Nickname said:
Valve makes some of the best, most stable games for the PC. They are tested pretty *edited* hard beforehand. But they cannot come up with every possible exploit before shipment and when they do find them, they can patch them instantly, unlike most developers.
I don’t hate Steam because of their title release quality, almost all companies suck at this. I hate Steam because of the way they force out updates without testing them. I couldn’t play CSS for 6 months after an update 2 years ago because Steam.exe maxed out my processor and crashed whenever I turned any game on. Updated drivers, reinstalled from the CDs, hell I even reinstalled Windows. I know of about a dozen others that were in TAG at the time that had the same problem. Steam released an update that fixed “a few quirks” and magically the Omega drivers started working (the regular drivers still didn’t after the update). You have to admit that no matter how fast they are to fix it, Valve has a horrible reputation for breaking HL games with updates. Microsoft has yet to break one of their games with an update.
I also hate Steam with a fiery passion because I hate ALL programs that “let me use” the games I’ve already bought. If I buy a game I expect to be able to use it whenever I want. You yourself saw me get a “this game is not available at this time, please try again later” message at the mini-LAN last Friday. Why would a game I bought, that isn’t being updated or used in any way, be unavailable to me? Remember a few months back when everyone got the “you don’t own this game” message in TF2? Also, check the hard drive IO reads and writes for Steam.exe. You’ll find that within the first 5 minutes it has over 1 million reads AND writes, that’s some serious HD usage and is why I don’t idle on Steam.
You may hate Windows Live but when was the last time it said you didn’t own the game you were trying to play or that the game was unavailabe to be played? Hell at least you can play the Windows Live based games offline, most of the time I can’t play any of my Steam games offline because “offline mode is unavailable”.
Steam isn’t the force behind PC gaming. It’s a help but there are many others doing just fine in the PC market, proven by the sheer number of good games that either aren’t on Steam or have non-Steam based versions.
I will agree that Steam isn’t going under anytime soon but when it does it’s going to suck not “owning” the games that I’ve bought. If the Linksys router that runs the internet ever dies we’ll all be screwed out of all “our” games.