Slashdot Mirror
SteamWatch Offers Forum for Displeased Customers
paniq writes "SteamWatch has opened a forum to discuss the pros and cons of Valves online distribution software Steam 'due to constant deletion of complaint threads in the official Steam forum', as the site states. Installation of Steam to play Valves newest cutting edge shooter Half-Life 2 is mandatory, but forum members criticize Valve for meager Support, violation of consumer rights and formulate alternative ideas for Steams implementation. A 'Steam Watch' news section covers articles and rants about Steam found on the net."
other news about steam...d =357
http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&i
not sure why everyone is up in arms about cyber cafe licensing. We are opening one, but won't be using steam.
hl2 grphx are nice, but in the end, a single player game doesn't cut it anymore. and cs source is still just cs (an outdated game).
not worth $120 per pc per year (min 10 pcs) - IMO
Last time I checked, nobody was holding a SPAS-12 to your head and forcing you to buy the product. Get your money back, don't play the game, and quit yer fucking whining.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I agree. Maybe if Vavle put more trouble into the actual HL2 and made a great multi-player component, you'd be interested. But no, they went and sunk a boatload of money in Steam. I am also terribly disappointed in CS-Source. You'd think you'd get vehicles or like 20 new maps. But they had to work on Steam.
There's nothing I could say here that really hasn't been rehashed elsewhere, though I'm sure it will somewhere in this thread. Anyway, here's another vote for I-won't-buy-another-steampowered-game.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
This isn't all that surprising. Steam distribution was at first heralded as a way of getting away from the "big evil publishers" and creating an alternative for developers. But it still has to administer the accounts, and in the end its still run by a corporation whose end goal is to make the most amount of money possible. If anything, having an even further distancing between licensing a product and actually owning it can make potential abuses against the customers even worse.
And for all those "they're not forcing you to buy it" people out there, of course they aren't, but if they'd remove the mandatory Stean registration I probably would have given them my $50 by now.
Not only am I disappointed in CS-Source, but I actually think it's worse than the first Counter Strike. At least the first one had decent hit collision, and didn't provide feedback (ie, blood splatter) until the server said it was okay. With CS:S it's possible to believe you're hitting an opponent, but when you check the console after dying the server never registered a single hit. I've never been more disappointed in a multiplayer game. I made a mistake in paying for HL2 early so I could get CS:S. Now I'm disappointed with both games. Oh well, I'll mark this up to a $60 lesson.
Don't be fooled, this website's open letter hides the fact that it is more dedicated to "people who haven't bought the game". -- ??? WTF is that?
In other words, Steam gets in the way of pirating HL2 and they're pissed.
Fuck you, buy it.
They say it's for all those with grievances, but I highly suspect this is the nearly the same as a certain site promoting hacked UT/UT2004 servers (which believes that people who don't buy the game have a right to play online too...).
For the record, few if any threads have been deleted on the Steam forums and the ones that have were complicated by people posting links to material that falls outside the forum T.O.S. and rules. I post there regularly and overall they are very leniant.
Thanks, but you lose by 2 hours 49 minutes.
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http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30
What people don't understand is that it's not just Steam. Anybody can create a Steam-esque system. What if you HAD to download GameSpy's bug-ridden, spyware-filled software or pay a yearly fee to play the next AAA game. I dunno about you, but I don't want Quake 4, Doom 4, Half Life 3, Duke Nukem Forever and other great games to force me to install spyware.
I'm not terribly impressed with all the "poor victims" so far that have posted on the forums.
Most of them are people that tried to use an illegtimate CD key or cracks, then bought the game when they couldn't get that to work, or felt guilty enough and bought it, and then got shut out of the game.
Gee, screw someone over, then try to play nice and they don't react nicely to you? Never saw that coming...
About the only legitimate post (obviously IMO) I've read there so far covers some of the interesting legal entanglements that come from Valve's EULA for Steam. Personally, I hope EULAs are abolished, or if not, that they would come back in a much simpler form.
