Captain Lemmiwinks wrote:you also hear of 1 persons good experience and assume the same will happen to you.
then you install it and find it has no use other than to >
use memory,
take space,
Every program you install on your PC does this. It's kind of a given.
poke its nose into your system,
You can opt out of the hardware and software survey.
spam you with ads,
You can turn off game ad pop-ups
turn a gameplay experience into a nightmare
By doing what exactly?
draining a monthly bandwidth allowance,
It's an online service. It connects to the internet if you're online and has features which use the internet.
install bad patchs without consent,
Developers release bad patches. And I'm not a fan of the auto install thing. However, Steam has a beta patch facility which I wish more developers would use. It allows testing of new patches for those who want to opt in and leaves the last patch version until the beta patch has been officially approved. Several developers are using this method.
unless of course you know something steam actually does that benefits the gamer.
Well lets see. Community groups. Built-in screenshot facility. Cloud storage for saved games. Friend lists and recommendations. Organization of your games into categories. Ability to install your game on any system without discs. Awesome sales. Integrated voice chat and game servers for supported games. When you buy one game you own it on all platforms(PC, Mac and Linux) without having to purchase a separate copy for each.
we used to just buy a game,install it and play
I did that just today. Sacred 2 Gold. Bought it, downloaded it. Hit play, it installed and immediately launched the game.
with steam its just hoops and problems.
That's simply not universally true.
the rallying cry these days if a game crashes is to "get steam to check game files"
Actually, a lot of the time that has to do with developers pushing bad updates out.
game files never used to corrupt so badly that they needed re-installing every other day.
Mine certainly don't need resinstalling every other day...or at all really.
Interesting story. Year before last I swore that STeam was corrupting my game files. Specifically, Serious Sam 3 would need re-verifying every few days. Other games were acting wonky and I assumed that because Steam was involved with each of them that it must be corrupted itself.
Turned out I had a faulty motherboard. I changed it, kept that exact same OS install, did not reinstall a thing except the new drivers for my new board and am still running that same Steam install and programs from then. No Steam-related crashes since. Lots of people don't realize that even a small hardware fault can cause extremely odd issues. My system was running everything else fine. Only in the very latter stages did I start to see an effect on other programs and Windows.
I dont hate steam,its just a company trying to screw...i mean make money.
problem is its trying to make money while providing nothing in return but problems.
In your opinion. I quite like a number of its features.
the only people to benefit are the developers,who seem to think nothing of passing us on to a vampiric company while at the same time trying to curry loyalty.
I think PC gaming as a whole has benefitted from Steam. Many games and developers would not be around today without it. It's got faults here and there, but it is nowehere near as catastrophic a deal as some people try to make it out.
"game crashed ?,steams fault"
"tech support ?..go ask steam"
When is a game crashing automatically Steam's fault? Because the game was running on Steam at the time? I've seen very few cases of games crashing and being the fault of Steam itself.
steams tech support = re-download the game files over and over and over again.
Steam tech support isn't tech support for the game itself. It's tech support for Steam. Most of the time you should probably be dealing with the developers for support if you're crashing.
if theres indeed nothing spurious about developers deals with steam,why wont they tell us why they have funnelled gamers into draculas lair ?
How many more times must they say it? Or are they not saying what you want them to say? You want them to say it is a huge conspiracy to oppress the gaming public?
It really comes down using a platform that makes it easier for them to release and support their games without having to maintain multiple versions of them. Steam also offers a lot of other benefits to developers.
A developer doesn't have to take every single action based on a direct benefit to the gamer. They have a business to run.
If you want a different perspective, stand on your head.