Sectorgame

Yes, I mean Steam(ing pile of crap).

The idea itself is okay.

"Let's provide a way for out users to obtain patches and keep up with whats going on with their favorite game!"

the subtext that they don't talk about in interviews or is talked about in general is not.

"While we're at it, let's make sure that it allows us to control them in such a way that they can't play the game unless we know about it. Yes, they paid $50 for a product that didn't come with any sort of actual media or manuals or anything physical, but we don't care about that. We're so possessive of our stuff that we're going to make sure that you can't mod it, cheat at it(SP, I don't condone MP cheating) or otherwise use our product in anyway other than what we intended it to be used for without us knowing about it."

Understand, I don't mind that they want to protect their IP. In fact I want them to protect it. I draw the line however at treating people like criminals when their not and behaving in a vaguely criminal way in the way that you deal with them.

Steam is draconian and I will never purchase a product that requires me to use it.

Copy protection is good and fine, but there are certain reasonable limits that steam has crossed.

Copyrights have been abolished in Raatoria...

Did I mention the way the Media are fawning over the damn thing like it's the bloody Second Coming of Christ? Every article and TV review of HL2 only mentions Steam breifly(which is a farce) and even then it's in a very, one might say overtly, positive light.

Steam = worse than *

Would this be a good place to mention that I just installed Steam and it's running fine (albeit for HL).

EDIT: Whoops, put a 2 in there by accident, sorry...

go die

I don't like the idea of buying something, getting home and running the installer, and find out that I have to sit and wait for 2 hours while Steam decrypts the files and does God only knows what else. And then it sits, resident, in 40MB of my computer memory sending out who knows what to Valve while I'm playing what is supposed to be a Single Player game with no Internet connection required. Only one other application type does the same thing, Spyware.

Steam is the absolute worse way they could have gone for user identification. They are treating their customers like criminals and I haven't seen the customer side reported anywhere yet. The media is fawning over them like they are the Holy Mother resurected.

I don't like, no matter how good the game is, nothing deserves the kind of preferential treatment HL2 and by extention Steam is getting from the media. Understand, HL2 looks great and I'm sure it's fine for it's part. My problem lies with Steam and the really shady behavior that has associated itself with it and the way Valve deals with those that Steam has decided aren't valid users.

I don't want a whole lot, just for consumers to know that Steam isn't a bed of roses and many legit HL2 owners have not only been screwed out of their $50-100 USD that they spent on HL2, but they're being blackmailed an additional $10 to make the problem go away. There's a name for that...it's larceny, in this case Grand Larceny, and it has a hefty jail term attached to it.

The problem with Steam is that it's not very good in implementation. Security-wise, the validation process is sensible enough; it's just that it pisses all over the customers that causes the problem.... for expensive commercial software (i.e. stuff that costs hundreds or thousands) it makes sense, for games it's obtrusive and inefficient.

And, of course, it's a massive security risk; it already scans your drives to find other Valve games, who's to know what else it can look for? Especially when it auto-updates without permission from the user. If someone manages to hack Steam - or just somehow hijack and spoof updates - you'd be looking at a virtual digital armageddon.

(Plus it's horribly slow to load).

Incidentally, many of the Internet reviews of Half Life 2 I've read touched on the horrors of Steam; it seems to be the printed media that don't care or fawn over it. Possibly not surprising giver the 'driv3rgate' fiasco.

I'm waiting for the first Steam virus. Considering how hated the system is I'm sure there are people looking for exploits.

I've not been able to uninstall it since i tried to play CS online... About 5 months now, and it WILL NOT go away...

i had to manually go in and delete the files

Only after we warned you though

I can't any more... The steam folder is gone, the uninstaller is gone, and still, it updates itself, and starts itself with windows... Even AFTER I killed CS, HL, BS, Op4, and TF, which were all ruiiing through it...

Try ad-aware........ surely someone's flagged it as malware by now?

Already tried

Seriously, take them to court. A piece of software that doesn't completely remove itself on demand definitely qualifies as malware. At least in a perfect world, this would be illegal.

They've probably got a line buried in the EULA if they're pulling something like that, Top Gun.

Hippo, you can keep it from running with Windows. There's an option in the preferences/settings/whatever. Also, make sure that you got the all directories. It may not have put everything where you thought it did, or you could have multiple installs (possible but unlikely).