I think it's absolutely ridiculous to expect anyone but a lawyer to have to read through and understand the pages and pages of legal drek that come with each new game. How can anyone in their right minds expect a person who isn't an expert in contract law to fully understand and comprehend all their rights with a EULA. Nevermind the questionable legality of EULAs to begin with. Of course one might argue that an expert in contract law already knows that EULAs can't be legally binding since they don't fulfill many of the basic qualifications of a legal contract, but since IANAL I digress...
To me, whether steam is a waste or not depends on what else Valve does with it. If all I get out of Steam is the ability to play halflife2 single-player, then it's a ripoff (since I don't play CS). But if Valve comes out with a multiplayer ver of hl2 in 6 months, and distributes it through steam, then it's worthwhile.
I picked up HL2 at the local discount store (bah no discount even!) and didn't discover any notice about Steam etc etc. I admit I didn't RTFB (read the fine box) very closely.
IANAL but isn't it a Deceptive Business Practice to appear to sell one thing, but actually the purchaser is buying someother thing entirely? Is Deceptive Business Practice even a legal term?
I mean you think you are buying a game, but you are actually selling your soul, okay not your soul, but agreeing to abide by "Steam's" rules and license and conditions and have broadband, Internet, surrender control to a list of software to Steam, agree to Steams unilateral decisions, etc etc.
So I am really glad I put it back on the shelf. I'll just wait for Duke Nukem Forever and keep playing with Quake and UT. Shucks I miss Shadow Warrior. Looks like stupid Valve has found a new friend! No money for you!
However, I think one of the reasons this forum is a good thing is because Valve has screwed up royally. Many of their once happy customers are pissed. By letting them know, and letting other businesses know, we have an effect on the way things will turn out, however minor it may be.
This frankly, is a good alternative to just not buying the game. Because if you don't buy the game, they have no reason of knowing you decided not to buy it because of Steam. They might just assume you didn't like the game.
Which leads me to my next point. Instead of just not buying it, if you want to do something more effective, buy it and immediately return it, and be CRYSTAL CLEAR when you explain why to the person that it is because you are unhappy with Valve's choice in requiring Steam for this and you do not find it a satisfactory product. State this clearly and loudly.
I know its wishful thinking, but at least you can DO something instead of just getting angry.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
In case the forums site goes down, I found a mirror here....
Steam games (mainly CS, CS:S, CS:CZ, Natural Selection, TFC, and DoD (soon DoD:S)) has about 15 to 20 times as many players as the second biggest online shooters out there.
Also, refering to CS as an outdated game is a bit silly. It is still by faaar the biggest online action game out there, with CS:S a distant second.
Gabe Newell used to work for Microsoft - also a company big on activiation and DRM.
Coincidence?
.......why can't I. :-)
jsut teasing, I didn't scroll down far enough
I like steam. I bought HL condition zero just for the CS:Source beta. I didn't mind just paying for the Beta, because I figured I had gotten my moneys worth x 10 out of HL1 with the CS mod.
I wasn't going to buy HL2, but a friend called me up one night last week and said he had HL2 and wanted to start playing CS:Source. I went onto steam and bought HL2 so I could play online with him. The nice thing is since I was in the Beta it was preloaded on my computer already. It took me about 10 minutes to be up and playing, where as if I could only buy the game in the store it would have had to wait until the next day never mind dealing with the sub-humans that work at my local best buy, or the fan-boiz at the local gameshop.
I think steam is a great delivery system for games.
To the people that say "get your money back", don't they know you can't return software if it has been opened?
If you don't control it, you don't own it.
If a program *requires* an external server to operate, and you don't control the external server, then you don't control the program - and thus you don't own it.
It is one thing for a game to say "Here's OUR online server which can direct you to other players, or you can enter your own server here."
It is QUITE ANOTHER to say "Here is our online server, unt YOU VILL FIND YOUR GAMES THROUGH IT ONLY! ONE GAME, ONE SERVER, ONE COMPANY!"
So remember from here on out, people - if you MUST use their server, and no other - you don't own the game.
If that is objectionable to you, DON'T BUY THE GAME.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The guy has some very valid complaints regarding games he already bought before Steam even existed.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
First off, I did accept the EULA and other than my initial annoyance with the Steam download/decryption (I was eager to play the game after plonking down a fairly hefty amount of money) it has not been a problem. Steam has only intruded once to ask for my machine information, and I did find it funny to see how poorly my machine stood up.
