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The Age of Steam
Ant writes "Edge Online has a six-page article titled "The Age of Steam" about Steam's history that begins: 'The name could hardly be more appropriate. Just as railroads swept the US, leaving in their wake a west that was significantly less wild, so has Valve's Steam client spread across the PC, centralising, simplifying and consolidating. What started as a way of administering updates has become a delivery platform so powerful that it has threatened to render even the big publishers' alternatives obsolete, an online community so well-supported that it sets standards even for those found on consoles, and a no-fiddling environment that allows your games, settings and saves to follow you from one PC to the next every time you log in. Looking back, such success seems inevitable, but in reality Steam was far from an obvious idea. Creator Valve was a developer, not a publisher or distributor, and the service's opening months were marred by bottlenecks and a frustrating online registration experiment. More interesting than the triumph, then, is the journey: what has made Steam such a powerful platform? Which forces shape its evolution? And how can it rewire not just the PC market, but the way that games themselves are developed?'"
It still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability and user-friendliness. Turnaround times alone make steam a hassle at times, just because I remember how quickly I could go from playing TFC to Pirates Vikings and Knights in the old WON clients, and I tended to register FAR more servers for the list than the ~200-500 tops I get now.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Didn't RTFA yet but have something to say about steam.
Digital Distribution of games is growing more and more popular. It no longer is an oddity amongst PC game distribution methods. Unfortunately it is growing more and more monopolar constantly with Steam's rising success.
Steam still is proprietary, non-free and most importantly, controlled by a game development company. There's not much wrong technically with Steam, it's actually the best digital distribution method I've tried.
Unfortunately with buying all your games from Steam we run the risk of no serious competition against one big juggernaut in digital distribution. There might come a day when Valve, a privately held corporation, decides to actively deny publishing something because it could put Valve's own products at disadvantage.
The best alternative would be a free, open source digital distribution method with payments handled by a non-profit entity/entities.
I just bought World of Goo for $5 on Steam and it is every bit as fun as the reviews have said. That's probably the third game I've bought for $5 in the last few months.
Almost every weekend they have another game going up for anywhere from 5% to 75% off. Bought GTA4 for $35 when it's still full price everywhere else and it plays fine for me.
Steam has a lot of benefits but when you don't have a large game budget those sales are nice.
Too bad that prices (in euros) are still the same as in stores, or even more than in store. Most of the time you can get the game cheaper, and with a box, if you go to a store. But then again, going outside is scary.
I used to have the same problem, where the server list refresh would stop at around 200-400. I read somewhere that you have to delete a file and let steam rebuild it on the next run. As I recall, it was one of those .blob files. I did that, and my problem was solved.
I bought a physical copy of the first Half-Life back when it was released. When Steam entered the picture, I registered Half-Life to it, making the CD-Key useless since at least the online portion of the game was now completely tied to the Steam account. Then I forgot my Steam password and was unable to recover it - for five years. So I couldn't do much with the boxed copy of the game I had, nor could I access it through Steam.
However, a week ago I suddenly remembered my Steam password, and installed Steam to see if my account was still alive. Not only did I find Half-Life associated with the account, but also several commercial mods and two expansion packs that I had never bought. All of these automatically downloaded/installed with just a click of a mouse. Turns out that the commercial mods/expansions were awarded at some point for free to those who bought Half-Life before Steam existed. On top of that I noticed the (apparently long-running) NVIDIA and ATI campaigns on Steam, through which you get a couple of games for free if you have their graphics card, most interestingly for me Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. And all of this works flawlessly through Wine on Linux.
All in all, I must say I'm quite impressed with Steam, as long as you don't lose your account credentials.
And in fact, the problems stemming from Valve being historically corporate-facing (publisher-facing) rather than direct consumer-facing company are still being felt. Their customer service is infamously bad, and their policies when things go wrong seem almost specifically tailored to piss off the customer as much as possible.
The software is decent (although I'm still quite unhappy with the intrusiveness of the DRM), but software alone won't take them all the way. I'd suggest that there needs to be a near-complete split in the company - one which focuses on game development and one which focuses on game delivery, as the two are completely different in the approach they need: product development vs service delivery.
It's odd how different retailers are taking different stances with Steam. But also, here's why I think retailers are stupid to support Steam as is.
Gamestop in the US I believe refused to stock Dawn of War II because of the fact it forced the user to register, update, and play the game via Steam. This is understandable as they'd basically be selling a game that forces a competitors sales tool on their system.
Here in the UK though, I purchased it online from GAME. They shipped me it to arrive on the Thursday before the Friday release and although GAME got it me early, I couldn't play it because I couldn't activate it via Steam.
I still personally think Valve are in the wrong here, just because I have to register with them does not mean I should have to activate via them and activation was not mentioned on the box or GAME's website. Still, who is in the wrong is debatable, neither did anything legally wrong, but one thing is clear, you might as well just buy via Steam anyway as you can still preload it and download as many times as you want from them.
But here's the twist, I complained to GAME because I was still pretty pissed that I'd bought a GAME off them that I couldn't play until Valve decided that I could so I complained to them and oddly, rather than having Gamestop's stance, that they agree, it's bad for their customers to have to deal with Steam they actually wholeheartedly supported Steam and their DRM and actually took responsibility saying they shipped it early to ensure I got it for release but that it shouldn't have got to me before release but that if they'd shipped it a day later I might have got it after release, blah blah blah. I also made the point that their website didn't at the time mention Steam, Windows Live activation and also complained that this is important because should Steam ever go titsup and not have chance to release a patch (which wouldn't be an impossible scenario for any company as the current economic situation has taught us) that I may never be able to reinstall or play the product again after that point.
I find that stance rather interesting, it's almost as if GAME actually wants to be destroyed and replaced by the likes of Steam. So is there more to this? Do they think they can actually benefit from Steam in some way? Was it just political correctness in that they wouldn't want to slag off a company whom they sell software for or is there something else to it altogether (maybe they only care about console sales?)? I as a customer sided entirely with them stating that I felt the activation and such was stupid but rather than seize that, they turned around and agreed with their competitor (Valve) that their method of distribution and service was effectively inferior even though there's no reason they actually needed do so.
For what it's worth I also contacted trading standards who agreed that my complaint regarding the DRM was valid, and that it was not illegal for GAME to ship me the game early and as such I should've been able to play it at that point. They are looking at taking action at very least for the fact the game box and GAME didn't advertise that the game was only usable when a 3rd party (Valve) states it can (or can't) be used through activation even if it did mention registration is required.
