I wouldn't put it past publishers to add extra 'filler' to the EULA's just to make them so long that almost nobody will read them.

100% agreed.

Having agreed, however, I still consider Steam to be an excellent service, even with the drawback of being unable to sell my games once purchased. As most people know, it's a crap shoot whether you will find a used copy of a modern game that hasn't been damaged in some way - either the license key is already used (and you're really hosed) or the multiplayer license key has already been used (and you get to play with yourself and only yourself).

To be honest with you, I don't have much of an issue with the idea of Steam. It does sound like a nice content delivery system, and game/patch manager. But the implementation and built-in DRM really really bothers me. The fact that losing your Steam account means losing access all "your" games (with no refund), being at the mercy of an external party to be able to play your games, etc... I just can't agree to terms like that, no matter how many other nice features it may have. I still have my original copies of Doom 2 and Heretic, and I still play those games today. I need to be assured that 10, 20, or even 40 years down the line, I'll still have a way to play my games. These aren't short-term purchases, after all.

Very true. I just find it hilarious how some ppl don't like steam without even knowing what it is all about...

Nobody likes DRM but nowadays it is a plague that set it's roots so deep that i don't think we can do anything about it... But from all the plague you can consider Steam a relief. It's still a DRM, but it's the best option to choose from.

Arguments that you can't run mods on steam games are ignorant. I ran Oblivion with OOO and a crapload of other mods, ran Stalker SOC with Complete mod, earlier with Oblivion Lost mod, ran Titan Quest with the TQLoader mod... that's just a dip in the ocean of possibilities and i never heard a game that is moddable not to be able to be so on Steam. Why? Couse steam installs the game the same way you install it without steam, and all the files are there in your steam folder.

Arguments it uses too much ram are silly. I got a nearly 4 or 5 years old rig with 2 GB of ram and run that bastard Win 7 and got no problems whatsoever. Idle it uses 25, 000 K and with UI opened no more than 45-65,000 k. If that's so HEARTH-BREAKING and memory consuming that it will make you rig lag like hell and ruin your life, srsly...

Not to mention the no-brainer deals every week, yeah every [censored] week there's some deal with discounts that range from 50-75% off the price, sometimes even more. Deals on X-mas are so mind-blowing that for 50 euro i got around 30 or 40 games that most of them were costing 50 euro on preorder alone. There are some free weekends for some games from time to time, that lets you download a game for free and play it through the weekend. Yes you play the FULL game, no some half arsed demo...

Or that you keep all your games in one place and have access to them no matter where you got, just if you have a net to download it - YOU CAN PLAY IT IN OFFLINE MODE THAT REQUIRES NO INTERNET CONNECTION /all caps ! You don't have to worry you will loose, scratch, break, burn, eat or whatever your physical disk...


Going out of business i don't think they'll choose to show the finger to millions of customers, eh? Nothing stops them from doing so, tho but it sounds unlikely. AFAIK, they got backup plan for that situation, as i already mentioned in my previous posts. Considering what profit they accumulate i don't see that happening anytime soon, really...

TLDR : what's steam all about - keepin` your gaems in one place and for easy management, no-brainer deals and discounts

Arguments against steam:

O NOES online activation: yeah only activation, activate product, /play in offline mod

O NOES DRM; yeah well would you rather have securom or ubisofts always online DRM

O noes it takes up so many system resources: from what your computer build in 1999?

cry me a river. steam is the lesser of all evils.

also

cheap games

Most games (and other software) use one of a bunch of standard installers. As such, there are rather easy ways (typically fully supported for automatic installing on multiple machines) to install those without having to click "I agree" on any EULA. So I can, in fact, buy a disc with a game and install it without agreeing to anything.

I have what I'd consider still a good system. Its 3 years old with a dual core Athlon X2 Dual Core 3 GHz processor, a 1.5 Mb GeForce 8800 GTS and maxed out 4gigs of RAM because it runs Vista. Of that 4 gigs I can actually only page 3.5 gigs. Just starting up my PC and running Firefox to access this forum eats up 1.68 gigs of my available 3.5 leaving... ta-dah 1.82 gigs for gaming. Shove another 50 Mb of DRM software in there and it gets commensurately less.

That is why I have to jump through hoops to strip down my system and reboot before each and every time I play Oblivion on my PC. Otherwise I don't have a full 2 gigs available for the game. And no, I can't leave the PC in 'lean' mode as I use it for work too.

So yes, unnecessary (and bloated) software is bad for me and my PC. It does cost me frame rates, shortens the time before I reach memory saturation causing a CTD, and it is not solvable by throwing more RAM in there since I'm at the ceiling already.

For you it may not be a problem. For me it is.

- My steam currently uses 11280k RAM as shown on task manager and 0% CPU for as long as I've cared to stare for it. Close Steam windows, mainly the web browser one that shows all those store deals and it'll give back used RAM.