But, has anybody actually tried to return a game after disagreeing with the EULA? I noticed in the HL2 readme that it said if I did not agree with the EULA, to contact Sierra regarding this. Given that people often repeat the argument that the EULA is stupid as you can not review it until after purchasing a non-returnable game, I was wondering if this is actually true.
Anyone?
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
There are still people in the world using modems.
Those people - particularly the ones who can't manage 33.6k - are pretty much fucked with a knife if they bought Halflife 2 with some expectation of being able to play the game from the crap that's in the box.
That's a VERY legitimate complaint about Steam. Last year - I couldn't get broadband before October 2003 - I tried to play Counterstrike over ~44k and I was absolutely outraged that the only thing out of that box that was useful was the serial number. If I installed the game that was in the box I didn't have a way to connect up-to-date to CS servers. In order to download the updates I either had to let steam run for days to download the required updates, or download a lump installer from a registration-only game site. Steam literally locked me out of a game that I owned.
Objection to steam is NOT just about pirates wanting to pirate. I own multiple copies of HL2 (ATI coupons) and I won't install it unless I can install the *SINGLE PLAYER GAME* without all the steam bullshit.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
My PC is not a platform for a third party's content. Period.
I haven't bought HL2. I won't buy it until there's a non-steam version of singleplayer, or a reliable crack. Two weeks ago, I'd have bought it retail from Vivendi and sent $20 to Valve on principle.
I'm sufficiently disgusted with the way Valve has handled the situation that (when the nonsteam release, or the reliable crack, comes out - whichever comes first) I'll buy it retail from Vivendi - also on principle.
For anyone who still thinks steam's cool, try going into offline mode, setting your date forward a year, and rebooting. Whether you got it out of a Vivendi box or a Valve download, you haven't purchased HL2 singleplayer - you've rented it.
If I wanted to rent games and play them on a PC-based console system, I'd have bought a Phantom from Infinium. (You Steam fans do all own Phantoms, don't you?)
You know, you're right. A prime example would be the release of Quake, where ID Software thought they'd be clever and self-publish the demo on a $5 CD-ROM, with the full game content being unlockable upon further purchase.
Along came a crack that unlocked not only Quake, but a half-dozen other full games on the same CD!
As we all know, ID abandoned this crazy idea pretty quick.
Now, as for Steam. It was a great idea at the time it was conceived. Remember, the plan was hatched around the same time as Real started Real Arcade, and Thrush had their own digital delivery system, and a whole bunch of other companies had digital game delivery systems (all of them purporting that they would cost gamers less money since there's no publisher and retailer costs tacked on). But where are they now? Real Arcade is still around, but what of the others?
Steam has only the enormous clout of Half-Life to support it, but after that........ it's still essentially an idea who's time has past.
The modem point is valid for CS, perhaps, but I'd have to think the fraction of the market with both a sub-56k modem and a computer with sufficient graphics capabilities to play Half-Life is really, really small.
/. like it if it was (gasp!) MS running this instead?
With all this publicity about the tiny group of people who may have had a problem with steam, we're often forgetting the hundreds of thousands (if not millions, by now) of people who have had success with this system and are off happily playing HL2 or CS:S.
When software companies don't sufficiently support or patch traditionally issued software, everyone whines about it. Now, when a company makes an real attempt to revise how the whole distribution channel works, everyone is whining it doesn't work the way they want it to, or that it doesn't run on their PC Junior with a 110 bps modem.
Tough nuts, I say. Steam, by almost any measure, has been a huge success commercially for both Valve and Vivendi, and the whining of a few uninvolved players is not something they're losing sleep over.
Money talks loudest to these guys, and you can bet that every other game developer is watching this process very closely, if not already trying to figure out how to shortcut the traditional retail channel.
Good for them. In the era of broadband there's no reason we should still be walking to EB to pick up a box that's 90% air and 10% outdated bits, and paying $10-$20 to them for the "honor".
At least it's a bunch of real game guys creating and running Steam. How would
For years I played TFC on my little 56k modem and crappy machine. I had alot of fun.. then WON was taken down and whenever I tried to use STEAM it killed me. my PC just crashed right out, no reason or anything.
