Save that it eats up a significant chunk of memory (40+Mb!?! What sort of bloatware is that?), then eats up processor cycles I could be using to improve the games performance.

I've never had any personal problems with Steam. That said, I don't want it forced on me either.

DRM does one thing, and one thing only: inconvenience legal purchasers. It does nothing to stop pirates, re-sellers, lenders, rental stores or whatever other boogeymen publishers worry about.

Thats not the much tbh, just close the gui and it uses 10 mb's in the background. Considering most have 2-4 gigs of ram, is 10 mb's really gonna do a thing? Not.

This. All the arguments I've seen against steam are either patently false (It's hard to mod steam games!) or leave me scratching my head (steam is inconvenient!) I even know a few people irl who hate steam just because it's so popular. It's ridiculous. I've seen the same arguments for not using OBSE, a mod which only has benefits.


If it ends up requiring steam, I'll be fine with it. I'd have gotten it through steam anyway. If it doesn't, I'd be pretty surprised. That sort of distribution is the future, and although many people fear change, or prefer a physical copy (which you can still have,) it isn't going anywhere. It's the only form of DRM that I've seen that's actually effective at all, it isn't intrusive, I can't see how it's inconvenient since I simply open and run the game as normal.

I don't get the steam hate.

Well said sir! People should read this before posting XD

wow! Complaining about the modest amount of memory the Steam client uses in the era of 2GB+ machines, and anti-virus software eating hundreds of megabytes.

Seriously? Seriously?

It's 50 megabytes, for crying out loud! It isn't 1995 anymore, guys. Go spend $15-$30 and buy yourselves another gigabyte of RAM.

And I'll likely be buying Skyrim at retail, only for the Collector's Edition stuff.

Moved from the other thread as requested by the moderators:

To answer you assertion that it is not steams fault:

It is steams fault for forcing the update, if they did not (If I could install from my retail disk and not update the files as is required after the first install by steam) I would be playing right now and not getting more and more angry about this.

Several people have posted thier wonder as to why people like myself do not like steam, but when I give MY answer for MY feelings you want to just dismiss it as moot.

You like it because it works for you, I do not because it does not work for me. Why cant we just agree to disagree on this?

I will make you a deal, I will not Post again on this if you do not OK?

Yeah, for forcing the update, I agree. But you wouldn't even care if the update was actually working. At the core of the issue is Obsidian's coding, not Steam.

I happen to dislike Steamworks DRM as a matter of principle and you can't argue with that. I will tolerate it for TES and TES alone and no amount of spiel will change my mind. If any other games enforce it then they don't get purchased. No whining, no arguing the services merits just a simple wallet based boycott of Valve.

The fact of the matter is, it's using 100mb to do NOTHING. That's what's making people mad. If it actually had a tangible benefit for me in some way, maybe I wouldn't mind. As is, where's the plus? The (shudder) Valve "community", a place so vile and horrible that even [censored] members would rather not participate? Forced patching so I can't run an older copy of the game? I fail to see any positives, only negatives, and that's the entire point here.

I skipped NV altogether because of this requirement.

I built and programmed my first computer (a ZX80) in 1980, spent a decade as a bespoke DB programmer, moved over to mobile phone software before eventually leaving for pastures new. Back in my day programming tight efficient code was an art. I know precisely how much code can be squeezed in 1, 128 or 512k and the vast amount of data that can be packed in a single Mb. So I absolutely resent having to run software which is bloated out of all reason. Seriously, a 50+Mb application clocking away in the background just so that I can run my game? When I'm offline!?! It is completely unnecessary. Its like filling up the boot of your car with bricks and then driving with the handbrake on. Yes the car still drives and I might even still reach 80mph, but it could be travelling a heck of a lot better.

You might think 50Mb is a drip in the ocean. But you've got all that other bloatware running in the background too. Task Manager, Explorer, plugged in HDDs, graphics card drivers, and yes those anti virus suites too. On a reasonably clean system you might be lugging along 1.2 gigs of mostly extraneous stuff, another 50-100 Mb is a significant straw to add to that camel's back.

And all of it is consuming processing cycles, reducing the processor slice you can allocate to running Skyrim at top whack, with every bell and whistle toggled on. When I play oblivion with all the extra mods I unplug from the net, strip my system to the bone and even kill off all the antivirus stuff. You can laugh at me for being a dinosaur, but to me, having an unnecessary application tying up part of my system resources is bad.

Exactly the problem. If programmers still wrote efficient code we wouldn't even need these systems with gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM. It was a negative feedback loop that brought us here in the first place.

• Systems get more RAM
  
• Programmers can write lazy due to more RAM
  
• systems need more RAM because of bad programming
  
• More RAM = programmers don't need to be efficient

I'm working on a land mass mod with a lot of custom meshes and textures. I'm also helping out with another large mod that has a lot of custom meshes and textures. Having separate installs helps me keep everything straight - as well as know what is available in the base install. Yes, I use a modding tool that extracts the correct file set, but it's still easier to work within multiple installs.

I happen to like the Valve community features, for one. And let's be reasonable. Steam isn't using 100MB. It's using maybe 40MB-50MB (on my system, while the GUI is up). And, again, patching is NOT forced. You can turn it off, if you like. I've described how to do that multiple times. Hell, you can even run it in offline mode if you choose to do so - that usually drops the RAM usage down to 10MB-20MB.