I also pointed out that the alternative is that many may just resort to piracy if it's difficult or troublesome to play legitimately purchased games. I received a rather amusing response that contained the ultimate freudian slip (or perhaps not??) stating:
"The DRM software that must be installed is designed to prevent privacy"
I'd imagine they meant piracy, but privacy works for me too.
Still the crux of it is this, I'd like Steam a lot more if it avoided DRM. You can do preloading without DRM- just give people the entire game except the executable needed to run it. I'll also never buy from GAME again, not particularly out of spite, but more because the only feeling I got from them was one of arrogance, effectively the
It still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability and user-friendliness.
True in some areas (as the ones you mention about multiplayer), but I have never bought as many games in retail as I have since I've got access to them through steam. The convenience of being able to buy a game I feel like playing and within the hour playing it far outweighs the problems for me. You could argue that I could pirate/steal/whatever the game and be playing it in the same amount of time for free, but by spending a little bit of disposable income I can be entertained for a couple of weeks and I get the added benefits of steam.
I remember how quickly I could go from playing TFC to Pirates Vikings and Knights in the old WON clients
I remember how much of a pain in the ass it was setting up a game between a couple of friends (not talking about WON here), and with steam that's done with a few clicks. I'm not going to paint a picture of a utopia here, but it's much improved from the old routine of getting on IRC or some IM client and alt-tabbing back and forth between your game typing "Can you connect now?"
The criticisms that I'd have on steam is the DRM (although compared to the draconian forms of DRM, Steam's DRM is acceptable) and of course the big question of "What happens if Valve dies and I want to play my games?"
All in all I'm really happy with Steam. It's made me buy more games than I used to, probably because now I buy on impulse rather than holding a box in a store and saying "Nah, I'll get it through other means", and it's decreased the time wasted on connecting to others.
Jeez. I was thinking I was going to get a treatise on Martin Wallace's masterpiece.
My chief issue with Steam is the content validation, these days. I picked up Sid Meier's Pirates the other day; bargain bin stuff, ten bucks.
Purely a single player game, and not exactly a hot commodity these days. (Five years old, after all.) Steam wouldn't launch it---unable to verify content. I'd actually just been playing less than an hour before, too.
Turned out my ISP's DNS server was spazzing so it couldn't phone home. I can understand that for multiplayer games or hot properties, but it seems slightly excessive in this circumstance. Phoning home on every single launch to verify?
Still, Steam remains a damned good content delivery system. Games I bought on CD most of a decade ago are still available to me for immediate replacement on Steam---good, since my physical media for Half-Life 1 have long since vanished. Infinite installs, so if I visit my family, I can throw Portal or what-have-you on whatever computer they lend me to use.
Compared to say, Direct2Drive or EA's Download Manager, there's simply no contest.
are painful. It took me 3 days to download unreal III during the free weekend and cut off very shortly after i got it downloaded because steam didn't have the servers/bandwidth. I would rather stand online all night for a midnight release then babysit a download from steam for 3 days again.
1. Yeah until Steam is no longer around and you find yourself without any of the games you paid for. Sure most people wouldn't care about decade old games they paid for, hey they hadn't played it in awhile, they'd never miss it. Same business model as those DRMed music stores that go bye bye with your songs, which you would miss. We're back to not owning our purchases and leasing it.
2. And I never tried it without internet access, but I know when you try to run a game (even one that's not online to play) it opens up steam. I had a problem once when I had steam running, and I opened the game from my desktop, and it said problem, steam is running, can't open again.
3. And the long download times. Buying a digital download game is all and cool, and progressive. But I'd still like to burn my own copy for backup. I'm one of those people who like reformatting their computer for ha ha's, incidentally I've been a Windows user for a decade. I also like to uninstall games that I haven't played in awhile to make room for new games, and then reinstall it years later when I like to revisit. I hope steam doesn't grumble at how many times you can install someday.
4. I also have two computers, a gaming computer for when I want to concentrate on gaming. And an all purpose computer that I'll play the game on with all the lags involved when I don't feel like booting up my gaming computer.
I do like steam for their handy demos, and trailers, though there's youtube for the trailer. And it was very innovative, although I wonder if they distribute the games via Torrent tech.
I also find it amusing, they have a bunch of classic games that they sell.
But my latest annoyance is DoW2 is Steam online. DoW is definetely a game that I'd want a backup of because RTS games you can go back to years later.
They might do some great offers if you manage to catch them, however any long term users of Steam know that if you want to get the best deal for a game then sometimes you have to look elsewhere. This is starting to build up a lack of trust for customers, games on Steam are often more expensive even though it costs less to sell than a physical box - customers will end up doing Google searches for the cheapest deal elsewhere. It reminds me of people going into stores to find the product they like, then ordering off the Internet to get the best deal.
Apart from pricing it's a nice platform.
Valve has promised in the event they go under, they'll release the DRM validation.
Of course, if they go under, it may not be their call to make. You never know who'll wind up in control. They're privately held now, but if the choice is between going public or going under, they may choose to go public first. Or they may take a loan against some of their IP like Flagship did before they imploded.
And, of course, who knows what their contracts with third party publishers look like? They're selling first run titles from other publishers now, Dawn of War II for example, or Spore.
I highly doubt publishers like EA would be happy with distribution contracts that would allow Valve to pull the plug on the DRM.
"What happens if Valve dies and I want to play my games?"
It is, as you point out, a valid concern. But I frame this problem in context of the cost/benefit I have received from a game. For the amount of money that I payed for TF2 and the hours I've spent playing it, I feel like I have already gotten the better end of the deal. Throw in the fact that the game has gotten so many additional updates (free of charge!) and I feel like I have already gotten value. If the game were to evaporate or be gone forever, I take comfort in knowing that I played it a lot, got enormous entertainment value out of it, and if I really missed it *that* bad, there's a cracked version out there to keep playing.
So that argument from the anti-DRM boogie man doesn't seem to hold too much water with me. I mean, at least some secu-rom rootkit isn't being installed on my machine, right?
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love Steam, I love Valve, and I loves me some HL, but I've been trying to walk through that door in "Opposing Force" since LAST SEPTEMBER without crashing the game.
Seriously.
September.
Fix it.
Steam is great for the masses, but I mostly play games which are good enough that I will be playing them on and off for some time to come. As long as the general crap is all that's tied to it, I don't care that much. However, I am afraid that DD (Steam or otherwise) and its equivalents on consoles may take over completely, which would threaten the longevity of those games I do wish to play. So, in the interest of games which are more than transient time wasters, I hope physical distribution stays strong, and preferably (though hopelessly unlikely) that DD just goes away.
