may notice that this was the game which my friend shared with my and I bought a digital copy of. This meant that my friend who, at this point, had moved far away needed to send me the key to the game. I contacted him and he no longer had the game!

"Never mind!" I thought, "I have bought a digital copy of the game, that should get me my games back!"

It didn't, to this very day Steam refuse to give me back my £200 of games despite the fact that I legally own every one.

This, my friends, is why I stay away from anything DRM related (excluding Cortex Command).

This, my friends, is why you don't share games with others. It's pretty clear to me what happened. Your friend shared a game with you, you accepted it, and you both got in trouble for it. Now you're out of £200. Generally speaking, you NEVER share games with any kind of DRM at all. Come on, this is how it works. I don't approve of it (the DRM), but it was your own fault. Don't blame Steam for what you did. They're using their DRM (albeit in a dickish manner, but how do they know it was just your friend?), that's how it works. If you don't want this to happen, you don't do stuff like this. That "scammer" (according to Steam) was probably your friend trying to get on the account. Now your games are gone, and you have only yourself to blame. I'm sorry if this comes off as overly caustic, but that's just how it is. I hate it and want to change it too, but I don't directly do things against it, precisely because of things like this.

How do you even get away from DRM without pirating everything anyway? Even older games that only require a CD is still technically DRM.

Let me rephrase this post:
They're dickish! But it's your fault!

While DRM is occasionally so meaningless that I don't care about it, occasionally it is also so absurd that I want to rant about it too. It is extremely annoying it is to have to do things that are technically illegal in order play a game you own.

The beauty of cracking a game that you own is that it's actual legal if you can reasonably prove that there was no other way if you get caught. But most likely you won't get caught at all (but seriously, don't do that kind of thing unless you own the game).

And yes, they are slightly dickish, but Steam is hardly the worst offender. For all they know, there might have really been a spammer that took your account. Five machine activation limit and unremovable software is dickish, Steam has neither of those.

By the way, for the connecting to Steam "problem", I think you can just disconnect from the internet, and it works just fine installing from disk. Haven't ever done it myself though, because all but one of my games on Steam is digital.

[Zangi]

The only steam games I'll get: L4D series

Honestly, any others, I can find without DRM... and if that fails...   I still got options.

[Nikov]

*looks over his library of Steam games aquired since Half Life 2*

You know... I don't really even go to a game store anymore. If I want it, its here, and its often on sale or at a reduced price. I never really have problems with it, either. Sure, there's the occasional difficulty setting up a mod, but as a user with a high level of understanding I don't particularly suffer for it. And since the catalogue of games is so diverse, I've been able to buy some games I never would have heard of otherwise, including a few I originally "borrowed to buy later bayed". And I can't imagine how much good Steam has done for the indie scene. Small developers getting 'shelf space' just like the big dogs must be a dream come true.

Steam is the Wal-Mart of computer game retailers, and it is good.

[NaziBad]

OP, the only solution is for you to stop playing video games.

[Cthulhu]

Steam seems to be very flighty and capricious.  Some people (Like me, thankfully) could only love it more if it made ice cream come out of the computer.  For other people it eats their games and blows up their computer.