Steam is some kind of gaming and entertaining platform. It lets you download and play games and store game saves and data online. And it’s complete shit.
I bought a PC version of Skyrim a few weeks ago, to go with my shiny new ASUS G75V gaming laptop. Played for hours and days on end when I was sick last week, it was great. Just this Steam crap kept annoying me. First, you can’t register or activate the game without registering with Steam online. I did not expect this with a normal game DVD bought in a run of the mill gaming store, and it wasn’t pointed out to me before purchase(although it says so in the fineprint on the DVD cover, to be fair). Now everytime I want to start the game Steam is started first, and immediately demands an internet connection, so that I may join their awesome gaming community. So I switch the laptop to flight mode. Now Steam pops up another message, and in a slightly indignant tone informs me that I am now working offline. For which I’m grateful. Since I really only booted up the laptop to get frequent message popups from some gaming malware anyway.
So today, afer having reached level 28 in Skyrim and being in love with my female heroine, her companion Lydia and their achievements, after leveling 100 in enchanting, alchemy and smithing, I finally got upset enough with Steam to uninstall it. Little did I know.
Because the shit app took all my game saves with it. Without warning. Like, no warning whatsoever. When I googled this after the initial shock, I realised that I’m not the first one to experience this, the internet is full of people finding this out the hard way.
Listen up, Bethesda game developing company! Why do you allow malware like Steam to be locking your game DVDs? You produce excellent games, but the experience is severely damaged by all the shit that comes with Steam. You know, like unexpectedly losing a month’s worth of game saves.
I f’in HATE Steam… My first awful encounter with it was when I bought a copy of Half Life 2. At the time I didn’t have internets, so was royally pissed off to find I had to connect to Steam to activate it. I eventually logged on at a mates place, but after way too many hassles, ended up playing a cracked version – just so I could play a game I paid real cash money for without the agro.
And don’t get me started on Total War updates… Imagine being locked out of a game you just wanted to sit down for a couple of hours to play while it downloads a massive several Gig update you can’t work around.
Pain in the arse!
I empathize with the loss of your game saves. That sucks. You should have received ample warning. I can’t defend Steam from that. That was wrong.
But if I were to defend Steam, I would do so on the grounds that it is a /very/ consumer friendly DRM tool. Their annual game sales are a gamers Nirvana. They provide a kind of Facebook for avid gamers. They automatically keep all of your gaming software (and mods for Skyrim and several other games) up to date in the background. They provide an easy to use mod manager. And there are many other pleasant features, like a screenshot manager and free online screenshot storage.
I too was skeptical of the usefulness of Steam. But after three years of use, I’ve come to love the Steam, despite it’s occasional pitfalls.
Being sceptical of Steam is sooo 2004
(Perhaps I’m suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but I get annoyed when a game isn’t Steam-friendly. My biggest annoyance is the same annoyance I have with the games-industry – region-pricing.)
Being sceptical of Steam is not the point. Hating them from keeping me from playing is. I have nothing but trouble keeping my configurations “right” to allow me to play the Civ 5 game I bought.
It’s been over a year since something went wrong, somewhere, in my setup. I’d given up for a while but really wanted to play, so I just spent several hours with no success scanning online forum, reading the (worthless) Steam support site, and trying to get it working with my iMac and Airport Extreme router. Steam *loves* pointing the finger at others, but has *no interest* in helping customers get access.
That’s why I think Steam is evil. I would never buy another game that’s blocked by them, because I couldn’t expect to ever be able to play it.
Steam: if you’re listening, and you care (which I really doubt) – you need to improve your support resource 1000% at least, and get things updated to not more than a few years old.
Steam sucks big-time.
I was given Civ5 as a birthday gift by a friend, and the only way to play it was to install that crap. So, to play a boxed game, I have to download and run this bloated piece of shit, and as noted above, put up with its updating every now and then.
No, I don’t want to chat with other gamers.
No, I don’t want to share my “achievements”
No, I don’t want fucking advertising spamming me.
(Bah!)