There may be hope though. When music first started becoming legally available online, it was horribly DRM encumbered, but they have backed off a lot over time. So, while DD may never go away, games in the future might at least not be programmed to fail.
Although, even in that case I would still hope that physical distribution would remain the standard. A real life example, the first two Team Ico games came in nice cardboard cases with art cards. I'm currently wondering if their PS3 game will follow suit, or only have a normal case. The idea of one being released without so much as boxart or a manual is not appealing.
if only the support channels weren't selective about their service and at least attempted to answer every question. Or at least reasonable ones. For example I have been attempting to address their pricing changes since late last year. Us AMERICAN soldiers stationed overseas are subjected to whatever pricing options they deem appropriate for our area, rather than change the prices for those of us coming from American-owned ips. You see, us soldiers have internet through a specific company here in germany, and the state that the ip address is registered to is an American military address. Porn advertisers have figured this out, as I get ads displayed on screens for "my local area" of APO (American Post Office). I spoke with Hulu.com about this, and they fixed it. Soldiers are now able to watch hulu videos because their service checks the ip addresses properly (or did, last I checked). Steam fails to do this. So after not receiving a reply to my support message about this, I sent another email saying that they should at least allow us the opportunity to mail in tax relief forms. We soldiers are not subjected to the 19% Value Added Tax present on every purchase made here in Germany, yet Steam forces us to pay this. And they didn't respond to that email either. So now I gotta pay long distance charges to attempt to call their offices during whatever their central time zone work hours are. GG Steam.
Let steam log in and authenticate. .blob files somewhere else.
Close steam completely.
Disconnect your Internet connection.
Start steam, log in offline.
Close steam.
Save the steam
The next time your ISP is down or the steam servers are down. You can still use your local games if you copy the blob files back. Don't allow steam to try to connect at all after you replace the files. I use Comodo and just disallow all Internet connections.
It used to work anyway.
Well, since a good portion of Valves profits comes from their slice of the game-sales, I'd say they would welcome their competitors with open arms. A way to make money off of SOMEONE ELSE'S game.
They might bump the steam release date a week if they are releasing something too, but I doubt it. They compete with gamestop for distribution, and every other developer for game sales, but nobody for both.
Look at the cock-up Steam made of the Total War Empire release last week:
http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic/44598/t/Empire-Total-War-Sets-Sail-For-Stores-Now-.html
I'm having more trouble understanding how the Age of Steam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Steam/) ALLOWED games to be downloaded than how it prevented it.
I remember when they first pushed Steam with Counter Strike 1.5 (or was it 1.6?) oh well. Before you could launch CS without Steam in a stand-alone client and after you had to have Steam. I was in college at the time and everyone (with but few exceptions) in my entire dorm hall played CS together at nights. Then Steam came out. Everyone hated Steam at first because it was clunky, slow, and impeded our play. It would frequently crash and sometimes kick people for no reason. It was Steam that killed dorm CS and left a bad taste in my mouth. Several years later when HL2 came out along with CS:S and I saw that they were still using Steam, I almost didn't buy it. When I found out what they had done with Steam (improved it substantially, made it actually work, added an online community, etc) I was happily surprised. Today I use Steam all the time and just last night downloaded a new game (UT3). Steam allows me to play with my friends in just a few clicks, keep tabs on their achievements and progress, and voice chat rather easily. I have real-life friends scattered all across the country now, and we can still very easiloy get on and play CS together. I know of no other platform that allows such seamless play for such a variety of games. Just my 2 copper coins.
Said like someone who's never heard of someone's Steam account getting hijacked or banned (they LOVE the banhammer over there at Steam) and losing their entire game library.
Do you really want to go there?
There will always be the concern that a company/platform with the vast majority of users/subscribers will cause problems, but sometimes, it helps.
Not everyone loves iTunes, but let's be realistic about it. Apple has created a consumer's place, more than the paradise the RIAA would prefer. Apple has done more to champion music at a reasonable cost than the RIAA companies would like. And iTunes has become so powerful, it keeps all the rest of the companies in line. The RIAA would love to break iTunes' stranglehold on the market, as would several other people like Wal-Mart. Frankly, I hope they don't, because Apple seems to have its head on straight about this.
So, it depends on the company running the show. Apple and Valve have both shown themselves to be responsible towards the consumer. Others would surely ratched up the greed factor.
Steam's DRM certainly is NOT acceptable. I purchased a game, boxed, at Best Buy. When I installed, it would not let me play until I activated it through Steam.
Guess what? Steam's activation server was down for the entire evening! Steam kept me from playing a game I purchased in a retail store! Utterly unacceptable.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I remember how much of a pain in the ass it was setting up a game between a couple of friends (not talking about WON here), and with steam that's done with a few clicks. I'm not going to paint a picture of a utopia here, but it's much improved from the old routine of getting on IRC or some IM client and alt-tabbing back and forth between your game typing "Can you connect now?"
You'll still have these problems with non-Valve (or at least non-FPS) games.
Steam makes it easier for games that use simple server lists where the game-play permits joining an already running server, but you're still mostly on your own for RTS and other games where lobbies are more appropriate (eg. hosting / joining game rooms, games where it doesn't make sense for late-joining, etc).
It does nothing to help you deal with router and firewall issues that cause major problems with these games.
The connection problems you refer to are exactly why I brought the GameRanger online gaming service to the PC. For most people, it completely solves all these network problems. It currently supports over 500 games, and is a fast, lightweight client that's dead easy to use.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
So that argument from the anti-DRM boogie man doesn't seem to hold too much water with me. I mean, at least some secu-rom rootkit isn't being installed on my machine, right?
Are you sure about that? After another mandatory update, are you still sure?
From what I've heard the DRM on Steam games is fairly easy to strip out; my friend was playing Portal on a flash drive on school computers when it came out before he bought his gaming rig that he could play Orange Box legitimately on.
That said, I usually buy games off Steam anyway since they tend to be cheaper than the retail counterparts and usually aren't using SecuROM or some shit like that. (In fact, it's the only way to get Spore and a bunch of other EA titles sans SecuROM) In many cases the weekend deals end up being around what you'd pay used for a game's console equivalent.
Speaking of the oft quoted 'we will remove the DRM if we go under' quote, I doubt that applies to third party games. Who would sign a contract - not a EULA, but a real contract mind you - stating that someone can remove your copy protection retroactively?
