I'm with NGTM-1R on this one. Steam really isn't so bad. It's a helluva lot better than it was at launch, seeing as how most games actually can be played offline now, barring the ones that have some form of idiotic DRM in and of themselves. The auto-patcher is still a bit wonky so if you mod you have to be really careful with Steam games, but beyond that I have yet to run into anything terribly obtrusive. At the very least, it's actually better then the DRM on most recent PC titles.
Steam blows. It's a
game leasing service. Steam may have been better than when it first launched, but it still sucks to use, sucks to be dependent on, and sucks for what it stands for. I also do find steam to be a very restrictive form of DRM.
In this game leasing service that it is, steam is a rip off. You'd just be purchasing a lease for duke nukem forever, why pay the money for owning the game when you don't get too? When you're at a pacman arcade, you're not required to pay for the whole arcade machine that doesn't get to belong to you in the end just to play through once. All games on steam should be much cheaper.
Plus, and this is a question I posed to myself before I started using Steam, how often are you actually without an internet connection now? It's fairly rare for an ISP to drop for more than an hour or so, and if the problem is on your end, why would you be trying to play a game instead of fixing your connection, which is all but necessary nowadays?
Plenty of people don't have internet connections. And plenty have ****ty connections. The other thing to realize about this is that sometimes when you buy a game, YOU JUST WANT TO PLAY SAID GODDAMN GAME! That means purchase, install, play. Not **** with internet, **** with steam, hope valve didn't benevolently ban your account for bs reasons, wait for huge ass game updates, game preloading, abide by steam license agreement, then play.
That's a lot of horse **** to play a ****ing game. People who have consoles can just play their games compared to this steam. I don't normally screw around with such nasty DRM like steam because it's a big waste of time, and i don't like supporting such customer hating practices. Steam is all about what valve gets to do with your game and hardly what you wanted to do with it.
Of which i use this metaphor for customer hating practices. Why upgrade to a smaller more comfortable butt plug when you have the choice of not going for a butt plug at all.
Valve hates you, valve doesn't trust you, ala steam.