What's your overall opinion of STEAM

How do you feel about STEAM?

  • It's fantastic and I buy almost all my games through it

    Votes: 428 76.7%

  • It's OK, but I don' really care if a game uses it or not

    Votes: 110 19.7%

  • It's awful, and potentially a deal breaker if a game requires it

    Votes: 20 3.6%
  • Total voters
    558
I

Itchyeyes

Gawd
Joined
Jun 26, 2007
Messages
710
I was browsing through the Civ 5 reviews on Amazon this morning and I was a little bit shocked to see how low the ratings were. In most instances, the low reviews were not because of the gameplay, but because it requires STEAM. As someone who's almost completely abandoned buying physical copies of games, not just in favor of STEAM, but often because I find the experience on STEAM so much better, boycotting a game over STEAM is nearly incomprehensible to me. Judging from what I read in forums and hear on podcasts, I thought that the general consensus in the PC gaming community was pretty similar to my thoughts on the matter.

Am I completely wrong in my understanding of where the PC gaming community stands on STEAM, or are most of these reviews simply from more casual gamers who don't know what they're actually boycotting? What are your thoughts regarding STEAM?
 
I am in favor of Steam and what it brings to the PC gaming community. At the same time, I understand other's hesitations and dissatisfaction with being required to use the platform. For decades, PC gamers have never had the restrictions of being required to sign up for a (universal) service to play a game, which leads to these feelings when they are required to do so. Ultimately, I feel Steam (and its competition) are great for the PC gaming community.
 
People are whiny bitches. This applies double to PC gamers.
 
151 steam games and counting. I really hope they never go evil.
 
steam won me over with their stupid deals.....

dirt
dirt 2
grid
toca 3
fuel

for like 15$?

seriously?
 
Selected - It's okay.......

I'm not fussed if a game is on Steam or not. Price is the most important factor to me. For instance I bought BC2 from an online retailer as it was £10 cheaper. Steam is a rip-off for the majority of new releases. Release dates in Europe are also a factor in looking elsewhere.

Steam is god awful slow of late too, I can't even be bothered to load the application up half the time. Games installed that do not use Steamworks launch much faster too. Steam seems to have got bloated and slow, the old interface used to zip along.

Unimpressed with Steam except for the deals, auto patching, friends list and convenience. Pretty good reasons to like it, but I'm not one those that will use it blindly if there are better options available, if I was like that I'd be fat and lazy, I have no loyalty to Steam ;)
 
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Civ5 is a game that will draw a broad audience. The sort of broad audience that includes people that rarely buy PC games and have been living under a rock since Civ4, so are still wary of digital distribution.
 
Personally not too fond of it, as I find the majority of the features useless. I do like the simple patching system it has though. If Steam instead acted as just an interface to downloading and patching games it would be alot better, but it tries to be alot more.

What I think would be better is using Steam to download and patch games and that's the end of it. The games themselves have absolutely no relation to steam after purchasing, downloading, and patching. That's what I would like. Basically like Blizzard did with their older titles. None of this "steam://rungameid/220" nonsense.

I will admit though I am getting more used to it, but I don't think I'll ever truly embrace it. I went from absolutely hating it 7 years ago, to simply not liking it, which is progress I guess.
 
CannonDub said:
I am in favor of Steam and what it brings to the PC gaming community. At the same time, I understand other's hesitations and dissatisfaction with being required to use the platform. For decades, PC gamers have never had the restrictions of being required to sign up for a (universal) service to play a game, which leads to these feelings when they are required to do so. Ultimately, I feel Steam (and its competition) are great for the PC gaming community.
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I can understand that point of view, but it just raises more questions for me. Do people object to it because they actually find the experience to be worse, or simply on principle? And if someone objects to it simply on principle, how valid is or isn't that objection in the grand scheme of things?
 
I selected ok. IMO it's GREAT for budget gaming and deals. Terrible for full price 49.99 games. I've bought tons of steam game. But I don't think I bought any of them at anywhere near full retail.

And the Steam service/experience is by far the best online gaming/distribution platform out there. Hands down. PSN and XBox Live should just blatantly rip Steam off and run with it.
 
I don't like it overall. The concept isn't bad but the execution leaves much to be desired - I hate the stupid install folder restrictions, the sometimes game breaking forced updates, and the lack of an option to roll back updates. It's an intrusive PITA, it's not the worst DRM system ever but it's far too far from ideal. I also don't like the way that when I start a game the client pops up first, jabbering about new offers and telling me over and over again that the user agreement has been updated. I don't like that when I start the Steam client it ignores my chosen favourite option to open the library, and instead takes me to the store to advertise stuff that I don't want.