I had kind of the same situation but I still don't remember my original Steam account info, but I contacted their service and jumped through a couple of hoops and was able to re-register the counter strike pack on my new Steam account
You assume two things
1) That their current distribution contracts don't include such provisions.
2) That Valve's employees won't go ahead and release the DRM stripping software anyway.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
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I will never buy another game powered by steam -- what a pain in the neck. Wound up tossing HL2 in the trash - $60 down the drain.
The thing I like about Steam is that it gives me a great sense of ownership. I'm sure this is not strictly speaking true, but I have the feeling that the games are mine, that I can download the client to another machine and play them just fine without harassment. Yes, there is DRM, but it is invisible.
(Now, I know there are some corner cases here. Bioshock. And Valve _can_ pull the plug on me after all.)
Compare that to the game Syberia, a great point-and-click adventure game developed by non-mainstream developer Microids. They sell the game by online download, which is provided by some shitty company called Metaboli. Look at the issues I faced with their DRM junk:
1) They won't let your game run under a VM or emulation. This is by design, and intentional. (I run Steam under VMware, Crossover and natively on my Mac, depending on what works better for that particular game)
2) Their support is shit. It took them a week to answer "No it won't work under a VM, yes, it is undocumented and it is remaining that way and you already tried to run it so it activated and you are screwed, no money back 4u!". Sheeple that I am, I move to a native Windows installation.
3) If I ever need to install the game on another machine I would have to beg the fine folks who sent me the answer above, because I already wasted my allowance of three activations trying to run it under Crossover and VMware.
They are sleazy enough to promise that you can "burn your own CD" as a backup. Yeah, like it will work if the activation server goes down. Congratulations for making me feel pissed off after buying an excellent game that I liked, Microids. Though the rest of your catalogue seems to be my thing, and I loved Syberia, you managed to successfully lose this customer.
Steam gets how the experience should be.
Automatic updates can be disabled.
Steam is so great, I've literally never heard of it until this article today.
It's one thing to say they'll do it, it's another thing to actually take steps to make sure it'll happen. Last time I looked Steam's TOS explicitly stated that they are under no obligation to allow people to continue playing their games if they go out of business or even just decide to pull the plug because it's not profitable any more. This is a very dangerous situation for gamers and no amount of happy thoughts about what great guys they are at Valve will change this.
What I'd like to see is Valve change their TOS to explicitly state that a third party will hold code to unlock the DRM and will release it in the event of Valve going out-of-business or else decide to pull the plug on Steam. In fact, I'd like to see all publisher do this. They should collectively set up a organization for unlocking DRM in old games.
In the meantime, I'll just steer clear of Steam and go checkout good old games instead.
TF2 wasn't the reason I bought the Orange Box, but since I've spent over 200 hours playing it since I got it, it alone was worth the purchase. I've also taken to posting in my journal when TF2 goes on sale to try to get my friends who haven't yet gotten the game to get it. During the most recent sale, I thought Friday morning about getting it for one of my friends as an early birthday present, but forgot that Valve's "through Friday" means through 12:00:01am Friday.
I have quite a few games I purchased over Steam (69, the latest being World of Goo. No, that's not a joke.), and some of them were impulse buys that I later wish I hadn't bought. I am somewhat concerned with what will happen to the DRM on non-Valve games if Steam went under, but given the amount of sales Steam does, I'm not that concerned.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
As with Lord Ender, my complaints with steam derive from the online activation component on retail titles. Half-Life 2 was the first and last Steam title I ever purchased. While I can appreciate Valve's frustration at the HL2 code thefts, I still have an encrypted, unplayable DVD of Half-Life 2 sitting on my office shelf. While I can see the utility of Steam, I simply haven't recovered from this insult.
That being said, I have no qualms about a one-time authentication process for games purchased online, or when CLEARLY disclosed on the box and in the game description before purchased. However, throwing an activation routine on a disk-based retail game without prior full disclosure is simply unacceptable.
I'm a huge fan of digital distribution. I just wish that I had never purchased the retail edition of HL2 (still have the shirt) so that I could give Steam one more chance in good conscience.
Did they promise this? In their EULA they immediately define their customer as "the subscriber". That suggests to me (hopefully incorrectly) that when Steam is gone, so is the subscription. Hopefully that's just boilerplate cover-your-ass legaleze.
About a year ago I installed Steam and started buying games. It works and I was quite happy with it.
Then recently they decided to SHAFT the European customers by raising prices by over 25% on ALL titles.
How did they do this? They stopped taking payment in USD and started taking payment in Euro. But the numerics stayed the same.
What used to cost 39.99 USD now costs 39.99 Euro.
That is about 50 USD. Imagine how happy all of us in Europe was when we got that slapped in our face?
Case in point: When you go to the Audiosurf website it states one price which is 9.99 USD
Click the "Buy it!" button and if you are redirected to the steampowered.com store. One little detail for European customers... the price is there 9.99 Euro.
While for such a small purchase the difference is not very big, but it is the principle of the thing. AT LEAST admit to your customers that you have raised the price of all titles and stop playing the Fawlty Towers "I know noooothing"-game.
I emailed the Audiosurf author and he seemed to agree with what Steam is doing since "9.99" is a "better" price than "12.70". Even though the change in currency happens.
I wonder if he would enjoy it the same way if it was "9.99 NOK" as that is about 1.11 euro or 1.42 USD :-p
If the people at Steampowered.com feel like just arbitrarily bump the price of games in Europe I see no reason to buy the games from them. If they insist on doing this I will keep the games I already bought, and not buy any more games from them.
I mean... If I just snag em of TPB I dont have to get up to grab my VISA. Oh, and I can blow the money on some oreo-cake and ice-cream instead... or maybe a steak...
Fuckers :-p
*goes back to working on what he -should- be working on*
I had purchased HL2 with Episode 1 and some other expansions a while back to play Gary's mod. Recently I wanted to play Portal and saw that Orange Box was a pretty good package deal, so I picked it up through Steam.
Steam recognized that I already had a copy of HL2 on my account, and actually added a button that allowed me to GIFT my extra copy of HL2 to another Steam user.
I was expecting the HL2 bundle part of the package to just be wasted (since I already had it), but the fact that they recognized it as a separate product and even allowed me to give away the duplicate copy sat very well with me.
I recently purchased DoW2 through them and my download speed was faster than what I was getting for the same product from TPB.
Steam gets a thumbs up from me.
Your friend is not stripping the DRM; his flash drive is big enough to hold a copied Steam folder. I've got TF2 and CS:S on a portable hard drive and it works fine at school.
http://pinopsida.com
Everyone talked about there being some sort of central online organization of downloads 20 years ago.
