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When Steam goes down, you can't play your games... not even when you're offline.

That's probably not the best example of the problems with Steam DRM - it does have an offline mode. You have to be online when you enable the feature, since by default all of your configuration is stored on the the server rather than your local computer, so folks that hadn't done that in advance will have problems when the servers are down.

A worse problem is that they can cancel your account for all sorts of reasons, and then if you ever launch steam on that computer while online, all of your games will be disabled.

Is there any store out there that still allow for game returns? I'm being sarcastic here; I really want to know.

Steam doesn't offer refunds.
Nor does newegg offer refunds on games.
None of the Brick and Mortar stores in my city does it either.

If there are still stores out there that allows for game refunds, how do they deal with the "Buy, copy cdkey, get refund" crowd?

This is a reference to the encoded pictures in the dinosaur .wav files that were put into the recent March update of the Valve game Portal which were teasers for the upcoming Portal 2.

This is a reference to the encoded pictures in the dinosaur .wav files that were put into the recent March update of the Valve game Portal which were teasers for the upcoming Portal 2.

This is a reference to the encoded pictures in the dinosaur .wav files that were put into the recent March update of the Valve game Portal which were teasers for the upcoming Portal 2.

I was worried about just such a thing due to the number of games I've purchased from Steam. The list is up to 71 now, with some including some expensive new games. I was worried about losing access to them some day, and so I emailed Steam's support department. This is what I got back:

Subject: RE: End of life for steam authentication servers? - [4131-****-****] [********]

From: Steam Support
Date: 11/3/2009 2:12 PM

========= Please enter your reply ABOVE this line =========

Hello,

A staff member has replied to your question:

Hello *********, Thank you for contacting Steam Support. In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users still have access to their Steam games. If you have any further questions, please let us know - we will be happy to assist you.

Anytime you wish you can view your question online:
https://support.steampowered.com/view.php?ticketref=****-****-****

It is up to each person on whether or not to believe them, but it was enough for me. "Measures" doesn't seem very specific to me, but I just assumed it was some kind of a software patch that permanently turns offline mode on. I've purchased something like 25 games since then... Their xmas deals racked up quite a few extra dents in my bank account, but they had a lot of $5 deals too. They aren't perfect. Most games can be redownloaded an unlimited number of times, but some of the newer ones are limited on # of installs or still have DRM, but at least Steam warns you about the DRM ahead of time.

BTW, Attention UBisoft: Its very unlikely I will ever buy one of your games again after the DRM systems you've been implementing lately. Yes, Steam wants an internet connection, BUT IT WORKS IN OFFLINE MODE TOO FOR UP TO LIKE 2 WEEKS AT A TIME AS WELL with most games, except, ahem, YOURS. Kick me out of my game if my net connection goes down? Ubisoft, that's bull***, and you've lost me as customer for a long time. I'm obviously not one of the pirates you're so worried about, yet you won't be getting any of my money either. NICE JOB YOU MORONS.

This is just awesome and funny.

* Doesn't work on Windows 64-bit.

There ya go

...they should lose it. Are they still actively marketing this game? Do they still sell it? Is there a new version in the works?

Yes, yes, no. (As far as I'm aware-- if there's a new version in the works, it's still unannounced.)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/10100/

...they should lose it. Are they still actively marketing this game? Do they still sell it?

They are still marketing and selling the game, actually:

King's Quest Collection on Steam
King's Quest 4+5+6 on GOG.com

Activision released a bunch of old Sierra games through GOG.com, cheaply and DRM-free: so far, they have three King's Quests, three Space Quests, Phantasmagoria and two Gabriel Knight games, with probably more to come.

Steam is just a website displayed inside an interface. I do all my purchasing online through Firefox.

http://store.steampowered.com/

Screenshots never worked for me inside the default UI. I do all my steam store browsing in Firefox.