The final insult as far Steam is concerned: it's way more expensive than Amazon et al. So much for digital distribution being a better deal for consumers and developers. The publishers are still greedy parasites, and Valve have just picked up the price gouging baton from the bricks and mortar stores.

Bottom line - I resent the restrictions and forced advertising, therefore I avoid Steam as much as possible. The only games I have on Steam are ones that I bought on optical media.

As for downloading replacing optical media, I don't think broadband is universally good enough and it will be many years before it is. My connection speed is OK, and the download limits are a reasonable compromise, however it's still quicker and more convenient to buy from online retail, even if delivery takes a few days.
 
"It's OK, but I don' really care if a game uses it or not"

Meaning, I have Steam and love using it, but I don't really care either way. I'll still buy a boxed game if it's not on Steam and good enough.
 
It is indispensable. My steam folder is 284GB and counting.
 
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I just do not see why I have to use in once I have purchased anything. It is annoying.
 
schizrade said:
I just do not see why I have to use in once I have purchased anything. It is annoying.
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How is it annoying? It automatically patches the games for you. And you can play them from any computer you can install steam (Or copy the folder, no need to install really). That and you can download any games you purchased as many times as you want.

What's not to like? No CD-Keys to lose / type in, no CD's to lose, no downloading 15 patches before you can play an old game.
 
I think it's fine personally, but I rarely play the games I have bought on it, so this time when I reformatted, I didn't even bother to install Steam, i wiped the Steamapps off my laptop. (had a Steam only partition on my secondary hard drive).

I have Steamapps backed up on an external though so i'm good there.

Overall though I will say through the years, Steam has done a lot more good than bad, personally.
 
i love steam. I dont buy many games but games I do, i always wish they on steam. I even add games to steam that arent on it ie starcraft2 so i can message friends while in game.
 
TheResidentEvil said:
i love steam. I dont buy many games but games I do, i always wish they on steam. I even add games to steam that arent on it ie starcraft2 so i can message friends while in game.
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That's another awesome feature... in-game messaging regardless of the game.

Although I'll say I think the only game I had issues with was Halo PC, I forgot why but SteamOverlay didn't play nice with it.
 
Blazestorm said:
What's not to like?
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weeks at a time with an unplayable broken game? accidentally deleted or corrupted files to re download? How many Metro 2033 users had to re download a 2GB file that was broken by Steam - it's not trivial for many users on restricted bandwidth, and in my view a wholly unacceptable situation that those users should be compensated for.
 
Steam doesn't really do anything for me. I only have it because HL2 and other valve titles required it. However, I think it has done wonders for indie game developers.
 
Blazestorm said:
How is it annoying? It automatically patches the games for you. And you can play them from any computer you can install steam (Or copy the folder, no need to install really). That and you can download any games you purchased as many times as you want.

What's not to like? No CD-Keys to lose / type in, no CD's to lose, no downloading 15 patches before you can play an old game.
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All of that can be done without Steam being so intrusive and annoying. See Battle.net's digital download implementation of older Blizzard titles.
 
Users that are on restricted broadband plans should turn the auto-updates off then.

I love Steam. The only thing I don't like about it is the extra 5 to 10 seconds it adds to start a game when Steam is already open. (I'm guessing it's some sort of authentication since it doesn't matter if it's on my SSD or a 5400rpm HDD)
 
Steam is basically the best thing to happen to PC gaming in the last decade IMO. If I can't buy a game on Steam, I'm angry.

The fact that I'm out 60+ games/hundreds of dollars if my one account gets stolen kind of worries me, but I try not to think about that.

How is Steam "intrusive and annoying"? I've never found it intrusive? At the expense of sounding like a mac user I will say that Steam "just works". All my games are fully updated and ready to play with zero intrusion.
 
I like steam, but if I can get it cheaper physical I'll do that. I dont want ANY GAMES TO REQUIRE IT though.
 
I'm using steam right now. AND LOVING IT!

although,

dear steam, expand the damn browser already. Your ingame browser might as well be called netscape.
 
Yeah. Please define "intrusive", because I'm not seeing it with steam.

intrusive -adjective: tending or apt to intrude; coming without invitation or welcome.

As far as I know, Steam won't install itself. There are games that will install it from a DVD, but they all ask first.

Yeah, the metro 2033 thing is a bitch, but there are workarounds, just like any other game with a screwed up patch.
 
