[S-99]

Unfortunate truth: court challenges have established that the "you are merely licensed to use software" is not legally supported.

Other unfortunate truth: all games licensing agreements today are worded in the same way as you are complaining.

Act your age.

I am acting my age, but aren't understanding me.
My point with bringing up the license is to show how they essentially say it's a game leasing service and how much it tells people to **** off. Not at all to say that other game licenses are friendlier. And not court cases.

Steam is a service that by design operates in a way that you don't own the games (steam is legal, it just sucks). In which case came my other point.

Paying normal video game prices for a game that you don't get to own is a rip off. In this i would say per example that owning half life 2 for xbox is much better than for pc since the xbox variant doesn't have steam. You would actually get the game in form that after purchase, you can toss it right into the gaming platform and just play your game. The pc variant requires internet, finagling with steam, mandatory updates, preloading, and then you can play. That's a lot of trouble to just go home and play your new game. At the time when half life 2 came out, they cost about the same for pc and xbox version, except the xbox version doesn't have steams grubby paws on it 24/7 (xbox version in this i would call the better deal).

There's no re-assuring me. I'm not talking about having technical problems with steam. I'm talking about how steam as a whole sucks and says **** you to the customer. Which in the end is, valve doesn't trust you, valve screws customers with steam, valve punishes their customers (all in the name of anti-piracy).

I don't like to support places that punish their customers. If you want to check into the benevolency of steam banning accounts, it's only a google search away. It also says in the license agreement to steam that they can for any reason ban your account. It has happened to people with steam accounts who had done nothing wrong. And steam in that case either does or doesn't reactivate the account. In which case if this happens, the person who has purchased a bunch of steam games and has their account banned, it is the equivalent of steam running away with that persons money with nothing to do about it.

I actually have not purchased a modern day game in a while. I bought quake 4 special edition (quake 2, quake 2 expansion packs, and quake 4) long ago. I bought it, i installed it, i could play it (i also didn't need internet). Quake 2 sure is great, quake 4 was boring, but the point is most games since then haven't been worth my interest. I mostly play oldies because they're a lot more fun, and less bs.

I sit here with orange box and a dialup connection. It's laughable for me even to try to play it with waiting for the massive amount of updates for all the games orange box has to finish (i got orange box for christmas long ago, i'd like to play the games at least once). I live in an area of alaska where dialup is as good as it gets.

At the end of it, the scheme of steam is to prevent piracy at which it excels. But, it's at too great of a cost for what i believe in and what i want. I don't pirate my games. Several good video game reviews will show me if something is worth playing, and that's where i slap down my money. After that, fso and other free opensource games have no bull****, and even encourage redistribution.

Steam sucks, you can't coin it any other way. Sorry for those who don't want to understand me. If all you read earlier was anger, know that i'm very unhappy about steam. They are the ones with the crappy service and the modern day games that do actually gain my fancy. I'm not angry at you guys. I'll play DKF on a friends computer whoever manages to get it to play. And i don't care who loves steam, steam blows big time.

In the end, I scored a deal that let me have Anthology again for $10 so I have the complete HL Universe available to me. Lesson here is: Don't forget your details. And while they have a few things left service side to work out, it could be a lot worse.

In the end after proving you had the game....they made you buy it again....yeahhhh......that sucks.

[sigtau]

Steam sucks, you can't coin it any other way.

I'm sorry, but when we're talking about a subjective matter (i.e. does steam suck or not) you claim that your point is objective and the only one correct.

As an analogy, you sound like someone who would say "I don't like apples, therefore they are the worst fruit in the world."

[Mongoose]

And honestly, for those of us not stuck in the middle of nowhere relying on 15-year-old Internet connections, the downloading part isn't a big deal at all.  Hell, I'm working on my download of Batman: Arkham Asylum right now, and it's cruising at a cool 1.5 MB/s.

[PsychoLandlord]

Yeah, I think the gist of this is that you're angry at your internet situation, and you're coming up with other, mostly wrong, reasons to be angry at Steam.  Which is fine, and I feel for you on the internet front, having been in a similar situation before, but now your'e evangelizing it at those who have no problems with said service, instead of just saying, "crap, I cant use it, that sucks."

[Dark RevenantX]

I'm sorry to burst some of your guys' bubbles, but Steam does exactly what most games' license agreements say anyway.

You never, ever, own a game unless you buy the entire copyright for it.  Otherwise, you are simply purchasing a lifetime lease to that game for your own use, or your family's use, or your workgroup's use, depending on what the license entitles you to.  In any case, you're usually breaking that license by handing the software to someone else after you finish with it.  After all, the company only makes the money of one copy of the game even though there might be 2-3 unlicensed users for your copy.

Unfortunately for software developers, it's impossible to enforce that license agreement if you give out physical copies.  With Steam, however, such restrictions are actually enforceable.

Steam's service is actually pretty good in the case of losing account details, though (as with every SINGLE OTHER COMPANY IN THE WORLD) there are always some exceptions, like what happened to Zacam.


However, Valve knows that adding restrictions will just not go over well with consumers, so they added benefits:
1. Physical backups made easy.
2. Downloading and installing games to a new computer made easy.
3. Friend and group support and integration into your games (you can turn this off if you want, though).
4. Frequent large-markdown sales.
And a few others I forgot.

Granted, there are other forms of protection available, such as the kind in WarCraft III or StarCraft where pirating the game is easy but it's extremely difficult to hack your way into the main selling point: the online service.  But that doesn't apply to every game.