This is where I think Steam falls short, when indie games are offered with Steam they will also come with Steam's DRM, but through other services, they do not; e.g. http://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/ vs http://www.direct2drive.com/8106/product/Buy-Braid-Download

I'm not sure what portion of Steam's sales they account for, but Steam does distribute a decent number of indie games, and Mac sales often account for a disproportionate share of indie-game sales, possibly due to Mac users being culturally more into "pay $10 for an app" mindset, and less competition from AAA titles.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I see your dubious statistics and replace them with the *updated* statistics which are referenced in the article you posted itself (i.e. the Jan 2010 steam hardware survey). As of this minute, it paints a slightly different picture, but pretty much the same (i.e Windows 7 is still losing out to XP - a nine-year-old OS - despite being force-bundled with every machine sold in the last six months... and Vista didn't get that much of a shoe in the door even with its three-year headstart):

Your article: XP 42.78%, Vista 27.91%, Win7 28.53%
Actual hardware survey now:
Windows XP 32 bit 43.81%
Windows 7 64 bit 19.04%
Windows Vista 32 bit 18.39%
Windows 7 9.76%
Windows Vista 64 bit 7.75%
Windows XP 64 bit 0.51%

But also, you're basing that data on the Steam survey. I hereby bring up the fact that Steam only officially runs on Windows anyway (therefore biased) and that even when run through Wine, it appears as "Windows" on their hardware surveys. Steam is a Gold-app on Wine, and most of the Gold/Platinum apps are games, a lot of them Steam games - that amount of development effort isn't done for nothing or because "nobody" plays them using Wine.

Also, the latest games released through Steam produce "spikes" of gameplay on them that disappear over time... if those games *demand* Windows 7 / Vista, then the spike will translate into the hardware survey for that month, but next month will be a different story (the last few times I've looked, Call of Duty 2 was mostly losing out to the *original* Counterstrike in player-minutes, but the situation flip-flopped repeatedly as time went on. Both run on XP but there are other, more recent, games that don't and affect the statistics.) I'd also be interested to see stats on virtualisation, "Windows XP Mode" etc. because that would be interesting too.

I'm not saying that Windows isn't the dominant gaming platform, or that Windows 7 isn't "selling" well, I just hate biased statistics. It's like people who say "Well, no-one uses Opera to visit our website anyway, so it's not worth making it work in Opera..." I just want to slap them.

I am an admin in one of the larger gaming communities in my country, and have a history of competitive gaming. I was never a gamer before I saw the teamplay in CS 5on5 matches (example video). I still play the orginal game once a week or so. Just for the record, CS is a team-game where aiming and firing is only part of the skill. Knowing and practicing with your team is essential just like any other sport.

If you didn't already know, Counter-Strike (CS) is still one of the largest on-line games out there, peaking 75k users yesterday. I'm talking about the version 1.6 and not the CSS (CS Source) version. There is still a larger userbase for other Steam-games, but we still regard the original CS to be the game played by the eSports community because of its smooth gameplay and predictable recoil patterns when firing guns. Many "elite"-players have tried moving on to newer games, but get disappointed and still comes back for the good old CS 1.6 where graphics may suck, but you get a predictable gameplay where the player is not that much affected by randomness.

The story of cheating in CS has been a long annoying trip. People have even been cheating at LAN-events where they used aim-key, and they even won price money and got away with it. The story is long, and websites profiting from selling cheats are very active today. Some of the cheats go very deep in kernel and hide itself just like a root-kit. Ring 0-cheats are common.

VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) has been the attempts from Valve to stop the cheats, however VAC has always been ages behind any new cheat and has never taken all cheats available for free at the net. There has been attempts from the community at steampowered to scare users with passive detections and delayed bans so users could not be sure which cheat got them banned, but mainly VAC seem to me being a low priority project at Valve. Valve is still, like any other company, prioritizing new projects and just leaving maybe one programmer doing some cheat-detection-code on his free-time. The situation is a win for cheaters and others. And also a win for Valve, since there are a lot of people trying cheats and thus they sometimes get banned, ending up buying a new copy of the game (the price for a new CS at Steam is currently available at 7,99€ which is annoyingly cheap). Valve still sells a lot of copies (in the years 1999-2008, Valve had sold 4,8 million copies!).

Various anti-cheat communities has gathered during the years, where one try syncing ban-lists and communities constantly have players monitoring other players trying to spot cheats by spectating. As VAC is such a failure, many still go undetected. Especially if one hides their cheats well. The community RADAR is one of these initiatives which accept new communities for sharing such ban-list.

The latest addition; Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) is a project created by a skilled programmer that is based upon deep-level detection accompanied with screenshots. This programmer may seem hard-core, and this is mainly because he used to be a cheat author(!). This is currently the best anti-cheat system available for CS, but it's still only used in Clan Wars/eSports. The public-area for normal players is still depending upon VAC, as the EAC requires a 3rd party client installed which is a tough barrier to overcome.

The future now seem brighter, as we have now left VAC and we are mainly no longer depending on it. I wish Valve software good luck in the future, but it seem to me that if VAC remains a low-priority project it will still annoy thousands of everyday players and leaving a few cheaters laughing, destroying the on-line experience.