- Reason why Steam requires activating a game when you install it is to prevent crooked retailers from breaking street date. One of the reason why street dates are important is piracy. Some of the very bad cases of broken street date end up with a huge piracy spike because when the game can be downloaded one week before you can buy it in a store, people tend to do that.

- You can easily keep multiple steams install around to simulate multiple copies of the game install to mod them differently. Or you can duplicate a Steam game install on another folder and run it directly from there if steam is already launched. It might need a little prodding and tweaking to get it working but it's not hard.

As someone who lives in California, I'd sure love to see the information that confirms this.

Mainly because I've used the EULAs against the retailers before, like Best Buy, who claim they can't accept returns on software. My defense? A standard clause in most EULAs for games that states you have the right to a refund FROM PLACE OF PURCHASE if you don't agree to the terms.

Retailers tend to be much more aware of these things than consumers, so if the EULA couldn't be enforced because it's illegal, surely I'd have no legal right to use it as a means to get my refund?

Keep in mind, Best Buy has a "strict" no-returns policy on opened software right on the receipt and they folded when I showed the store manager the EULA and highlighted the part about refunds from place of purchase.

As for the rest of the Steam argument, I've explained my opposition to that Evil Empire plenty of times before and don't care to get into it again - your CA EULA thing interests me though.

It hasn't been directly confirmed as far as I know, but I can't imagine it won't require Steam. I don't have a problem with it, I'll probably buy it on Steam anyway.

Have you tried steam anyway? I run it with no [censored] problems whatsoever, while you got double the ram i have, better video than mine, better processor and still think having problems with it? I never needed to restart my comp to play whatever, due to steam... got 1300 ram available in task manager and still game with no problems... srsly dude, it's nothing you should worry about. If you never tried it at least do so, so you can draw the ultimate conclusion!

The fact of the matter is there's people who just really don't like Steam, and you aren't going to change their minds.

And i got no problem with that, if you don't like it - good. But some just struggle to find a lame excuse not to like it... like "i don't don't like that TV couse it's cable is red" kinda thing, know what i mean?

That's a self-defeating question. If you use the EULA to get a refund because you don't agree to the EULA, then if the EULA's not enforcable you have no need to return it for not agreeing to the EULA. You said yourself that you had to convince the manager to take it back, so they likely figured it'd just be better to just take it back instead of fighting you on it and risking a court battle and/or bad publicity. That doesn't mean they known any better about the legality of EULAs... it just means they'd rather take it back than risk a fight.

Besides, it'd be insane to think an EULA could bind to a third party like that. They'd only be obligated to take it back if they had a prior agreement with the publisher (or you) to do it, but then they wouldn't have a "strict" no-return policy if they did.

...if you're seriously worried about 50MB of RAM, why the hell are you running firefox, and why the hell do you only appear to be running a 32bit OS? (Assuming you mean you can only use 3.5GB RAM, this is usually because you're running 32bit)

And 1.82gb RAM - 50mb is 1.77GB of RAM. That's not really much smaller, and given that everything you're not using (Such as the firefox you have no reason to have open, and the majority of steam) can be swapped out as it doesn't actually have to be in RAM. 50MB of RAM will not affect any machine not already at the very limit of simply being able to run the game.

plus no mods, yikes!

And if you end up damageing the CD......... yeah, pretty much screwed.

inb4 homebrew, but thing could get http://www.google.bg/images?um=1&hl=bg&biw=1111&bih=466&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=messi&aq=f&aqi=g4g-s1g5&aql=&oq=...



I never said they worked and tell that to the person that does the DRM, no to me, tyvm. Considering almost every game nowadays HAVE a drm, witch is pretty sad, i was stating my humble [censored] opinion for the steam DRM, that's all. Witch i said i don't mind ppl that don't like it, but i mind some of the ignorance about the whole situation...

I have never used Steam since the only graphical games I've played in the last 8 years are Morrowind and Oblivion, so Skyrim will be the first game that I have to encounter this. I have no interest in the other services Steamworks offer, and would prefer to buy Skyrim on disk - although I might have to reconsider if I have to gum up my system with Steam anyway.

Whilst do find the whole concept of licensing the right to play a game rather abhorrent, that in itself would not stop me from purchasing Skyrim. Available memory remains a concern to me, especially since even an unmodded Oblivian still causes CTD on my system, so keeping my available gaming memory as clean as possible is vital. With the current trend of growth in background services and processes, in nine months I might be struggling to keep my base OS, browser, anti-virus software and all the other 'hidden' background processes below 2 gigs at boot-up, all the big companies simply assuming that newer PCs are running Win7 with over 4 gigs of RAM available. Indeed I bet that the Steam exe itself has bloated considerably in size during the last few years, and will keep on swelling.

In addition I'm pretty sure that Skyrim will be pushing that 2 gig memory limit to the max in order to improve AI and gameplay, which means unless they plug all the memory leaks this time, it'll CTD all the faster on 32 bit systems. Seriously and deferentially in return, memory is an issue and will will become increasingly so over the course of the next couple of years.

