I can remember my Achievements and who my friends are. No possible issues? Servers down, slow internet connection... I wanted to play fallout new vegas, Steam said i have to start it once so i can play it in offline mode, i tried that, steam said i need a friggin 2 GB update, i disabled automatic updates, i tried to start the game, steam started the automatic update. So what happened? 12 hours downloading that [censored] update, after that, i didn't even want to play the game anymore, had no fun, and can't even sell it again. Yeah, right, steam causes no possible issues... 60€ spend for nothing IS an issue for me. It's just annoying that's all it is. If it ships with steam, i won't buy it, and i won't buy a console just for that game. That's my opinion, and nothing will change it so arguing with me is futile.

Unfortuately Steam is still a corporate entity and I don't like corporate entities of any sort with the ability to exert direct control over my legitimatly purchased possessions.

Pwm70 made some really excellent points and I agree entirely. Without getting into rather politically charged conversation, I'll leave it at, "IMO: DRM=Bad"

I'd be fine with CD-keys, online activation... even online registration, to play my games. I think the steam system is flawed with respect to hard-copy distribution. Don't get me wrong, it's an absoluitely wonderful platform for online distribution and is a great hub for the PC gaming community, but if it's required to be able to play hard-hopy games, then that's messed up. "Messed up" doesn't necessarily mean wrong or broken, but until the uptime and connectivity of steam online systems can match or exceed the reliability of highly maintained and cared-for gaming rigs, then it needs to decisively be an optional feature.

After my steam experience with NV which is pretty negative I consider not buying Skyrim if it is a steam game. I agree with most of the CON arguments that are already said here (so no need to repeat them).
But what really angers me is that steam is stealing my time. I mod a lot and I am sure that I can't help to mod Skyrim either (I successfully avoided modding Oblivion yet ) . With Fallout 3 was modding a dream no launcher needed, Windows Live could be made completely silent (without any unofficial or pirate stuff) and the workflow was fast and easy. NV is a nightmare compared to this. I am in europe and steams server answer here extremely slow. The so called offline mode still transfers data to steam if there is a internet connections and let me wait till steam thinks I am allowed to test my mod. I am forced to use the launcher (because of NVSE and the steam DRM which was open after a few hours after the release) which doesn't only take time but also changes my ingame mouse configuration all the time when my mod changes a bit.
So if Skyrim is a steam game I pass this time.

You know who really needs to get their priorities straight? People who tell other people they need to get over not wanting to buy a game because of something they don't like. It's our freaking money, hard earned through work or whatever. If we don't want to spend our money because of ANY SINGLE FREAKING ISSUE, tha t is our prerogative. I swear, if I see one more person say that those of who won't buy this game if steam is involved(especially if it's because of a valid reason, but even if it's just because they don't like any form of drm, even then) need to get their priorities straight, I'm going to freaking scream. Our money, end of story. You want us to get the game, you can drive to wherever we live and buy us a damn copy, capish? The way some of you act, it's like we're committing a crime by not buying it. It ain't life n death, it's a freaking game.

What do you feel are the Pros and Cons of Steam?

Achievements

Eh. I don't care about achievements. I never actively pursue them.

Automatic Updates

Pro.

Cloud Savegames (assume they work)

Pro if they actually work.

Mac Support

Never owned a mac. Indifferent.

Monopolistic Business Model

Disagree that it is. Any company is free to make a version of Steam.

Multiple Computer Use

Pro.

Multiple Downloads

Pro.

No need for a disk

Huge pro.

Offline Mode

Necessary. Pro.

Online Activation

Pro, I guess. Never think about it.

Personal Gameplay Statistics

Don't care.

Sales and Bundled Deals

Pro.

Steam Client

Pro.

Steam Community

Pro.

Steam Overlay

Unclear on what this is.

Steamworks (forced registration)

Don't care. I'm buying in a legit manner.

Terms of Service

I've yet to find myself legally screwed by steam, so pro.

Title Exclusivity


Pro, since I don't plan to download it anywhere else.

There has been a very good point brought up a few time that I would like to see a specific in depth counter argument. There is a major flaw with online registration in general, it requires that the registering entity maintains the same internet presence.

Case in point, about 10 years ago I bought an indie game online. I punched in my credit card info and got a link emailed back to me to download the game. The email also gave me a link to re-download should I lose the game somehow. Many years later my hard drive completely failed, I got a new drive and started reloading all my programs. However by this time that indie company was gone, the re-download link was no longer available so I have lost that game forever. When Mount & Blade first came out I tried the demo and loved it, I heard that there was supposed to be a boxed version available but I could never find it. I did the online activation which allowed me to download an additional file to turn the demo into the complete game. I have burned both the demo installer and the unlock installer to multiple discs just in case, if Paradox/Taleworlds goes down I still want to be able install the game in the future.