Now I bought HL twice, OP4 twice, BS twice, CS (was in a boxset), CS:CZ (which I've never played) and I'm spending £600 tomorrow on a new PC so I can play HL2. Now I'd say I'm pretty much addicted to Half-life in general.
Now I understand I don't buy "a game", I buy a licence to play the game and to own the game. Now if I have to use STEAM to "register" my product, then does that not mean I don't have the licence? Surely if I've payed my £30 for my right to own a copy of the game I should be able to install it on any machines I see fit because I bought that right.
Why MUST I let ET phone home if I want to take advantage of his cool glowing finger when I just paid him to do it?
Valve are trying to set up a community they control and if you cross them they cut you off. They will lead the path onto this new games industry. "You report to us, only us and no one else! If you install someone elses software we will destroy it or deny you access to ours!", we wouldn't take this for anything else so why should we software?
People say "speak with your money" but news flash, they don't care. For every game we buy theres 50 more sheep buying it. Whats a few hundred bucks from a couple of geeks?
The only way to stop this is to act up, make some noise. They could easily release a single player only HL2, make it so it simplely includes the game it's self and nothing more. Most pirates want more then the single player so they might play it (ALA demo) then buy it for full multiplayer.
I like muppets.
I agree that few people may decide to agree to sign up to use steam for a game they never heard of.
However, once Steam is on the computer, up, running and trustworthy....why not just use it? Its there. It works. It is proven. Companies will love it - sure there are bandwidth costs, but there is no dealing with pesky distributors. Users will learn to love it. By the law of the marketplace, Steam will not only survive and outlive Half Life, but prosper.
People are saying that Valve has no responsability to their consumers, which shows just how messed up the "marketplace" has gotten. Yes the seller has a responsability to their customers, you can't sell something that doesn't work, advertise falsely, the original EULA can have some terrible stuff in it because software is never seen as nescessary (even a monopoly like Microsoft is exempt) because software used to be written in house and the law's reflect that.
But what valve is doing in terms of forced obscelescence is covered in most countries commercial statutes.
Really, this should cross the line into what is WRONG with liscencing, and if it wasn't a game this would have been shot down.
But whatever Gamers can't organize, we know it, so in the ass this goes.
The first part of your sentence is fully within your rights. The second part is not. If you don't like Steam, nobody is making you buy the game. Give up whining that you are justified to pirate the game because you don't like the terms it's sold under.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Made forced update on my installation though - now it does not start. A lot of people had the same problem, according to alt.games.half-life
Forced updates are very evil!
I can't say much for petty complaints claiming that 'when a thief returns the goods to pay for them, he ceases to be a thief', but steam does offer some very real problems which should be addressed by valve with priority.
:)
For example, right now i'm typing in slashdot because the HL2 SDK is "updating" with no evidence of progress...
Meanwhile, i'm unable to *play* HL2, let alone download the HL2 update while playing a different game (CS Source or Codename Gordon for example) because valve have decided to set us back 20 years to the days before multi-tasking.
"Cannot Run Game. You currently have another game in progress, please quit this first"
Last time I checked, waiting for a massive *questionmark* sized download over ADSL wasn't much of a game... but what do I know?
Not to mention the conflict of interest brought up by the posting of ads on steam update pages when coupled with the potential(?) for product usage and market information harvesting.
If I was commercially developing a mod for HL2 and I was physically unable to access the SDK or HL2 until it had finished updating, I would be furious... as it is, I think i might take a nap
'plex
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
that I can't try a friend's copy of Half-Life, because no-one I know wants to install Steam on their system. I can't, because I don't have my own internet access until after new year, just a work connection and occasional access to friends' dial-up internet access and internet cafés.