[S-99]

Yeah, I think the gist of this is that you're angry at your internet situation, and you're coming up with other, mostly wrong, reasons to be angry at Steam.  Which is fine, and I feel for you on the internet front, having been in a similar situation before, but now your'e evangelizing it at those who have no problems with said service, instead of just saying, "crap, I cant use it, that sucks."

I just don't like steam for what it stands for and is. It's a base of customer untrustworthiness. Yeah my internet sucks. A lot of other people are stuck with dialup in the US too. Broadband expansion like in canada sucks over here. I don't necessarily use dialup because it's cheap. I use it because it's all i can currently get in my area.

This is mostly, "wow, this is a ****ty game service that shafts the paying subscriber", and a little bit of "i can't use it because i have dialup".  Does anyone want a copy of orange box?

[PsychoLandlord]

Does anyone want a copy of orange box?

Ah, careful with that. If you already logged it to your account, nobody else can use it short of you giving them access to said account. I actually forgot to mention that earlier, thats my one real gripe with Steam. If you buy a Steam game on a disk it's hit with the same "One account, forever" mentality as the online purchases, so there can be no passing on.

Yeah, that part sucks.

[S-99]

I know steam sucks. I'm very experienced with how their accounts work (this means i will be giving out my account, that's how you give steam games away). I doubt steam is going to know someone other than me is using it (i didn't use it that much). Again, i also don't buy any modern day games. Most games these days suck so much they're not worth my interest. Sucking so much in either the areas of DRM and crappy gameness (most of the time both). Case in point, screw getting assassins creed 2 for pc.
 
Again, i don't hate steam because i currently can't use it. I  hate steam because the whole business model of it is about ****ing the customer. That of which i find scary that no one else can see this, and instead choose to think i'm deluded and say that i'm wrong. I am not wrong about steam, people's responses going as far to say that i'm angry because i can't use steam aren't understanding me. I don't hate it because i can't use it, i hate it because it sucks, through my own beliefs and principles i can't support such a business model that shafts people.

Whoever wants it can go ahead and tell me now. I'll install steam since that's no problem, and have a change of password and other things.

[General Battuta]

Can I have your stuff

[S-99]

Well, only do it if you don't have orange box. But sure you can. Send me a pm to remind me. I'll get to it as soon as i can.

[Scotty]

I  hate steam because the whole business model of it is about ****ing the customer. That of which i find scary that no one else can see this, and instead choose to think i'm deluded and say that i'm wrong. I am not wrong about steam, people's responses going as far to say that i'm angry because i can't use steam aren't understanding me.

Source please on the bolded part, and explanation for the rest, if you would.

[General Battuta]

Dude, it's not even worth it, he's just going to yell walls of text at you. This is a form of life beyond our ken or communion

[Scotty]

Yeah, but I'm going to be really bored until fencing later, so I thought I could spend the time trying to figure out what he's actually pissed at.

[sigtau]

inb4 links to the steam subscriber agreement which contain things that we've already debunked as being 'part of the software lease we pay for if we buy our games through places that aren't steam anyways'

[watsisname]

I was enjoying it actually.  Especially when it's mostly made of

I know steam sucks.
Most games these days suck.  Sucking so much.  i hate it because it sucks.  Yeah my internet sucks. Steam blows, but it still sucks, sucks, and sucks.  wait for huge ass game updates, going for a butt plug, more comfortable butt plug

[Mika]

That of which i find scary that no one else can see this, and instead choose to think i'm deluded and say that i'm wrong. I am not wrong about steam, people's responses going as far to say that i'm angry because i can't use steam aren't understanding me. I don't hate it because i can't use it, i hate it because it sucks, through my own beliefs and principles i can't support such a business model that shafts people.

Rest assured you are not the only one.

I don't like it how this trend is going to reduce the amount of used games in a game store - I'm usually not in any sort of hurry to play a new title and can easily wait for the 60€ titles to drop to somewhere more reasonable 30 € to 40€. Luckily, I have been able to find, buy and play quite a reasonable fraction of the good old stuff and given that there aren't that many that interesting games coming on, so even if new stuff is going to go to Steam I won't lose much. But DNF is not an acceptable casualty.

[PsychoLandlord]

It's that exact mentality that makes me like Steam. Used games = NO MONEY for the developers. I'm not going to crap on everyone who waits to buy their games cheap and used, but if I like a game well enough to spend any money on it whatsoever, then I'm going to make damn sure the right people get it, so that they can continue making awesome stuff. Steam, and most Digital Purchase services I believe, give a larger amount of that money to the people that actually made the damn game. That is absolutely a good thing.

[Mongoose]

I think Steam gets something like 70% of a game's cost back to its developer/publisher, which is much more than your standard retail channel.

As far as used games go, I don't think I've ever seen a games store around here selling used PC titles, mainly because of the whole CD-key/activation thing.  In fact, there are a lot of games on Steam where the only alternative to get them is getting lucky on eBay or Amazon.  And given how frequently Steam has ridiculous sales on random titles, it's very easy to get what you want for dirt-cheap.

[sigtau]

30%, according to the game design folks I keep in close contact with.

Also, larger AAA titles sometimes cut bigger deals than that, on a case by case basis.

[karajorma]

Unfortunate truth: court challenges have established that the "you are merely licensed to use software" is not legally supported.

Other unfortunate truth: all games licensing agreements today are worded in the same way as you are complaining.

Surely that argument means that if Steam cut off your account, preventing you playing games, they have acted illegally then?