Steam makes my wallet steam with all their [H]ot deals. Gotta love 'em.
 
Love Steam, skeptical at first (years ago), but it has been well over a year since I have purchased a game on disk, I pretty much wait for whatever I am looking for to become available on it. I have knowingly paid (a little) more for a game just for the convenience. Having a fast connection to Steam servers helps a lot of course, I often get 1.5-2Mb/s when downloading so while not instant it goes quickly.
 
Bankie said:
Users that are on restricted broadband plans should turn the auto-updates off then.
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Unacceptable. Steam ignores that option and forces updates anyway. Users on restricted plans are entitled to patches and DLC just the same as every other paying customer.
 
z3r0- said:
Steam is basically the best thing to happen to PC gaming in the last decade IMO. If I can't buy a game on Steam, I'm angry.

The fact that I'm out 60+ games/hundreds of dollars if my one account gets stolen kind of worries me, but I try not to think about that.

How is Steam "intrusive and annoying"? I've never found it intrusive? At the expense of sounding like a mac user I will say that Steam "just works". All my games are fully updated and ready to play with zero intrusion.
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Intrusive is probably the wrong word, as I don't really find it that intrusive either. I just don't like it's implementation as an advertising, social network, and digital distribution platform all in one. If you have a Battle.net account with some older Blizzard titles tied to it, imagine all your Steam titles there, that's what I would prefer. Like Steam, games are able to be bought and are then tied to your battle.net account, but other than that there's no relation. You simply go to your account settings and download one of the games, install and play. No DRM. This would be ideal. I don't like Steam's execution of games through it's platform either, it makes one go through extra effort with simple things, like per game video profiles. As someone mentioned earlier, the game and Steam should be entirely seperate and not intertwined, I don't like this.

As I said before though, I do like the simplistic patching system Steam has.
 
obs said:
People are whiny bitches. This applies double to PC gamers.
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Amen. Bitch because Crysis requires so much GPU to play. Bitch because Crysis 2 is tuning down the graphics slightly.

Steam is the best thing to happen to the internet since porn! I can't count the number of games I've bought for $5 on one of Steam's many 75% off sales.
 
Blazestorm said:
That's another awesome feature... in-game messaging regardless of the game.

Although I'll say I think the only game I had issues with was Halo PC, I forgot why but SteamOverlay didn't play nice with it.
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I was booted from bf 2142 before for having a "memory modiffing program" (or something like that) thanks to steam, but in steams defense it was a beta client of theirs. Once I opted out of the beta pb and bf 2142 stopped booting me lol.
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I'm mixed.

I don't like that you can't ever go to previous patches. I don't like how the patching process is either automatic or off. Not the best thing for mods. (Yes I know tons of games have mods that work just fine). Online mode is annoying, and offline mode is annoying too. Sometimes Steam ignores the settings you put in place. I don't like the idea of games going Steam exclusive. Steam is overrated.

But Steam isn't bad. No major complaints. Sometimes it's really nice and convenient, especially with demos. I buy from them whenever there is a hot deal. That's about it though. All in all, Steam is definitely a great thing for PC gaming.
 
I'm a huge fan, but I also wish I had more control over the patching process. That's been the only real downside for me.
 
maademperor said:
I like steam, but if I can get it cheaper physical I'll do that. I dont want ANY GAMES TO REQUIRE IT though.
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The way I look at Steam, it's not the be all and end all. It will always come down to prices for me aswell, if it ain't cheaper on Steam then no fucking way am I buying it. You'd have to be stupid or loaded to do so, and there are plenty of the former!

Some people seem obsessed with Steam. It seems to me that people love buying off Steam, it's almost compulsive. You see these wonderful deals and people bite. I seem to remember the thread with people saying they have x amount of games on Steam and yet they haven't even touched the majority!
 
i think anyone with a keyboard and internet access can spend time trying to find things to bash on Steam's service, but really... what more can you ask for from Steam? Fanboy? no. But satisfied? Yes.

In-game chat, DLC, friends network...
Seems like basic features - but for PC gaming, there isn't much out there that offers such a comprehensive solution.
 
But I do think it deserves proper merit for helping indie developers, occasionally offering great deals, and having an absolutely pain free patching system.
 
Steam is great IMO and is always improving...there is the once every few months Steam is down for an hour while I am trying to game but once every few months downtime is acceptable IMO.

With the recent inclusion of ATI Drivers update to Steam I think they are headed in the right direction.....lets just hope they don't turn into AOL.
 
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