To be fair, his complaints are perfectly valid. The journal is a mess, the countless dialogue options that are the same for every NPC are silly, the knife not hitting may not be a bug, but it's certainly a piss poor game mechanic and the missing mapmarkers are at least debatable. If you're stumbling through fog and empty landscapes for ten minutes, searching for that cave entrance some NPC mentioned, you might very well ask yourself if you're a hardcore roleplayer, having an immersive experience, or actually a bit of a tool for voluntarily spending your free time with something that's about as fun and challenging as searching your house for your car keys.

And that's coming from somebody who really liked Morrowind.

Not to mention that this was also criticized by people when it came out ten years ago. People always seemed to have failed to comprehend that not every game is for everybody.
I agree, the quality of games has improved in all aspects. The quantity of games also, which makes the turd maybe stand out more but for that we also have more quality games than ten or twenty years ago.

They're valid from a certain point of view, true. It's a bit more convoluted and cluttered than it ought to be. At the same time, the sequels are almost at the other end of the spectrum. Too streamlined, dumbed down and simplified which leads to the games feeling like they're a lot more linear and having much less content than Morrowind.

And that's coming from someone who loved Oblivion and to an even larger degree Skyrim. ;)

GOG is almost the perfect platform in a old school way.

New gamers love steam for the autoupdate/save-cloud/sales. If they offered a way for publishers to opt out of drm (and a steam search criteria for it) it would be almost perfect. GOG just seems like the right way, as in I feel like I own the game. Also the sales don't make you rebuy games you already own through them.

I must admit i love the news of the linux steam client. Not to mention all the goodwill they are doing in the OSS driver circles.

I don't fully agree. We have some outstanding games now and graphically or usability wise they have certainly improved a lot. However from the game concept they very often resemble old games. The "have seen it already somewhere else"-feeling is strong and really original concepts are relatively rare. Some genres like turn based strategy are more and more neglected. The quantity there has dropped by a considerable amount. However I don't think that the quality today is worse, only that it has advanced in certain aspects much more while only a bit for some and in some genres quantity has even gone down.

The age of crappy 3D models is over. The age of buttons without explanations is over. The age of mindless levelling has been prolonged by visually stunning mindeless levelling.

Well, you can only reinvent the wheel so many times. And especially indie games are really pushing the envelope right now. And if I compare gaming nowadays with 15 years ago there is a definite increase of good games. Back then you had maybe two or three "must plays" each year. Nowadays there are far more. Unsurprisingly, as the industry is so much bigger.

I also find the stuff currently happening on the 3DS and console rather interesting. The new input options will probably offer new angels to make games.

I agree that some genres seem to be in decline, but that is just the usual "genre curve". There was a time when adventure games were deemed dead and buried. Nowadays they seem to be the new crack. And who would have thought that RTS games might someday be in decline?

I'm not so sure I agree about "back then you only had two or three must plays each year", because back then, games tended to take a LOT less time to create, so a company could create more games on less time. There are certainly more than two or three must-play games each year in the nineties, at the very least, and probably more in the 80's. Check a release list from, say, '91, and say that there are only two or three mustplays on that list.

To me, this seems a bit analogous to cable companies, telephone operators and such. Nobody wants a monopoly, but nobody wants to use more than one provider either. And everybody wants to use the provider who gives the best service for the best price.

I'd love to be able to swap game-provider and keep my game library the same way I can switch to a new phone operator and keep my number and contact list.

While I do agree with this - I've been increasingly seeing people actually too lazy to get up out of their PC chair to fetch a disc to install a game - I think laziness is only part of the story.

And yes, I'm aware that sites like Steam are a boon to those living in countries where buying games legally is a genuine chore - by which I don't mean walking 10 minutes to a store, but rather in countries where they have to import games at great cost.

But we shouldn't forget the fear factor. A lot of hardcore PC fanatics have been painting Valve and Steam as some kind of saviour of the PC gaming industry out of some kind of fear that if Valve did not exist, PC gaming would cease to be. They are worried about a lot of the majors abandoning the PC as a platform, and place all their hopes in Valve out of some misguided notion that if Valve can be sustained, then PC gaming can be sustained.

The same to me !

I am a solo gamer, online play has almost zero interest for me... now, if any game I want comes out using steamworks, I can't buy it. I am required to install a 3rd party piece of online software and make an online account, and then activate my disc copy of a single player game online before I can so much as install it. I will never understand how people find this acceptable... See, steam's online service is great for hooking up players and matches online, that's all well and good for those who want it but it's not optional, it's forced on everyone, and as a solo player, this does nothing but significantly impede my gaming experience.

Interesting 6 months since the original post.
Steam is still Steam albeit with a Greenlit section for people to vote games in (for better or worse..)
Competition from GMG/GG/Amazon etc have resulted in a lot of sales and some really good deals over Xmas etc, so much so Steam had a very ordinary or lacklustre sales without really any fantasticmusthavedeals (glitches aside). Still a monopoly?. Likely. Is competition getting better?.Definitely if comparing deals vs Steams prices.

Yeah Amazon fairly decisively beat Valve's prices during the Winter sale. I don't know if it is true competition as the end result still sends people to Steam, just with less money in Valve's pocket. Amazon did have some non steam games on special at least, like Guild Wars 2.

I wonder if Valve gets any money at all out of those deals. From what I know these Steam keys are usually those free keys developers now are allowed to distribute.

That doesn't really matter because Valve get what they want; the player is absorbed into the Collective and will, inevitably, become a Steam customer in the future.