I Have Seen The Future, And it is Annoying

[teh_gunslinger]

And I treat Steam/Impulse/GFWL as malware, because they are.

Others have commented on Steam so I'll say a bit about Impulse. It's actually not so bad. You DL the game and install it, and that's it. You don't need Impulse running to play. So that's a pretty lenient DRM. And it should be mentioned that Stardocks own games are DRM free, but you need a legit copy to get updates.
In short, Impulse is okay, as far as I see it.

GFWL on the other hand needs to die.

 

[Shanecooper]

Another problem with digital distribution. About the only time I leave the house is to get food of buy games, and, what with pinky pizza home delivery's, The only time I get any real social interaction with physical beings, is when I go to get the new game out. Now, with digital distribution, I never need to look another human being in the eye ever again.

 

[Joe Deadman]

It also opens straight on the store page (which seems to run on Internet Explorer, of all things and takes forever to load) instead of on the "my games" screen, which is something that even PSN and Xbox Live don't have the balls to do. You want to play a game? Here, check these nice offers first.

File -> interface -> Favourite window.
With that out of the way yeah steams alright they actually give the user handy tools in exchange but it just gets really silly when you've got multiple pieces of DRM running for the sake of one game and I don't think it helps that GFWL is so flashy and doesn't seem to like responding to mouse clicks. My poor computer's already bogged down enough tyvm.

 

[Chipperz]

I don't know why people are defending Steam, it's a pile of crap that keeps randomly disconnecting and forcing itself to the front of my work to tell me that I can't log in to it while I don't want to play games.

Hell, CurseClient is less invasive and has more point than fucking Steam...

 

[shial]

I've never had any problems with Steam crashing or lagging, you can play games when not connected to the Internet, and the automatic updates are useful.

Yeah, only today my connection was down for an hour, which is roughly how long it took Steam to realize it wouldn't actually be able to auto-update and even offer me the option to switch to offline mode.

Seriously, Steam works EXACTLY like any other online platform. Has anybody else purchased Dawn of War II from Steam? It runs Games for Windows LIVE and Steam at the same time, without even bothering to prioritize one over the other. It's a big, fat mess, and it's not less of Valve's fault for not letting the game just ignore steam after you've paid for it and downloaded it as it is Microsoft's fault for... well, for Games for Windows.

Steam is as much of a blight in your tray as any other delivery system and, after authorising your game online, it should shut down. But it doesn't. So it's evil.

It also opens straight on the store page (which seems to run on Internet Explorer, of all things and takes forever to load) instead of on the "my games" screen, which is something that even PSN and Xbox Live don't have the balls to do. You want to play a game? Here, check these nice offers first.

Steam doesn't run GFWL, SecureROM or anything else, it downloads the game and you launch it, its the game itself that launches everything else and is the guilty party here. Don't confuse one for the other. Steam is just delivering the game as it was given to them.

You do realize in the options there is a drop down where you can pick which screen opens up first? Guessing not from your anger over seeing the store page.

My personal experiance is steam is rock solid. I have a collection of games on Steam that is now at 301 titles. and when my internet connection went down I had ZERO issues playing a few games offline. Your milage may vary but don't take individual experiences and try to claim them as a general consensus, thats a logical fallacy called Anecdotal evidence fallacy

 

[literallyanythingelse]

I find steam to be fine as long as you have a decent internet connection, but GFWL is a massive piece of shit that adds at least 5 mins onto any load time in DOW2. I hate it.

 

[Jandau]

I crack any game that does this. If there's more than one program required to run the game, I go online and get a crack/workaround for this.

GFWL is the least annoying one since you can usually use it in offline mode. Steam is a resource-hogging pain, Impulse is useless. SecuROM is intolerable and is usually the first thing I remove in any game I own.

 

[Urthman]

You aren't forced to connect to the internet to play it, it doesn't sound like you've actually used Steam much if at all. You're forced to be connected to the internet to buy or download a game because, you know, that's how digital distribution works, you need an internet connection.

You're the one who seems to be lacking in experience. You have to be online to get permission from Steam to go offline. If you forget to go offline at the end of a gaming session and you lose your internet connection, you're screwed. If your internet connection goes down while you're in online mode, you're screwed.

And surely if you've used Steam much you've had the annoying problem of installing a game and then when you go to play it for the first time you get the "Servers are too busy. Try again later" message. That really sucks.

Really Steam is one of the most obtrusive DRM methods available for PC, because every single time you want to run the game you either have to be logged in to Steam and have it check your permission, or you have to have gotten permission previously to be in offline mode.

And of course there's also the issue that if you lose your account for some reason, you lose access to all the games you bought. It's really more like a rental service than it is actually buying the games and owning them. I only use it for Valve games and when it's offering a game so cheap (<5$) that I basically wouldn't mind that much if I lost access to the game.

 

[Rolling Thunder]

Death to DRM?

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Nope, quite the reverse. As you're trying to fit all the possible PC architectures into one state, you're using apps, as Shamus said, to force that transition.

Yes, but doesn't that fall to the manufacturer rather than the consumer?

 

[DTWolfwood]

omg thanks for this rant i totally totally agree 1000% fuck i bought Wings of Prey on steam wanting a modern version of the wwii combat flight sim and now im regreting it cause it requires steam and yuplay! >.< Not to mention they only gave me 3 copies of the game... im fucking renting Wings of Prey for $60. then wen i wanted Demigod i needed to install Stardocks gay store. dammit to hell with all of these

FUCK YOU TO HELL SecuROM and any of these stupid as hell DRM methods. You dont own your games anymore you just rent them!

p.s. sadly it looks like the car industry is doing this too! Namely just Ferrari and their Ferrari FXX [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_FXX] quote "Customers pay $2.5 million, but are only allowed to drive the car on special track days which are approved by Ferrari." can someone explain to me how this makes sense?

 

[Souplex]

Seems like all of these problems stem from PC gaming and digital distribution. The easiest way to solve these problems is to ignore them for Hard copies and consoles.

 

[Fearzone]

I'm seeing a lot of generalization in this thread along the lines of: "I use Steam, all digital distribution sucks."

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Nope, quite the reverse. As you're trying to fit all the possible PC architectures into one state, you're using apps, as Shamus said, to force that transition.

Yes, but doesn't that fall to the manufacturer rather than the consumer?

Imagine if all gas stations were converted to diesel, and the only way to get your car to run was to have a loud, heavy convertor fixed. And all the big stations only did diesel.

Wouldn't you be miffed?

 

[Dhatz]

you stole my words. there was already an affair that one company, when asked to release DRM-less exe (because there were problems), gave out the cracked exe.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Fuck PC gaming, I'll stick to PS3. Batman, Bioshock - no problems plus exclusive content for both.

Although I must admit I sometimes buy games on Steam, but only those which are PC exclusives and require only Steam to run.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

We kinda have everyone with their own distro system now and it will get worse until those that can do it better or underhandliy will weed out the rest.

But that's not as annoying as 90% of released projects being shtty because they are carting to the brain dead masses as much as they can. Screw core demographics these shtty games sell more to a wider audience who cares if its forgotten in a week!