Yours

I think you are likely mistaken. I haven't seen any installations personally, but the Steam survey showed twice as many x86-64 installs than of Windows 7 than there were i386.

Of course, Steam is will have a severe sampling bias against laptops, so it's possible your observations fits the data. Here are the survey results: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I would agree that there is still a large base of single core computers, but I think gamers generally upgrade much more frequently than business users. If your curious about the installed base of gaming computers, the best picture I have found is the monthly hardware survey built into Valve's Steam service. Take a look here to check it out. If I was a game developer, this would be the first place I would look.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4100/

Whoops, my bad. Modern Warfare 2 bumped CSS and CS (and TF2) down 1 slot each on Steam's stats (I also thought I hit preview while I went to check on those numbers...)

Unfortunately, the thread asking for Webkit in Steam at http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=861863 demonstrates how clueless the average gamer is about standards etc.

Some choice quotations:

"ie is fine"

"I'd rather not have steam bloated with redundant tech right now."

"Also W3C != Web Standards, and IE aren't the only ones not complying with the "standards", Firefox didn't comply with all W3C published recommendations either.(Don't know if that's still the case) [...] Microsoft is a business, and they don't want to take the blame because of a third parties inabillity to properly design websites. That is their design goal, and as the W3C isn't enforcable, as it's not considered a standard"

"It works, it is secure and it isn't that slow"

"IE is fine, and so was Windows 98."

"there is nothing wrong with the day-to-day performance of Trident."

"...in January 2010 Valve announced that it had surpassed 25 million active user accounts. It regularly services in excess of two million concurrent users."
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3390/
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

I know you said those numbers are from a year ago, but your numbers still come up rather short.

"...in January 2010 Valve announced that it had surpassed 25 million active user accounts. It regularly services in excess of two million concurrent users."
http://store.steampowered.com/news/3390/
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

I know you said those numbers are from a year ago, but your numbers still come up rather short.

That's nonsense. If the servers go down, I can still play whatever is currently installed that is non-multiplayer.

May I direct your attention here and here

That's nonsense. If the servers go down, I can still play whatever is currently installed that is non-multiplayer.

May I direct your attention here and here

The solution *is* already written, and they literally *do* just have to flip a switch to deploy. I'd feel better if the code was in escrow, but this is second-best.

This has come up before. See http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10642189&postcount=28

Steam has no SecuROM activation limits. GFWL has a 15-activation limit, but you don't need GFWL to play (you can play offline).

"Steam isn't my favorite, but at least it doesn't force a constant connection to the publisher's servers to play a game!"

That's true. But I've still had it crap out with errors, fail to connect to servers, and otherwise unjustifiably complain when I'm trying to play a game. The inconvenience is fairly uncommon (it usually works properly), but it does slow down the game load every time and it is more annoying when problems occur. I don't like it. The only reason I finally took the plunge was when I could buy Orange Box used for $20, years after the original release. I'll certainly never play full price for that kind of inconvenience.

Oh, and another thing. I bought a second copy of Orange Box so that I could have two installs on my local home network. No go. Apparently I can't have two different steam accounts tied to the same e-mail address. Why the heck not? I've paid for two copies. I only have one e-mail address. You're telling me I have to get another e-mail address just to register a fricking game? Either that or there's something I'm not understanding from the on-line documentation, but even if that is the case, this is all a hassle I shouldn't have to go through.

I buy all my games, but the first thing I do is look for no-cd or other patches to get around the stupid DRM.

If you're putting all your games in Steam's basket, be very very careful.

If you're putting all your games in Steam's basket, be very very careful.

If you're putting all your games in Steam's basket, be very very careful.

This looks like a game to me, no matter how strictly you define "game":

http://store.steampowered.com/app/18110/

Stereotypes are usually wrong. This would be one of the cases.

Steam is great!

Most games have had their Securom DRM stripped out and replaced with whatever Steam uses. No more annoying DVDs! There's constant sales with great prices - right now Psychonauts is on sale for $2. (A ridiculously fun game, btw)

When a friend bought Left4Dead, I was able to copy my L4D folder to his computer, and he was able to avoid downloading it.

Really convenient - the only area they need improvement is refunds on games that just don't work! (there are a few - ex: Universe at War wants Games for Windows Live running, and for whatever reason it won't start on my PC)

Great. Yet they still hold all your games hostage if you're having payment issues (and potentially do anything they don't like.) Also their regular updates can break steam for you.

