Apple is just the tip of the iceberg, and just the tip is never enough for mindless consumers.

The Super Bowl is protozoan and the iMac is purple. Fnord.

On Steam I'm annoyed because when ever I really want to play a game, it's always being updated...

On GOG (on the old website at least, not sure about the new one yet) You'd get that really annoying red flag for an updated game that I never play like Amazonian Princess or Ultima, for a FLAC soundtrack and it will never go away...

But also I didn't live in the time you mentioned, well I did but I was 5 or 6 and didn't game on the computer.

I guess I only mentioned that time to put the current availability of patches into perspective. Yes, Steam does have frequent game updates. On the GOG website you just have to click on the game to expand it in the game library and after that the update flag with disappear within a couple of hours at most.

I do that with GOG but it's still there. I think it was a bug because quite a few people were reporting it lol.

And i know you used it as perspective, and I used the fact that I never went through that as my perspective of not really caring that much unless it becomes an inconvenience to me :P

It was bugged for a game for me too, I can't remember which one. But it got fixed. Site update! :)

LOL. I get the joke, but you did actually hit on the reason why I don't like them. I don't get broadband-at least not according to the FCC. Sure, compared to dial-up I'm golden, but game patches these days are often bigger than entire games back in the dial-up days. I have to be careful about when I let things download or I risk clogging up the internet for my stepdad.

Other people have faster speeds, but they've got to deal with monthly caps. Imagine coming home to find out a game downloaded twice your monthly cap while you were at work.

A valid reason. There are ways to cap downloads even in Steam, though. At least speed-wise and time-wise. There are also several easy solutions to cap usage of your line in general.

Patches can sometimes break things (see the recent Windows update that was causing BSODs), can cause problems with saved games, can conflict with mods that are being used, or can simply change the game in a way a person dislikes. Because of these reasons people should always have the option of rejecting patches to their games if they so choose.

I love them.. I vote for a way to disable them, too.. That's it. :)

Auto updating is a lot of times done when the game launches, and it can be designed poorly enough that if you launch your game while you're offline the update process will start, realize (or not) that it can't update, and then lock you out of the game until you connect to complete the update, since after all the game is still updating. Or some crap like that!

Has never happened to me, but I guess it's a possibility. The update system itself would then need an update for a fix. :)

I don't want auto-update for the same reason I buy from gOg in the first place: it's my game and don't tell me what I have to do with it.

As a practical example, a recent patch to Divinity: Original Sin caused some content / gameplay problems that are avoided by, well, not installing that patch. Should we be forced to accept a buggy "fix"? My preference is that we have the option to say "No, but thanks for asking."

And Steam's download cap works. Many of them don't. Others don't include speed limiters.

Even still, they've got it set up so you have to opt out of auto updates on each individual game. I can't tell you the number of times I've wondered why the internet isn't working and it turns out that something or other decided to auto update and not tell me.