Steam is still a clunky POS that does more to impead my play then add to the experience. I also wander why it says it deletes something, but still keeps all the files on my system.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Steam was created to prevent you from exercising your First-Sale Rights. Not coincidentally, it also prevents you from exercising your Fair Use Rights to make an archival copy (specifically 17 USC 117 (a)(2).) Steam has a backup process but you can't play the backups until your Steam installation has been updated and blessed, by connecting to the Steam network. Steam backups are no backups at all! They are backups of game content but you can't really call it a game until you are able to play it. Until then it's just a collection of files taking up disk space.
Those who purchase a Steam-"powered" game while Steam does not permit both the immediate play of a restored game backup and the transfer of Steam games from one account to another are voting to give up their legal rights in the only way which matters in a capitalist society - with their money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm from Argentina and I bought Left 4 Dead for $37 during the holiday sale deal.
I already had the pirated version but wanted to play online (hassle free) and have the latest future patches or (free) DLC from the moment they are released.
You could say I bought not content but a license to play it buy I'm fine with that given that I played countless hours online so far (compared to the offline-only/buggy/abuse-cheat online servers from the pirate version).
Another odd remark is that the retail version was not yet available in my country, so Steam was the only legal way to buy it back then.
Also I got the $10 Team Fortress 2 deal a few weeks ago and I'm loving it.
i bought a box set of games from Circuit City I think it was Half Life, Blue Shift, Opposing Force, Team Fortress, and Counter-Strike. I installed it, and it needed to call home to activate. But the activation software version in the packaging was old, so I had to upgrade to the latest version. Did so, ran it again, and it gave me a terse alert telling me I still needed to upgrade, but it was the latest version, and it didn't even tell me where to go to get a newer version. The software sat unused for months on the hard drive.
Eventually I got curious again and did more searches and found that the registration software had been replaced and that I needed to install Steam to manage the games now. I did so, went to register... and the registration codes were already registered by someone else! Well, for everything other than Half-Life. Some more research and I found that the packager of my set of games had put the same registration keys in all the boxes! If it had been within the first 30 days, I could get a free set of keys. This being months later, they offered to sell me a new set of keys... for the same price I paid for the games, effectively doubling the price!
Except for Half-Life, they still sit unplayed on my hard drive.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Steam Cloud is promising to be even better. All of your saved games are stored on Valve's servers. You can log into your Steam account from any PC with internet access in the world, and within an hour, be playing one of your own saved games.
Frankly, the most of the people I hear complaining about Steam are pirates, and I say FUCK THEM. If you actually pay for your games, Steam's service is unbeatable.
Throwing karma to the wind here, but the last thing we need is an open source distribution method for games people pay for with real money. I mean, even high-profile projects like compiz get crapped out because developers come and go and lose interest in "teh shiny." That's fine when we are talking about notepad application number 2,387,691 on an OS I didn't have to pay for, but that is not going to cut it when money is on the line and I want to play that game four years from now.
Frankly, the track record for open source for longevity and remaining agnostic about the issue-of-the-moment is not exactly stellar. All it would take is some pissing-contest between developers over "the vision" or whatever, and the rifts would last in perpetuity. XFree/Xorg is a great example here.
Betting on the long-term success of any open source project is about as reliable as betting on sub-prime mortgages in your investment portfolio. I wouldn't put my money into it. Valve has a far better track record and long-term viability despite the DRM inclusion and phone-home nuisances in their products.
You don't even need to do that. Login. Then switch to offline mode. You're done. I have Steam on multiple systems here and there is no problem even when my crappy ISP is down.
No copying and mucking about needed.
Stardock have Impulse. I've got a few games on that as well. DRM free etc... But the experience just isn't as solid as Steam IMO.
My guess is that if Valve failed to release the no-DRM tool when they went under, then the cracking community would take over and release their own tool. It's these sorts of morally justified situations where you almost invariably see the tool come out.
I read the internet for the articles.
Or, you know, just use Offline Mode.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
You should still back up the Offline blobs. That way next time the steam servers are down you'll be able to start in Offline mode. Otherwise it's a Catch-22 situation - you won't be able to switch to Offline mode until you log in.
So I read about a new RTS game, Dawn of War II, and since Strategy games are my favorite type of PC game, I picked it up at Best Buy while on vacation.
I've been a computer programmer for 26 years (professionally for 22). I was part of the Microsoft team which put out the first version of Windows NT. I know how computers work, inside and out. I know how operating systems work, although I will admit I don't use Vista for anything except playing games so I'm not very good with it.
I go to install it on my MacBook Pro with 3G RAM and 512MB video card running Vista 32 Home Basic (I have MSDN with all the Vista versions, but this is the smallest install so that's what I used).
First, it makes me install something called "Steam." This is something I have assiduously avoided installing because I have heard it is very intrusive and prevents you from actually owning any game you own, but since I was on vacation and could easily wipe my Boot Camp if it did something unsavory, I decided to go with it. This Steam install seems to take a very, very long time (an hour or two) and forces me to create some sort of Steam account, which I do because it didn't ask for any information other than name and e-mail address. (I would have given it a fake name too, except for the fact that my e-mail address is a give-away for my name anyway.)
Finally, it gets Steam installed, which does lots of back and forth on the Internet and then keeps running in the background. Mind you, I'm trying to install a single-player game for which I own the DVD and it's sitting in the drive. But, the game is not installed, I learn, when I tell it I want to play the game and there are no games listed in the "My Games" section. Well, that's stupid, so somehow I figure out how to tell it to install the actual game Dawn of War II.
This goes amazingly slowly. I mean, it's already been over an hour and I don't even have a game installed. This takes about two hours - no joke - to install 3.6 GB of game from a DVD. I can watch a 2 hour 7 GB DVD in the same amount of time, so I have no idea why copying files takes 2x as long as viewing them. Hard drives just aren't that slow.
So, I eventually gave up and let it install overnight and came back to it the next day.
There is no desktop icon for Dawn of War II, so I hunt around the hard drive to try to run the installed game. I finally found it, and all it seems to do is run Steam, connect to the Internet and hang. I try running it a handful of times, and then I run the Steam program (which was actually running the whole time in the system tray, wasting my memory and CPU resources). There, it says Dawn of War II is installed so I attempt to launch it (with the launch button). It shows some multiplayer code on the screen and says I need to enter it into the game to get it to work. I ignore it because I couldn't give a damn about multiplayer, I just want to play the game already after several hours now in the second day of trying.
