Any update on Steam?

[divideoverflow]

So just lay down and accept it? Sorry, but if I buy I game, I expect to be able to play it for as long as I have it, not at the whim of some company who may or may not think I'm a criminal, or at the whim of some server's up-time (this carries over to normal online games with company-controlled servers as well.. much prefer single player games, or at least the ability to host your own server).

I never said to accept it, or to lie down. I hate it just as much as you do, but like I said. . it's been here for decades, isn't going away, and even with copy protection new games are shifting to consoles where using even legitimately copied games is more of a hassle.

Steam is a great idea, botched up horribly. If it didn't require itself to be running to play any of its games (could you imagine having to have portage running and active to play a game on Gentoo?), and didn't assume guilt-over-innocense, my problems with it would be vastly diminished.

I can't agree with it being botched horribly as I have had almost no issues with it. I've actually had more issues with Source games themselves than Steam. As for Steam running in the background, I am not aware of it doing much else but sitting there. I know that Bram Cohen joined Valve, and I did find a reference to Steam using something similar to Bittorrent for voice chat and downloads, but I have not seen any instance where I have suffered from bandwidth saturation from Steam. When poking around though, I did find that there are some hidden P2P settings in Steam. a screenshot of which is here:



I also do not like how tightly the games are controlled, and I do see references to other people not being able to play because of Steam not being able to connect. I wasn't aware of it because I've never encountered the problem. . and you're right, thats complete bull.

As mentioned, not everywhere in the world is so "connected". I didn't get away from 33.6kbps dial-up (on crappy phone-lines that liked dropping calls) until after 2001 when I moved. Even if we could, we simply didn't have the money to afford the cost of broadband. And personally, I'd love to live in an area with few residents (an thus having lower chances of "high-speed" connections). I'd still like some connection, but it doesn't need to be OMGFAST Cable/FiOS.

I personally would love to move to Alaska with all the snow and mountains. . or to the Midwest, where there are no trees or buildings blocking your view of the horizon. The biggest stopper for me however would be broadband. I think that is true of everyone here. There is nothing that can easily be done about this however, and it does not affect the vast majority of the world population. Besides, most of the games that are on Steam have had disc distribution.