Oblivion can't even use more than 2 gigabytes worth of RAM, for one. It can't even utilize multi-core processing properly. How about you complain about the game not utilizing your system to the maximum potential before you go on about a program that maybe takes away less than 2% of your RAM (assuming 2 gigabytes) and a really small fraction of your CPU's total power.

Maybe Skyrim will be a 64bit application - and maybe it will be a highly efficient program that will utilize your computer to such an extent that that 50MB-100MB of lost RAM really actually maybe gives you 5 more FPS. But this is Bethesda we're talking about - I love their games, but they certainly haven't been the most well-optimized bits of code out there in the past (possibly due to using middle-ware like Gamebryo). How about you petition Bethesda to utilize every last drop of system resources before you go on about Steam?

Yeah, totally true. Why don't we all just write in Assembler and call it a day? Geez...

It's funny to see comments about how someones internet goes down all the time. If you're having that much of a problem, switch internet providers, cause it's obvious they're not serving you well. Assuming that you've tried tech support, and/or you actually have a problem. Instead, if you don't like Steam based on the principle of having to be connected to the internet, what not just say it?? :rolleyes:

My internet is up more than 99.9% of the time. I won't lie. I don't buy new UBI titles simply due to THEIR particular DRM. However, I'm perfectly fine with Steam. There is an offline mode if I so desire.

I like the way Bethesda did it with F:NV, and I'm hoping to see the same thing with Skyrim.

Bulwark, do keep in mind not everybody has the luxury of living somewhere with great Internet service. In many areas, unreliable slow internet is your ONLY option, you either take it or don't have Internet at all.

I know in this day and age its cool to assume everyone has broadband internet, but its really a false assumption. Point in case being me, where I either have to use Dialup(which does disconnect often) or something like 3G(which I do use, and its ~250% more expensive than DSL would be).

Not that Im arguing against Steam or anything, just making the point that a consistent/always-on internet connect is in fact an issue for some people.

To add to Achromatis' post, I know a fellow in the UK, lives in the middle of a large town, but the best he can get is 800/100, due to the fact that the council won't let BT lay fibre close enough to his house, so while 3 streets away they have 50mbps fibre, he gets stuck with DSL on 40 year old copper being shared by an entire street. You can't assume your customers have consistent Internet access, or even any at all.

In all of this, we have to remember that we are assuming that Bethesda will have Skyrim using Steamworks - we don't have confirmation of that yet.

Also, we have to remember that, for whatever reason, Bethesda believes that using Steamworks - or not - is the best decision to make, both from a marketing perspective as well as a gaming prospective (but mostly marketing / it somehow makes them more money). They've figured that it's better to use Steamworks than not - even if that pisses off a medium-sized group of people. Or, they've figured that the debacle that was encountered by Obsidian with NV isn't worth it in the long run.

I'd much prefer an Oblivion approach. Steam version if you want it, but if you don't, hey no big deal here's a no-Steam version.

I hope so too, if only so we can all shut up about this and go our separate ways.

Good argument, with some good points in your other post.

My only thing is that it appears there are more people using that as an excuse because they simply don't like Steam or any type of DRM. For people who do run into internet issues, the way they did F:NV would be fine, only requiring internet once for an online activation.

It's not so much that programmers are lazy, it's that our expectations are getting very high. All of us are sitting in front of systems that, were they magically transported back 30-40 years, would be super computers. The modern PCI-e bus would compare nicely to the advanced I/O of an early CRAY supercomputer.

The difference is that we can do things that our parents could only dream of. We can manipulate fully animated 3-D objects in real time - on software systems that were developed in a few years or less. It wasn't that long ago that you had to have an SGI box to do stuff like that. We expect more of our systems now, than in the past.

Which brings me to my point. The only way to do all of this stuff in a timely fashion is to use frameworks, reuse code, etc. If everyone had to write everything from scratch, every time, it would be decades between releases - not a few years. Unfortunately, frameworks that are generic enough to be useful often have to trade raw efficiency for ease of use and integration. I'd say we have done quite well with that trade myself. For one thing, open-source software wouldn't exist without these frameworks - it would simply take too long for a small team to produce anything without being able to stand on the backs of others for lots of stuff.

Then, there is the insane amount of graphical stuff in modern systems. For a standard GUI, you can get away with just drawing rectangles and filling them with solid colors - but for most things, you have to use stored textures. Those textures have to be stored on disk, loaded into RAM, and transferred to a graphics card - all of which takes resources.

So yes, it seems like we aren't making progress because our apps seem to be as fast or slow as they were a decade ago - except for the fact that they are doing a heck of a lot more than they were a decade ago. Can you imagine running something like the TES CS on a machine from 2000? I still recall moving from an AGP video card to a PCI-E video card, and being pleasantly surprised that I could move in the preview window in real-time.

I'm old enough to remember having an Atari 800XL with 64kB of RAM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atari_800XL_Plain_White.jpg It was cool for the day, but I can now emulate that system at nearly 100x speed with ease. In fact, I still remember when PC's had "turbo" buttons on them, because hardware was advancing so fast that poorly written software would run "too fast". (If you have ever played the old DOS game 'stunts', you will know what I'm talking about)

I'd say we have made some progress...

(PS - I still remember hand soldering RAM chips to an add-in board for my old Franklin Apple II/c clone to get up to 128kB of RAM.)