The game hangs for a long while. I cancel it and re-launch several times. Finally I just give up and let it sit there for like 30 minutes. It does something about patching, or installing, or updating, and pops up a command line window which then disappears again after a while, and finally dumps me back at the Steam games list which now has a button saying "news" and some comment about it being fully installed. You mean, it's only now fully installed after three hours?
Anyway, so I launch it again, and nothing. I kill the program, exit Steam, and try again. Still nothing. After a few more tries it turns out it was popping up an error message underneath all the other windows, saying that my Windows Paging File size must be at least 1.5GB. Wait, what? Why? I have 3GB of RAM and I don't want any virtual memory being used. But, it doesn't care, and eventually I give in and tell Windows that it can allocate a paging file anywhere between 16M and 1536M (1.5GB). I re-launch the game and, guess what... Same thing! So I tell Windows it can create a paging fil
I see you are now impersonating me at the forums @ 4chan.org, by registering as myself there & posting excerpts of my posts here @ slashdot (some in their original form and altered ones as well from other sites also) as well as your admitting to using multiple registered accounts here (to mod yourself up and to make it appear as if you have supporters (not)).
Bad move: That is just going to make me go to 4chan.org's hosting provider and have them remove it, & if that fails, I will employ the local law enforcement in their area to do so and to prosecute you as well, & strangely I think it's going to go FEDERAL pal.
(Oh, & by the way - I've had to do this before to a Mr. Jeremy Reimer and Mr. Jay Little of arstechnica, who had their websites @ CrystalTech.com & petitiononline.com removed in their entirety or in large portions & was completely successful in exposing those 2 for the same type of garbage you are pulling here on this site and over @ 4chan.org):
http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1235936964/1-40
I came across this impersonation of myself online (via cuts & pastes of my posts here & from other websites, some original, some altered) right after I posted about Windows VISTA, Server 2008, & Windows 7 removing port filtering and also making it impossible to use a 0 inside of a HOSTS file to block out bad IP addresses. -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1143349&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=27012231
This impersonation of myself "oddly" seems to have happened only after when I also caught one of your own here @ slashdot, "The End of Days" -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147437&cid=27056793 caught admitting to using multiple registered accounts to "mod himself up" here and to use those same registered accounts to mod down others (on top of his use of ac submissions as well to also make it appear he has further supporters).
The "The End of Days": I would be a bit worried now were I you, because now it's going to go out of my hands @ this point, & you're the only person who might have any reason to do so. Now, I will just go to the hosting provider involved for that website to take care of it, & if I get resistance of any kind, I will prosecute yourself, and any others involved, to the fullest extent of the law.
Heh, it looks like this is truly "the end of days" of you being online, period, much less you constantly bothering others here or elsewhere online via your bogus methods of impersonating others or posting under diff. account names here & at other forums in order to do so. You only bring this on yourself, & it only takes me minutes to take care of.
APK
P.S.=> It's one thing to shame yourself here being caught admitting to using multiple registered accounts to mod yourself up with (something us ac's can never be accused of) but, to go & impersonate me there has legal implications, and that is just plain dumb... I have no pity for you here, this is a lesson you will have to learn just as Jeremy Reimer &/or Jay Little of arstechnica had to before (my friends & family suspect it is they once more, but I'll reserve judgement on that until the law & hosting providers do their end of it)... apk
It still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of reliability and user-friendliness.
I agree. I tried signing up with them some time back, after buying a version of HalfLife. Apparently someone had broken the key scheme for that title, as mine was "already in use."
Their support basically accused me of pirating or giving out my key, despite my offer to ship (at my own expense) the original packaging to them for a new key.
My account is still banned for "abuse", I managed to "strong-arm" a return at the retail store so I wasn't out any money, just time & headache.
It's too bad, really. They appear to have some fun-looking games, but I refuse to use their services until they admit their fault & unban my account.
Usually steam alone works fine for people, DOWII has a fatal flaw in that it requires both steam and windows Live (which doesn't work on my uni's dorm network). However it sounds like most of your problems are with DOWII itself, which while a good game generally, it runs on a pretty finicky engine. Their decision to make the cutscenes at the start impossible to bypass via a button was stupid, I had a bug with the beta where the game didn't like my video drivers, and I ended up having to watch those opening cutscenes 10 times over until I finally found the launch option command line doobie to stop it.
Once you've set up steam the first time you can set it into offline mode (or if you don't have an internet connection). That's one of the main reasons I don't consider it to be that bad of DRM. I have no idea what took it so long though, unless the dvd was just mainly blank and instead it downloaded all of the data.
As for the desktop icon, there should have been an option when you installed, I haven't bought or installed the full DOWII game yet since windows Live won't work on my network, so I dunno about that.
Don't cross off relic just yet, they did make the Homeworld series as well as Company of Heroes, they did botch DOWII though...
Cost to value comparison
Cost 50, Value Fuckall
Resell value
Fuckall Squared
Get home install from CD, says it wants steam, install steam it installs itself to steam, and just like that I might as well have never bought the damn box in the first place.
Right. I hate you Steam.
Most large companies have their code in escrow. In the event they go under, terrorists take over, the pink unicorn rampages through their offices etc.
Hopefully this is something like what Valve means.
On a personal note I'm more a fan of ImpluseDriven from stardock. They have actually given me a refund on a game that crashed on startup, this is a first for me from any game company.
I enjoyed Homeworld and Homeworld II, and I can play them any time I want because I still have the CDs and the manuals.
I doubt I would be able to do that in 6.5 or 9.5 years (II, I) with Dawn of War II, because I strongly suspect you're right:
a) There is probably no game on the DVD I bought (and subsequently returned)
b) There will probably be no more "Valve/Steam"
c) There will probably be no more "Windows Live"
I just don't see why I should "buy" something and end up not "owning" anything. I can't lend or give it to a friend. I can't re-sell it. It's completely wasted.
If the game were $5.00 or under I would probably buy something off Steam. Until then, no thanks.
Oh, and Stardock/Impulse just got another $10 for the Sins of a Solar Empire expansion this weekend. I can back that up to DVD and it will work forever...
Steam prevents resale of games, effectively stopping the used market. I can't even give them away and their EULA prohibits transferring the entire account too. Years ago, I had made purchases on my Steam account since my son did not have a credit card. Now that he has left home he has his own Steam account yet I am unable to transfer those games to his account. I play single player games, and these are games I have no intention of playing such as Counterstrike, yet I am unable to transfer it. Instead he had to purchase it again. Maybe poor planning on my part, but it allows me transfer the extra Half Life 2 license I had after buying the Orange Box, but not any other purchases.