Great. Yet they still hold all your games hostage if you're having payment issues (and potentially do anything they don't like.) Also their regular updates can break steam for you.

Speaking of which, Serious Sam HD (the updated version of Serious Sam 1) is on massive sale this weekend only until Monday on Steam! Down to $6.79 from $20! Man, Steam game sales are awesome. I now have more games than I can possibly play because of the recent Steam Holiday Sale which had games at prices where you shouldn't even bother with pirating :P

That being said, the Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition can be gotten from Good Old Games for only $5.99. The nice thing about GOG is that you can download any of the games you purchase from them again anytime (just log in to your account), and these classic games have absolutely no DRM (unlike Steam where Steam has to be running for your games to run).

Also, if you're going to give old Duke3D a spin, don't forget to grab the fan-made Duke Nukem High Resolution Pack which will give you high resolution textures, actual 3D models and a windows-native 3D hardware acceleration!

Cheers!

1080p is quite a bit less than the 2560x1600 that the poster was talking about. In consumer terms, its comparing 2 megapixels vs 4 megapixels.

Also, last I checked, the largest PC gaming segment still runs at 1280x1024 (presumably on commodity 5:4 aspect LCD's which stormed the market several years ago.) Only 12% run at 1080p or higher resolution. (source)

The 512MB NVIDIA 8800GT is probably still the best bang-for-your-buck card on the market given the resolutions people are gaming at. The 8800GT handles every game you can throw at it just fine at 1280x1024.

ebook readers buy more paper books than other readers, and this is a suprise ?

Someone who is willing to spend 200-400 dollars on a e-reader is already a heavy reader, practically by definition.

Not to mention that when you can buy books directly through your reader/computer the barrier for doing so is lessened. Seeing a book that looks interesting, to purchasing a copy of said book is lowered (in my opinion), when all you need to do is press a few buttons and said book is all ready to go for your enjoyment. Kinda how I bought five games off Steam this holiday season simply because it was a good deal (or so I have convinced myself). If I had to go down to a shop to look at what bargains or items they had in stock chances are that I wouldn't have bought as many, or maybe even none at all since I am too occupied (read: bloody lazy) to go down there.

At some future point I will get myself an e-reader and I reckon that, just like when I got Steam, the number of products I purchase will increase dramatically (though it should be added that the arrival of steam happened around the same time that my financial situation improved and allowed for more purchases of that nature). Right now I buy a book now and again, or several if I discover a new author that I enjoy, but for the most part I shall admit that I am far less inclined to just "grabbing a random book off the shelves" as I was a few years back. With the practicality of being seeing a book referenced in a blog/review/article/etc and buying said book within seconds I can imagine by digital library will grow rapidly.

Wait, it's only compatible with Valve products?!?

There was a sequel to Duke Nuken, it was called Prey, you can get it cheap as shit right now.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/3970/

I trust a demo more if it's the full retail game for a limited amount of time.

Like, for example, this weekend's Team Fortress 2 Free Weekend. The game can be pre-loaded now for it, but the game is only available from when the WAR Update comes out on Thursday evening, through Sunday. However, it's the full game.

Granted, TF2 is a multi-player online game, so it's hard to have a demo without having the entire game after the game itself came out.

Personally I buy a lot of computer games, through Steam, when I was younger I used to get pirated versions ; usually because of financial, or simply distribution reasons (ten years ago games would arrive at local stores several weeks after their original release). These days if I feel confident about a game I will preorder, as with Dragon Age or Arkham Asylum, and if it entertains and leaves me wanting more I will buy whatever DLC comes along (if it sounds interesting). However if I am uncertain about the quality of a game I will download a "pirate version", try it, and then either buy it or throw it out.

Over the last few years I have found game reviews to be of declining value to me so in this frequently demo-less age it's either piracy or nothing; and when it comes to buying a game that often costs 49.99€ (that's about 72$ going by a randomly online converter), I really do want to ensure I get something worth paying for. It's not so much the price as that I don't want my list of Steam games cluttered with bullcrap not worth the scrolling. Perhaps this makes me a bad consumer in the eyes of some, but frankly I don't much care about what others think, I have purchased 23 unique games through steam since my account was created in 2007 and will continue to purchase games regularly for the foreseeable future.

Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?

You are assuming that people haven't already got a computer and paid money to Microsoft. You are also assuming that Nintendo couldn't make their emulator work on the Mac as well. This would not really add anything to Microsoft's market share.

Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?

They can still charge for the software and quite probably still make exactly the same profit on the software that they do on the hardware. Besides, there is more profit in the Wii Fit board that costs a third of the price of the Wii for just a few sensors in a plastic case. That's the genius of the Wii product line.

"The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced." - Kind of backwards - its much easier to pirate something that already runs on your target system.

This doesn't make sense at all. You seem to be suggesting that an emulator is piracy. People write an emulator so they can run a Wii game on their PC. If that software already exists officially (an isn't too expensive), why would someone feel the need to write another one?

But, last time I can think of, not many games out there require Administrator rights to run. Maybe you have Windows Vista?

Here's a random example. The current weekend special on Steam is Tomb Raider Underworld. According to the system requirements, it runs on "Microsoft Windows XP (admin rights required)/Microsoft Windows Vista (admin rights required)". Most recent games don't do that, but I can tell you (as someone who has run as a limited user since NT4.0) that it used to be the norm a few years back.

PC gamers are abandoning XP and Vista and moving towards Windows 7. For the first time ever since Valve began publishing their hardware survey back in 2003, Windows XP usage among Steam users has finally dipped below the 50% mark, and is losing ground relatively fast. Steam Hardware Survey

We don't have "Black Friday" here, but I noticed Steam has also been having five-day-long every-day-new-games discount on games, usually ranging as 33-75% discount. Since they actually have good games there on sale, with a good percentage off, it's been leading me and many of my friends to buy the games that look interesting now. People have been buying those LucasArts and THQ Complete Packs and many single games (I bought Borderlands, City of Heroes and LucasArts pack last night) Since PayPal also processes purchases for Steam, some of the increase probably comes from it too - there are hundred thousands players buying those games now.

I didn't buy more because I didn't even know about the special day. But I bought when I saw the discounts. I'm a lazy guy so I wouldn't go fighting in stores anyway (and I hate all that crowd), but these discounts surely lead to some impulse buying on Steam. And it still continues for a few days, oh man.

This is what will kill PC gaming, the fact that every game will have only the maximum potential of what a console can do hardware wise.

In case you hadn't noticed, the consoles are already years old. If that were true, wouldn't you expect it to have happened already?

Yet PC hardware continues to advance, PC games still scale up far beyond the capabilities of their console brethren, and the market hasn't died.

One of the common complaints that wasn't covered in this review was the lack of "Rally Points" in this game. It was requested several times on the steam forums but the developers there actively refused it (Source: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11634198&postcount=4).

When I tried the demo, the lack of Rally points made things very tedious when I wanted to pool together all my units on the perimeter in order to maximize defense. I would have to click each area and move everything manually.

This once again distracts from the graphical beauty of this game as it also forces you to remain zoomed out where you can hardly see anything noteworthy.

Since you didn't say which company, I'll point out that you're referring to Valve's Steam Stats for Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2.

I'll also point out that those numbers are the number of concurrent players, not the number of total players.

Personally, I got very angry about Steam when they decided to change their online shop pricing to local currencies for some European countries - of course not without some juicy price increases. Basically, one Dollar then was transformed into one Euro now. (One Euro currently equals to 1,5 Dollar)

Of course, this created a HUGE uproar among the community, with a notorious thread residing on page 1 of their general forum for several months now, currently at 449 pages despite heavy censorship: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=770231

The wave of complaints meanwhile caused many Steam sellers to demand price adjustments, since they were affected as well by all this negative publicity among European customers. Nowadays, the price situation varies from game to game for continental European customers who are forced to pay in their local currency - may be a fair deal, may be a rip-off when compared to US prices. And surprisingly, UK Pound prices are often even cheaper than US Dollars.

Okay, one last topic for my rant posting: The price issue in general. I mean what the hell?! As an Austrian citizen, it is far cheaper for me (like 30% cheaper!) to order a boxed game at http://play.com/ and have it shipped to me from the island of Jersey than purchasing a mere digital download on Steam. Yet Steam is very successful - they must be swimming in money. What infuriates me is that our economy/politicians/whatever created this bizarre situation, and are doing nothing to change it. It is an ecological nightmare! Producing DVDs and shipping them all over Europe by land and sea is less expensive than sending a few GB of data through some glass fibre? I want to see the person who's responsible for this. No, actually I just want to punch them in the face.

Hey this might actually become my first 5-star posting *hopes for the best*

oh, you mean like Steam?