I to dislike Steam. This might be because the only Steam games I own I purchased retail, and I have had little interest in making use of Steam's other features. Thus, Steam has proved nothing more than a nuisance, and additional program I have to fuss around with to get the games I purchased to work properly. These are the grievances I have against Steam.
1.)It takes control away from the end user - I like to run my computer I my own terms. I want to decide where my programs are installed, what features they are installed if, if they are patched(and then I liked to patch from downloaded .zip and .exe stored on my hard disk), how it runs, etc. and I definitely don't want to log into the publisher's server to verify if I am using their product properly. Steam decides were the program will be installed, and must be active in the background for the program to run. And although their are workarounds, initially its going to try to log onto the internet and patch everything whenever I try to run my Steam games.
2.)You can only install games to one drive - Maybe this isn't true, but I never found a work around for this problem. I have multiple hard drives and hard drive partitions. Should the partition Steam was installed on be full, I can't install Steam programs to another hard drive with empty space. I either need to uninstall Steam, along with every Steam program currently installed, and then reinstall everything to a different drive, or uninstall some other programs sharing the partition with Steam, and reintall them if I want to use them. This is a unnecessary annoyance.
3.)Installing from a DVD is faster and more reliable that the internet - Not much to say here, other than not all internet connections are fast, and downloads can be easily interrupted or timed out.
4.)It takes time to log onto Steam and Install Updates - I have shared other users frustrations as Steam has occasionally taken considerable time to authenticate and load. The client then has to patch. If the program hasn't been used in a while, this takes time. The all loaded Steam programs will patch, unless this has been disabled. Probably not a deal breaker, but again an annoyance.
5.)Steam Breaks - This is true with virtually all software. Unlike Consoles, there are a virtually endless variety of PCs. PCs have an endless number hardware configurations, using different motherboards, processors, memory, hard disk, video cards, ethernet adapters, which are developed by hundreds of independent manufacturers. Then their are numerous operating systems that can be installed on the PC, along with dozens of different drivers of varying origin and version for the hardware components. On top of that you will have background services such and virus scanners that influence how the PC will act with other programs. So while some may absolutely no problems with the service, expect a lot of people to devote considerable time to corrected Steam specific technical issues, and yet others to have a nightmarish time getting the program to work. I have had all sorts of technical problems with Steam, although I was eventually able to fix it by uninstalling, cleaning the registry, reinstalling and then patching. Still, it took several hours to troubleshoot(including trying to get Steam to patch to only watch the installer hang), hours which I could be devoted to playing a game, or ranting about stuff on internet forums.
6.)It serves little or no benefit when only used to install retail software - This is were the hate comes down to. The above problems may be tolerable when you are using other features, but if all you wanted to do was play a game you just purchased in a store, its just this vestigial that serves no other purpose than get in the way of playing a game. As such, it will be appreciated about is much as an intentionally design bug to players who using it only for its DRM functions(or rather, who are FORCED to use it for its DRM functions).
7.)Its not exactly advertised on retail boxes - This compounds the other problems. The "needs Steam to play" requirement will be located in the fine print in the corner of the box, so buyer beware. Individuals purchasing a retail copy hoping to just pop and DVD in the drive and install will be unpleasantly surprised when it instead tries to install Steam if they glossed over the system requirements. Would of been nice of valve to make this little fact a bit more prominent on the box.
That is enough ranting for today.