While stationed overseas, my son's previously activated and working Orange Box would not start in offline mode one day. What he ended up having to do to fix the problem was rename the clientregistry.blob file, connect to the Internet and let the file be recreated. After doing that offline play was once again available. The problem with that was that he did not have Internet access for months so until he finished his tour even the single player games were unvailable.
One of his shipmates had preordered F.E.A.R. 2, even paying the extra cost to have it shipped to a FPO. Upon receiving the game he found out that unlike the first F.E.A.R., this version required Steam and Internet activation and he did not have Internet access. To this day there is still nothing in the description on Amazon stating that requirement unless you read the user comments, and Gamestop just says Connectivity: Broadband without stating Steam and activation required.
If you have a dispute with Steam they can hold your entire account hostage and there isn't much you can do about it. Looking at some of the active threads in the Steam support forums I see one that stood out to me. Someone had purchased Left 4 Dead and had his purchase declined. He attempted it again and it went through. When he got his credit card statement he had been charged twice. He opened a support ticket and never got a resolution. When he had his credit card company do a chargeback his entire account was suspended with all of his purchases, not just the game in question.
I had also read of a problem with a gift, where there was a Paypal dispute resulting in a chargeback and the account was suspended. It appears that you don't even have to be the one that intiates the chargeback and your account can still be suspended.
Valve's anti cheating system will ban you for cheating. That's a good thing, but what if it is a false positive? Valve insists that they never make mistakes and that the bans are irreversible. There are several threads where people claim to have been banned without reason. I can't attest to the validity of their claims, but the attitude that our system is never wrong doesn't give me a warm feeling. It sure doesn't make me want to rush out and have hundreds of dollars tied up in their system.
I don't like to be forced into running a client just to play a game. Not only does it lead to increased load times, it also consumes system resources. I hate forced updates, even if I have no intention of playing online. If I want to watch a video for a M rated game why does it have to ask me every time to input my birthdate when they already have that information from my account?
Steam works well as a content delivery system, but being forced to give up your rights as consumer for a little convenience just does not sit well with me.
Off Topic: The link to your forum on the support tab of your website is borked.
I'v used steam alot, and still do (I wanted to get Left 4 Dead a few weeks back an no local store had it so I bought it from steam instead).
When Stardock launched their Impulse I was a little bit annoyed that I had to download another application just to update Galactic Civilizations 2. However, I am quickly becoming a fan of it. I pre-ordered Sins of a Solar Empire and was able to play the beta immediately. When the full version was released the Impulse client took care of everything for me. I recently bought the Sins of a Solar Empire expansion, Entrenchment, and the whole process was hassle free.
The best thing about Impulse is: /. will agree that this is the #1 reason steam is not as good as it should be.
1) No DRM. I think everyone here at
2) You dont have to launch it to play your games. How much time do you waste when trying to play Left 4 Dead while steam launches and decides that not only steam needs to update but 5 other games need to update and start to all by them self.
3) You dont have to update a game if you just want to play single player. I cant remember how many times I wanted to play Portal real quick and I had to wait for it to update before playing a SINGLE PLAYER game.
4) It automatically detects if you have a Impulse game installed. I picked up a copy of The Political Machine 2008 in BestBuy because I had some gift cards to blow. I installed it and played it for a while then forgot about it. It was not until I wanted to check my GalCiv 2 and SoaSE games for updates that I remembered I had Political Machine installed.
Currently Steam is more popular because everyone who plays HL2 or Portal has to use it. However, if a game is ever released on both Steam and Impulse I'll take the Impulse version any day.
http://memo.deviantart.com/ there is a little assist for anyone who is interested
How is it possibly insightful that if you lose games that you've paid for that it's okay because you've played them enough already? I don't understand this.
Pre-Steam versions of the original HL games don't need to be registered; you should be able install and play Blue Shift and Opposing Force without Steam. You just won't be able to update them beyond what patches were released prior to Steam being implemented.
Likewise, you should be able to install and play Team Fortress and Counter Strike, but since you can only connect to servers running the same version you are, it's kinda pointless, seeing as you won't be able to update beyond the pre-Steam patches.
My sig can beat up your sig.
I will never understand why someone would ever think that it's ok for a random company to both install unneccessary software on your computer and then require that you phone home and report to them every time you use a piece of software developed by another company. It's not that some of the features of Steam aren't useful - it's that many of them are absolutely not needed.
Example, once you install a game via Steam, and even once you activate it, why the hell does it have to phone home when you play it? Not needed for any legitimate purpose other than Valve spying on you. If you want to install a patch, fine, but that should be up to you, not enforced to a point where you are not even allowed to play a game without first patching it.
Yes, Steam isn't installing Secu-rom on your PC - but it is installing an invasive, internet-enabled piece of monitoring and access-control software over which you have no control whatsoever. Give me secu-rom any day.
Steam is an excellent advertisement for piracy, in my opinion.
Read Pynchon.
Your party is starving and Timmy has been bitten by a snake.Timmy has died at the age of 7. Leave Oregon trail, YES or NO.\
Frustrations will always be a part of the gaming environment. Reality isn't perfect either.
I do wonder about survival of the fittest computer program type methods of games that reinvent themselves.
So that argument from the anti-DRM boogie man doesn't seem to hold too much water with me. I mean, at least some secu-rom rootkit isn't being installed on my machine, right?
What makes you think that? Has Valve announced that it will restrict access for developers to use SecuROM? What about the copy that comes with Windows?
It comes from an understanding that nothing is forever, that there are some things that are completely out of our direct control, and more importantly, that the life of the game is not expected to last longer than Steam. In ten years we'll all be playing something else--it's OK.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Off Topic: The link to your forum on the support tab of your website is borked.
Thanks, but it's not a standard type of forum. It's tightly integrated with the GameRanger client, so it requires the client to be already installed.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
They compete with Stardock for both, actually. And you'll note as a consequence that no Valve game appears on Impulse, and no Stardock game appears on Steam.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Holy shit, thanks for the warning. No fucking wonder that people are moving to consoles in droves. And it's just amount of time before console owners have to "register" their disc on an account before being allowed to play it.
Hahaha we're just talking video games here, Plato, not the meaning of life. Possibly fortuitously, I was given mod points since last checking /. but I'd hate to kill your flowery philosophical dribbling because it's just so self-righteously, arrogantly brilliant.
