Slashdot Mirror
Would You Pay for Steam?
dasmurf asks: "Many users have discussed this possibility. Now that Steam has pioneered the biggest online game delivery system to date, is it as simple as that? Read my concerns about the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Has anyone else read this agreement? Should Valve change it? If you love Valve's games but you've never religiously kept an eye on your credit card statement, maybe this will give you more reason. ;)"
Right now I dual boot. Why? Steam. Steam is pretty much the only windows-only PC game left that I have a desire to play. Everything else is either so old I can emulate it with dosbox or wine perfectly. Or it is like doom3 with linux support. Mostly I don't play pc games much anymore.
As it stands I wont pay anything for steam. However, if Valve made Steam for linux I would pay. I would pay... 100 bucks for a lifetime. Or 5 bucks a month. As long as it worked and I get every game.
Meanwhile despite my dual booting I haven't actually played Steam in many months. That will probably change soon with HL2 and all.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
1.5 IS dead....
Run the latest version to rid yourself of these niggles.
Its called progress.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
This steam you refer to is vaporized condensated dihydrogen monoxide(Water). </picky mode>
I'll try my best. Steam is a content delivery system at heart with other things added on top. It allows you to buy games online and they will be sent to you through the Steam servers (not peer-to-peer as some people think). If it stopped there, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it, but it goes deeper. You have to use Steam to play Half-Life and its mods; there is no way around it. It can take up to a minute to login to Steam in order to play your games. Once in, the steam client has a built in server browser, that takes up even more of your memory. It has around a 25MB footprint just sitting there.
Hope this clears a few things up
1) It's always been in the Steam EULA and no story appeared about this when Steam was launched.
2) They won't be able to charge you for something you don't specifically agree to, i.e. a game "subscription" or similar.
3) If you agree to a subscription and paid via credit card straight to Steam, then you've just bought yourself a contract that says they'll take out next month's money next month. My ISP does the same, so do my hosting providers, etc. what's the difference?
4) If they suddenly start changing ALL games on Steam over to subscription, bye-bye 90% of their users, hello some other 3D FPS.
5) (quite a minor point considering 2 and 3)... how would they automatically charge my credit card when there's not one registered on the account? Answer: They can't. Buy the game in-shop, install and you don't ever need to enter anything but a CD-Key.
Don't blow this out of proportion, it's no worse than any other EULA and it's all there in black and white and has been for a long time..
The overrated tag, imop, points quite simply to a cowardly moderator trying to shut down a point of view he disagreed with.
No, you didn't have to pay a dime. Neither did I. I, too, bought half life (in fact, I bought it twice.)
The point is not the monetary cost, but the cost in terms of unconscionable conditions, a shoddy product, and most importantly a bait and switch routine. Think about it. We bought half life. I don't know about you, but I bought it for counterstrike, period. The 'regular' game I may have played for 20 minutes, total, it sucks - I paid my money to play counterstrike, and so did a lot of other people. Then, without us having any choice in the matter, that game that we bought and played was made nonfunctional. Sure, we get a 'free' (in monetary terms) 'upgrade' to Steam - but what if we don't want it? What if we would rather keep the game that we bought and paid for instead of accepting a substitute that we may or may not like as well, which in any case comes with a new set of conditions, which requires us to run a 'content delivery system' which takes away our control of our own system? Now if you like that deal, fine, take it. But I don't, many others don't, and Valve has no right to take away the game we already paid them for and offer a substitute that we do not want instead.
And you're wrong, that is indeed what they did. Steamless and several other projects have attempted to hack past the actions, with some very small amounts of success, but that doesn't change the fact that they intentionally shut down 1.5 and insisted that everyone had to move to Steam.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I got a copy of HL2 for free but I won't be using it until I'm damn sure they won't want credit card information.
Go ahead and use it. Once you have Steam installed, all they ask you for is the code printed on your coupon. I did it, and Steam reports that HL2 has been purchased and CS:Source is available now, no CC info required.