Why shouldn't I run a 32bit OS? It is what came with the PC and would cost a fair amount to upgrade.

I use firefox because I prefer it as a browser. I did mention that when I want to game I strip down the system and boot it with as little extraneous software running. Primarily because I want to:

a) get the best performance out of the game
b ) get the longest period of gameplay before it CTDs


Those are memory demands at the moment. I can guarantee that background processes, servers and drivers are only going to get bigger in the next nine months, and Steam itself will also grow. Somewhere in the near future there's going to be a constricting bottleneck where a 4 gig 32bit Vista PC isn't going to be able to run Skyrim straight off the daily desktop without gagging itself on all the other crud which is running on the average rig. 2 gigs of completely free memory is soon going to be difficult to achieve without specific tinkering. We've already passed that point with 3 gig Vista PCs.

Of course if I upgrade to a new PC it will no longer be an issue. I can have a Win7 64bit system with as much RAM as I can dream of. But at the moment I don't. At this point in time I have a decent - not yet outdated - PC which a 50Mb program will increasingly affect my gameplay whether in frame rate or potentially the frequency and duration before crashing.

I've got to side with the no-Steam-here group.
For me, it's not the fact that it's using precious memory on a 3rd party DRM that I don't want to run but have no control over. It's not the fact that some updates are forced on you even though they may break the game. It's not the fact that you have to be online to play (or you can play in offline mode if you first start the game in online mode, make sure all game files are updated, shut down the game, check a few settings, put the game in offline mode, and ask Steam nicely to let you play YOUR game). It's just the complete disregard for those of us who are honest purchasers of a software product, video, music, or other media. I totally support DRM. I support DRM right up to the point where it starts affecting legitamate users. I consider being forced to install a piece of software on my computer in order to run a totally seperate piece of software as 'being affected'. Yes, there are tens of thousands of Steam users that have had no issues whatsoever with Steam games. But there are also many (hundreds even?) that have had real problems.

Is Steam required to play the game (from a developers standpoint)? No, it's a DRM addition to the game.
Does Steam enhance the game at all? No, and for some it even degrades it.
What is Steam then...? A parasitic addition to a perfectly functional piece of software.

This is disturbing news if it's true. It probably won't stop me from buying Skyrim but I definitely won't be buying it on release day. In fact it will probably already be cracked and on torrents by the time I pick it up at the corner store...

When you pay your money and get that receipt plus a copy of the media with the product on it, you buy the right to USE the product, although you technically don't "own" the game. On the one hand, you don't have the legal right to reverse-engineer the game or use it for commercial applications without further agreements. On the other hand, the software company has no legal right to rescind your access to the game unless you break the agreement, so "denying access" after 10 years is a breach of the sales agreement, and you could probably demand a refund if it was worth the $30-60 to press a lawsuit, and if they're still in business. With Steam, you merely buy access, and they aren't legally obligated to continue it for more than a limited amount of time, especially if they go out of business (which is a financially rewarding way of shedding a lot of expensive obligations after you've raked in enough cash; gyms do it all the time by selling lifetime "memberships" and then closing the doors, only to reopen a few months later under a different name with new managers).

In my case, the PC I use for gaming does not have Internet access, and probably never will. If Skyrim REQUIRES Steam, I simply will not buy it, because I won't be able to play it. If I have to activate it once, that will mean tearing down the system, hauling it down a few flights of stairs, and setting it up where I can get access, then tearing it down again and hauling it back UP those stairs. If the game turns out to be decent, MAYBE I'll get it two or three years further down the road when I build a new system and have to activate Windows, and download all of the patches, updates, drivers, and other stuff needed to get it going in the first place.

It includes features like handling of DLC sale and download, auto-update of the game for the core features most game should have.

It allows you details like having a web browser in-game even in full-screen mode (checking forum/FAQ sites anytime ftw), it acts as a friend communication tool (friend lists, chatting, presence etc...) and it allows Achievements to work in-game and be shared with the community (which is kinda the whole point behind achievements).

What else? When it works you can get cloud shared save games which is very nice for people roaming around multiple computers without having to manually copy the saves.

Yes most of that could be done by putting the code directly in the game itself. But then you'd argue that doing it would be a LOT of work for Bethesda (each of those features would take a lot of work to get done) while all you have to do mostly is launch the game through Steam. You can try it : install Steam, add an "External Game" in your game list and launch it through there. And instant Steam overlay support! Access to a web browser in-game, friend list, friend chatting, in-game clock etc... all that without leaving the full-screen mode.

I bloody hope it isn't Steam only. I'd have to get it on console then, which means no mods, which means sad me .

There are more important things in my life to worry over than steam. Never had a problem and I don't care if they use it or not. Ill buy a pc hard copy regardless.

That's not quite the way I remember it. Once they worked out the issues things were fine, but NV launch with Steam wasn't exactly what I would have called smooth.

I personally don't care if they use Steam or not, but lets not make things up either.