I appreciate that you might simply enjoy the latest and greatest multiplayer-only game until the next new and shiny thing attracts your attention, but some gamers actually possess an attention span. Maybe it's a single player gamer thing, Steam actually sells those as well you know.
To suggest that --it's OK to theoretically lose games that people have paid for because in ten years time we'll all be playing something else is awesomely naive. It's like you're completely unaware that consoles existed before the PS2/Xbox, that projects like DOSBOX try to make it possible to play games as old as 15 years on modern hardware, and that sites like Retro Gamer magazine still have a solid userbase. That, just as people listen to music, watch movies, or read books for longer than a few months, some people actually play games for longer than a few months.
All these people ask you politely to get your head out of your ass and get the fuck off our lawn.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147437&cid=27056793 , that's where "The End of Days" admits to using multiple accounts to post here so he can "mod himself up" & create illusory supporters with that are registered accounts users to further "support himself" (& then to use AC posts on top of that as he has done here now & thru other threads this & last week)... for starters.
See here to others reading (this went to the mods here as well, and also on other websites where "The End of Days" has begun following me to as well):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1154933&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=27137671
Where "The End of Days" here was caught admitting first (in the 2nd URL) to having multiple registered accounts here (to mod himself up no doubt & to make it appear as if he has supporters of his posts, you know the type: Online losers basically that think they're "smart" until they get caught & have to admit it as he has)
Personally @ this point?
I am NO psychiatrist, but, I think this guy "The End of Days" is seriously "unhinged" mentally!
He is buying his own trouble is all I can say, especially in he undoubtedly doing so more on another website where he has resorted to attempting to impersonate ME there:
http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1235936964/81-
AND, where others there, who are legitimate registered users, are "shooting him down", as I have seen others here do all week long & longer based on his post history (which he tried to hide, but is finding it is nigh impossible to do with a registered account, which makes him TRACKABLE as all get out, & it is the WHY of why I don't do a registered account here, so nutjobs like he cannot track me all to high hell here easily)
TO THE SLASHDOT MODERATORS/ADMINS/OWNERS:
Going to be submitting this your way, as I have to the folks @ 4chan.org, & also to their hosting provider, to nail this seriously brain-damaged idiot hopefully, AND, to hopefully teach he a lesson he really does apparently NEED to have taught he.
Unfortunate, but, 'bad children need discipline' I suppose for lack of a better expression.
(He is probably flipping IP's, not a big trick as we all know, or using anonymous proxies or TOR onion routers, but I think his 'registered account' may help you in ridding your forums of a SERIOUS pest)
APK
P.S.=> All the result of my tracking him here after he has harassed myself here on this site starting here ->
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1143349&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=27012231
Where, there in a post I made that's been modded up as +2 interesting & also over @ Microsoft where myself & a few others are confronting Microsoft on it here ->
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/25/feedback-and-engineering-windows-7.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage
Where MS are ASKING people for improvements they'd like to see in Windows 7, as well as on WHAT technical grounds (valid ones)... apk
On the back it has statements saying that both GFWL and Steam are required, as well as logos on the front of the box. As with what another poster said: Steam can be run in offline mode once it's been installed and activated. And the reason you didn't see an icon is because it doesn't install one to the desktop when it downloads through Steam(at least I've never seen one) because you have to run the game through Steam
;)
I can't say why it took so long to install Steam unless it needed a really large update to run and it downloaded that as well. Steam has always installed extremely fast for me. It seems you're not the only one with the issue(really long install times), many other people have the same problem. Here's a FAQ from Valve on how to install from the DVD:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1783-EYZN-9672
And another link in case you have problems:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=806897
Those are more for people who are encountering the problems and not someone who has already returned it
You can create an offline only GFWL account, which doesn't require any of your information. It's not very obvious that you can do this, but you can.
I do agree with you though, the Stardock/Impulse approach is much better and I've been very please with them. I've never downloaded anything from them, just physical copies. I really like that you don't need to activate unless you plan on using the online component. I think other companies should move toward this since I'm tired of the draconian DRM associated with many games. I do my research to ensure this DRM isn't present in any game I'm thinking of purchasing, I personally will not allow them my money to further what I feel is customer abuse.
I like Steam and feel it's a great service. It does have it's flaws however(the main one having to be online). But Steam is way better than the alternatives(SecuROM). Though I do feel they should take the route of Stardock/Impulse and allow single player/offline play without being online.
Saying that "GFWL" and "Steam" are required don't really do justice to what that actually means. Furthermore, one only learns what it actually means after attempting to run the software, which then makes it nearly impossible to return the software.
The bottom line is this: it does not clearly state that you need to download the game from the Internet (although it does say "Internet Connection Required," which I thought meant for multiplayer), which seems to be what other people think happens, and that it is not included on the DVD.
The bottom line is that the software is not what one expects when one buys a game. I've been buying pre-packaged games since the days of Wizardry and Mystery House (for the Apple ][), and this new way of "buying games" is a perversion of that process and violates all expectations.
PS3 games are not much better anymore. I purchased HAWX (which surprisingly is an amazingly terrible game and bears absolutely no resemblance to any real flight dynamics in any plane I've flown and once again, proves that games should be returnable for ordinary consumer protection laws) and before I could play it I had to wait literally 90 minutes. First, it forced the PS3 to update it's system software. Then, it forced the game to update its software. Then, it forced me to copy the game from the DVD to the internal hard drive. And then, after 10 minutes of playing this useless piece of junk, I had to delete it all. Really? (This was the first PS3 game I bought purely for myself as opposed to my son, and it will be the last. What crap.)
I'm "this close" to junking computer games and console games entirely at this point. The current system is just plain broken. The only ones which seem to work the way you'd expect are Impulse games and MMOs, and the latter have mostly become too expensive for their entertainment value to me as a long-time gamer and parent.
Another example: I found this interesting flight simulator DCS Black Shark. It also uses Internet activation using a highly disregarded system whose name I forget after spending an hour researching it last night. Once again, a vendor has lost my $50. Buying the boxed version is $36 (at Amazon), but this also requires online activation. The number of activations is limited to 8, and you can also deactivate 10 times, but after that the vendor's FAQ basically says "you're screwed because that's more than enough for anyone." Right, and 640k too.
I apologize that I sound bitter: I am bitter. It is amazingly disappointing to me that I cannot participate in gaming anymore due to the greed and/or fears and/or poor design decisions of the gaming companies. That's OK, Bridge (and Go and Shogi etc.) is a deeper and more interesting game than almost all computer games anyway, and that's hard to restrict, and I still haven't read all Dan Simmons's books, and so forth.