I would convert to Islam if Impulse went down.

As someone said earlier you have far too much bias, if you hate EVERYTHING about steam then you can't be objective enough to participate in this debate.

Why do people still go on about bloat like it's 1995? Take a look at the spec of your machine, your not working with 8MBs of RAM anymore.

And the load times? wow yeah it shaves 5 secs of my hour long gaming session, where's the fire?

Steam isn't perfect by any means but all things considered it is still the best out there right now, so it's not like people have a choice.

It's not free by a long shot. It'll cost them at least an alleged 40% for every copy sold via Steam and who knows what percentage they take from retail (it's all discussed under NDA, remember). As stated in the Steamworks documentation, use of Steamworks depends on review of the completed (or nearly completed) game in question and upon agreement of terms with Valve.

For the record, GamersGate would probably give refunds when no one else would. They're also more likely to throw in a free game or two as way of apology. In my experience, the support I've received from GamersGate (on the few occasions I've needed it) has been both faster and better then that I've gotten from Valve, who I often need to contact due to how they treat the region I live in.

In the case of Steam, you pretty much have a bunch of Euro/UK based customers to thank for that as they're the ones who kept asking Valve to give them pricing in their own currencies. Said customers probably didn't consider for a moment that things would turn out the way they did =/ And naturally, the publishers are pleased that it happened.

That all said, I don't really want any of the DD services to go out of business. But I would love to see several of them being forced to make drastic changes (for the better) to their current business practices.

Seconded. IMHO, Gamer's Gate support is the shining pillar of DD customer service. Always responding in time, always helpful.

First : I don't hate Steam. Just for future reference. I don't hate companies in general, except maybe Monsanto and a few like them.

Steam has four main problems for me :
- The fact that Steam can cut your access to their games anytime. You are NOT the owner of the games you "buy" on Steam. This has been mentionned
- The poor handling of mods on Steam. They are usually tough to install. In some cases, Steam also install automatically patches EVEN THOUGH you don't want them (patch inferior to pre-patch - HoI3 case - or patch breaking saves).
- I cannot buy games for (girl)friends on Steam, because either it is risky because they are on my account, or they need to install a client they might not like.
- Support is supposedly very slow. Never had any problem myself but I read so much about their support that I dread the time when I will have to use it.

Steam has quite a few advantage, though
- It is very customer friendly - to launch game, to see what's new on said game and to see what the offers are. Nice, but not decisive
- Matchmaking for MP games is outstanding. "standard matchmaking", but also to see what your friends is playing and directly join them.
- Finally, they have many exclusive games, including Valve-produced games. Fortunately, I am not much into FPS

Thus, to buy a game on Steam, I have three conditions :
- The game is an offer
- I KNOW the game will work on my computer (so I am sure I have no need of their customer services), this means the game is neither too old or too recent
- I know I won't come back to the game once I finish it.


I always have an internet connection running, so I have no problem with this. I don't know whether you can launch Steam games without connection. I understand why it would be an issue.

Gamersgate shines for one thing : customer services. If I want to buy a game but I am not quite sure whether it will work on my computer, I buy it at GG because I KNOW that they will refund me (in "blue coins") if it does not work - even though I cannot prove it did not work. To give you an example : I bought Simon the Sorcerer for my GF, but she did not try it immediately. She tried it like 3 weeks later, it did not work, so I sent a mail to support almost one full month afterward, asking for support, and after it failed, to be refunded. They still paid back a couple week-days later. Try to bring a game to your retailler one month after buying it :)
GG sucks for their prices, though. The €/$ scam most particularly. I don't know whether Steam has the same policy - I only buy offers there so I don't pay attention.

Wow, people with a strong opinion on a forum! It's unheard of!

At least I put my dislike in words and point out WHY I dislike Steam so much instead of basing it on ridiculous fanboyism. In fact, most of my Steam arguments are caused by Valve fanboys pretending Valve are some perfect company who loves its community so much. So far, NO-ONE has given an explanation why Valve made Steam work with subscriptions in this way unless they aren't all that great after all ... and that's my point. They aren't. Everything they do is PR - it balances out a lot of the crap they pull, but I don't see any real respect from Valve towards the community. No, CD Projekt are those with true respect - and so are the GOG folks. But Valve? I've seen their real face plenty of times - other people like Gamers Gate deserve that respect a LOT more.

Good points. You CAN play Steam games without a connection (there's an offline mode).

Also, Steam CAN cut your account, true, but to be a successful business they can't go around turning people's accounts off for no good reason. I'd be more worried about them suddenly having to require some kind of monthly payment (or some other required payments).

True about the gifting... a lot of the time I don't know if they'd appreciate having to install Steam, so I end up not getting the gift.

And Steamworks, despite being a kind of a DRM, is actually pretty cool what with the achievements and cloud and whatnot. Also the sales are insane.

I've never tried to return a game on Steam, but from what I've heard it is possible (do research before you buy).

I really don't mind you having a strong opinion and remember I did agree with you partially earlier but I'm sorry you are verging on evangelism here. I just wish you would concede a little sometimes.

From my understanding of Arcen Games' position, registering license keys from other sources to the Steam client costs zero to the developer. I doubt that Valve would charge much for actual disc copies, if any at all. OK, I'd admit I'm probably wrong, especially for the AAA games like CodBLOPS, but it's largely beside the point, since the cost of DRM + DLC sales + patch distribution [+ achievements + cloud saving + community site] etc separately will probably be far larger than Steamworks.

I guess the reason why Valve is currently subsidizing their form of DRM is to make their platform the platform of choice with major market share so that later if they decide to put fees into action nobody can ignore them. Its such a common and simple approach that it feels a little queer pointing it out here.