I think you missed the parent post's point about renting not owning. He said he wouldn't buy the game until a non-steam or reliable crack(thus making the game non-steam) not that the parent poster wanted to play the game for free(gratis). Your accusation of piracy is akin to saying I am pirating my printer by buying a non-oem ink cartridge.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
I'm noticing a lot of complaints involve steam updating games at inoportune times. You all should pay more attention seeing as you can simply tell Steam NOT to automatically update a game so you have to tell it manually to download and install the update. If you didnt tell Steam not to automatically update its your own fault. The next numerous complaint involves how many 'megs' it takes for Steam to run and away from HL2. If you actually checked Steam takes up only twice as much as FireFox. It would hardly make a diffrence if it wasnt running. And third the problem with internet connection. "Shouldnt have to use the net for a single player game" and the like are very common complaints regaurding Steam. Personally I think this is a bullshit excuse seeing as 98% of the people that would want to play HL2 have internet connections. Sure on day 1 of HL2's release people had trouble getting their games to authorise. But its a *free* service and when you get as many people hitting your servers at one time as they did for authorising its no wonder there were problems. Note that most of these issues were for people who had retail. This is most likley because all the net buyers (or damn near) preloaded the game before Nov 16th. By the time most of the retail owners had their copy in their hands others were authorising. By the time they installed the game and attempted to authorise they were already having issues with people being unable to authorise right away. Also a good portion of the people that had issues authorising HL2 were at colleges and universities that blocked the ports Steam was using to auth HL2. And then the second part of this third complaint, once you authorise HL2 you do NOT need an internet connection. Infact you dont even need to LOGIN! You can play in "offline" mode and be 'happy' that you dont need the internet to play your game. I just dont understand what people's problem is with needing the internet to authorise that you purchsed the game. Sure it takes time but we've all played games that take a while to install (Hello Far Cry and your 5 cds, nice to play you in 25 minutes). Its a more effective step than a CD-KEY (at least I assume so, when was the last time you heard of 20 thousand people getting their accounts disabled for using illegal copies of a game and credit card fraud to boot? Cause its been a while for me) and doesnt take up all that much time really. -The game itself takes a bit to start up on my low end system anyways so I didnt even notice the grand total of 15 seconds it took for me to login to Steam. -Steam barley takes up any processing power. -Steam allows me to update my games a lot easier (I dont have to wait in line at FilePlanet or something because for one reason or another the downloads from the official site arent working) and at my convienence as well as installing automatically. -Steam is just as easy to customise and you dont have to backup the original files when you add in new skins/sounds. -The more popular mods are standalone now. -It has an easy interface, minus the Browse Games and Play Games menus which are poorly named. -Harder to play pirated copies online (NOTE: Yes there are 'hacked' versions of Steam or w/e but they dont work except on 'hacked' Steam servers so you wont find some hacker repeatetly coming on your server and hacking as often as other games. Its a lot more difficult to get random Steam IDs than it was random WON IDs where any numbers worked. They usually have to obtain a second Steam Account. Bannage works 99% of the time, 100% for all I know but I seriously doubt that any system is full proof and without flaws) -Rev
I'm a new Steam customer. I paid my $50, pre-downloaded Half-Life 2, started playing immediately upon release.
It's mostly been OK, but I've had issues running my single-player game. It is annoying that you have to connect to Steam each time you want to play the game. I mean, come on -- check for updates IF I ASK FOR IT but give me a simple checkbox that allows me to turn off the per-use authentication. I paid for it, you've authorized it, now leave me alone for a while to enjoy my game!
PS: I logged into Steam last night for a little HL2 play, got some automatic Steam updates and HL2 Deathmatch (cool!), and my HL2 was totally borked up. Wouldn't play at all, DLL errors. Ouch! I think I had extra copies of the DLLs and EXE sitting in an inappropirate directory, I copied/replaced all with the newest versions and it seems to have fixed the problem, but wow, how bad does that suck to get an automatic update and then not be able to play at all?
PPS: Still getting some sound stuttering and random crashes to desktop A LOT. Grrrrr...
Don't buy the game. Don't talk about the game. Don't write a review about the game. Don't tell your friends you downloaded the cracked version and it was awesome.
Steam is the first iteration of Digital Rights Management. This is how Palladium is going to work for you. Deal with it or find something else to do.
I get flamed by an immature little brat for posting my thoughts on slashdot? Not everyone spends 4 hours a day reading web sites about the newest games or buys every valve game. I enjoyed the original Half Life a lot so I bought Half-Life 2. I had heard of Steam but I didn't know what it was, and I hadn't bought any other Valve games like counter strike.