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
People are asking me why, and i'm doing my best to explain. All you do lately is go into a topic where i posted and say "he's cookoo-cachoo; he has no point or argument, he's always wrong". You aren't helping and you're encouraging people to not understand each other.
If a wall of text kept people from not wanting to figure out what i'm going after. Then i'm sorry, but sometimes you cant say some things in a sentence. Walls of text has been mostly replies to people. Wall of text does not equal it shouldn't be read. And wall of text does not equal, "time to be lazy for read".
If people didn't find out right now, my argument is that steam punishes the customer to prevent piracy.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.
Well, you are one of the many people who live in an area where high speed is delivered. And yes, with a download speed like that mandatory updates is a pinch. My main problem with the updates is that they're mandatory. My secondary problem is that they come often, they're huge, and my connection speed realistically doesn't permit in any timely fashion to get these mandatory updates. There are millions of people out there who live in areas where dialup is the only thing (mainly canada and US). In america it's mostly about big ISP's not expanding infrastructure (no expansion of infrastructure was where metered billing came in as an idea for the current infrastructure that cannot keep up with ever increased bandwidth usage) and just being greedy little piggy's with their money instead (but that's a different problem for a different thread).
Connection speed is the least problems with steam, in fact connection speed is my problem. Mandatory updates is one of the reasons i don't like steam. Talk about another way to force specific usage upon people.
Source please on the bolded part, and explanation for the rest, if you would.
I thought the
steam license agreement/subscriber agreement/end user license agreement says pretty good what they will do. That and you pay an ownership price for games you don't get to own, no freedom to do what you want with your purchase aside from playing it, they can ban your account for any reason = they ran away with your money if they did and games you don't get to play, you don't get to just go home with your new game install and play...you get to mess around with steam first, blablabla they do screw each and everyone of their customers (they're business model really goes after this). That and i've already stated several times in here why i don't like steam.
Steam punishes the customer to prevent piracy.
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.
Developers never liked second sale, the company selling the game never liked second sale. Despite second sale being legal, the game industry is in the area of trying to make video game consumers think that it's a very bad thing when it's not. Video game developers don't like second sale because they don't make a dime off of it. That's the big reason why most big companies or corporations dont like second sale.
The steam business model prevents second sale very well (another thing steam punishes the customer for). This only means that if you're tired of your games it is next to impossible for any kind sale of your own. Second sale is not bad or illegal. If you like supporting a certain developer, buy more of their stuff. When that certain developer releases something that you bought and it sucked, you like many others will probably try to sell it off.
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.
However, Valve knows that adding restrictions will just not go over well with consumers, so they added benefits:
1. Physical backups made easy.
I do have an orange box sitting right next to me for example with an install dvd or two in there. It's the same thing as the option of making a physical backup now offered by steam which is just as useless as having an official install disc. Because of how everything is tied to steam, you can't use that official install disc/backup without steam and an internet connection.
It's a lettuce on my sandwich caveat; steam only offered to let people make physical backups because they know that there's a significant portion of gamers that actually care about having tangible items (in which case, the now made into a tangible item from digital distribution service, still doesn't mean much of anything). And because of the way steam handles it's official install disc/backup, it's anything but impossible to enforce the license agreement. Being able have an official install disc/backup of your steam game is largely useless because in the end it's still that game tied to that specific steam account and still requires internet. Having a physical copy of a steam game is so useless that you might as well just depend only on the digital distribution of games through steam.
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."
What is subjective...I don't like steam, i think they're pretty bad for a game company, and i liken they're DRM to a buttplug.
The nonsubjective part. Steam is bad, they screw their customers by terribly restrictive DRM and other requirements, the subscriber agreement says they will get to run away with your money for banning your account for whatever reason they wanted, and that does make them a bad company, blablabla...steam punishes their customers to prevent piracy. In other words, it's not all subjective (don't know how you thought it was).
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'
Uuuuugghh, again, i don't know what the point was about quoting a course case earlier from ngtm-1r (i'm figuring it was for showing that game licenses don't matter in court of law). I brought up the license agreement for steam because it shows what they will do, what they say they're not responsible for, how they're business model works for them, and hardly how it works for the customer.
I didn't bring up the steam license agreement/subscriber agreement/end user license agreement to somehow show that it's different than that of other games or game services. I did it just to show how much steam sucks. It doesn't matter if they're license agreement/subscriber agreement/end user license agreement even holds up in the court of law. It does show you what they're inclined to do and what they're not inclined to do (what they will and will not do are the things they will and will not do and are the things that screw customers).
Are there any instances of Steam having done this?
There have been some complaints that Steam anti-cheating actions go a little too far and ban accounts that haven't actually done anything, similar to Microsoft's Live crackdowns, but I haven't actually encountered anyone who has had this happen to them.
Like how psycholandlord says, except i would change his word of "some" to "many". There have been many instances of account bans happening to innocents when they shouldn't have. Most steam bans happen through their VAC system (valve anti cheat), the other part is where steam just bans somebody (for now irregardless of the reason, all that matters right now is that there's two ways they do it).
For reasons to do it, steams software on their end isn't working so great which has lead to bans on innocents, steam going after the wrong people, and also steam going after the right people. Example of
steam screwing up, example of
steam working properly.
The guy who sold the steam account, he collected his money, and the account later got banned because it gained too much attention and i believe he refunded the money to the buyer. It's not illegal to sell one's steam account, but it does breach the terms of service for steam (steam is designed to prevent second sale based on steam license agreement/subscriber agreement/end user license agreement, that is why steam banned the account).
As far as sourcing account bans on innocents that were not caused by a steam malfunction and was just steam going after the wrong people. I don't know how much authenticity people would feel if i was quoting a bunch of forum threads from other forums to back a claim up. That's all google wanted to pop up with for that kind of steam ban scenario.