Now I'm faced with the inclusion of Steam in games. I understand the idea that Steam is a trustworthy, profitable company with no immediate plans of shutting down or changing their business model, but that describe dozens of companies 10-15 years ago who do not exist today. What if Morrowind had required you to register with a third party just to install the game, if that 3rd party was Microsoft then you better hope they didn't discontinue their registration service when they stopped supporting Windows ME, If that 3rd party was Sun Systems then you're screwed. Steam/Valve are solid companies today, but that means nothing to the world of tomorrow. If a judge were to order the immediate shutdown of all Steam servers, where would that leave you? What good would the retail disc be if Steam were included? Where would you get the official Non-Steam patch that they promised? What about some kid who sees a game in the bargain bin at the store who never knew Steam existed?

Again this is not just a Steam issue, I have a big issue with online registration in general.

If I buy a boxed copy of a game (always), then I want to install it off the disk. What if Valve goes down like Interplay did? Then I lose all my games that I've paid for?

Possibly.

some people faithfully believe that steam will release some patch that frees all the games from steam requirements.

You'd probably lose the ability to re download from a steam server. so unless you have that game backed up, or have a hard copy, it's probably gone in that event.

I shouldn't have to worry about backing it up. I've got the disk, I should be ab le to install it, end-of-story. Why not just digitally down-load? It has the same effect in the end.

My problem is pretty simple: I have a high end computer running my music studio in the basemant that I will never connect to the internet. I run Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 down there. My internet computer upstairs cannot even run Oblivion. I download mods and transfer them downstairs with an external drive and I'm perfectly happy with that setup. I was able to set up Operation:Anchorage and The Pitt using Windows Live by that process. I cannot set up Fallout New Vegas because of it requiring authentication via Steam. I'm unhappy about that. If I want to buy Skyrim, and I certainly do, I will need to buy a new computer and run it upstairs or run an internet cable downstairs and run it down there on a new computer. It would be nice to be able to run it on my existing high end computer without needing to ever connect it to the internet. Other game systems like XBox or PS3 are out of the question, because I don't play enough different games to justify the cost.

You ask why I don't have my music computer set up to run the internet? Because it's lean and mean and I want to keep it that way. I know myself and I'd just get it all clogged up with a bunch of junk I don't want on it. I'm stubborn like that.

SO, I GUESS I NEED A NEW COMPUTER.

Steam? I know little-next-to-nothing about it, but I guess I'd use it if I had to.

There's only two especially strong arguments I've seen against Steam here or elsewhere. One of them's the fact that, should Valve go out of business, you'll lose access to all the games they're hosting... but that one's not especially compelling. It's a bit common for people to think that the current markets work so that things just happen suddenly and without any warning, but that's simply not true. The example people usually use is the recent recession, but the fact is that economists saw that coming for an extremely long time - it didn't really sneak up on any of the industries struck by it and it certainly didn't sneak up on anyone monitoring those industries, it just happens to be something where a lot of people, politicians, and companies ignored the long-term consequences of their actions for the sake of short-term gain. Basically, there were warning signs on that one visible from miles away.

So what about Steam? Well, look at Steam itself. Valve's used their own extremely popular titles to entrench themselves so deeply into the downloadable content market that even some larger publishers who've attempted to set themselves up afterwards can't hope to compete (EA has their own online store, but typically releases their titles on Steam anyways simply because Steam is where most of their potential customers are). They've started introducing features like Steamworks that make it so that competing services can't sell their games without packaging Steam with those games (which they won't do), making it pretty much impossible for services like Impulse or Direct2Drive to actually compete with Steam. And with the market and consumer base that Steam has now, they have so much momentum that even an exceptionally well-funded and well-developed startup could never hope to compete with them.

And even putting all of that aside, look at the overall market. Virtually every media market is expected to shift toward digital downloads. Netflix is killing Blockbuster, services like Hulu are eating away at the cable industry, newspapers are struggling to compete with their online ad-supported counterparts, devices like the iPad and the Kindle are becoming increasingly popular, and more and more video games are selling through digital distribution services, especially on Steam. This is a trend that's constantly picking up and that has absolutely no competition and no reason to change, so there's absolutely no indication here that Steam's going to do anything but get bigger for quite some time.

All that said, does that mean Steam's going to be here forever? No. Of course not. But it does mean that the service is going to be around for a very long time. Even if we run with a rather questionably short time frame for its remaining lifespan of about 10-15 years (considering how long game development takes and how sluggishly the games industry tends to move)... well, 10-15 years is an extremely long time in terms of technology. By the time that's passed, Steam going out of business won't matter - getting the games that had relied on it through other means will be so trivially easy that its disappearance would affect virtually nothing aside from some mild level of convenience.

As for the other good argument... this:
And this is the main problem I have with Steam. Skyrim's almost definitely going to be a single player game. It's also almost definitely going to use Steamworks. Steamworks comes with some nice perks (Steam Cloud support being the best one), but it also means that retail copies of the game are going to require an internet connection for installation. It may not be common, but (believe it or not) some people still don't have high-speed internet at all, and a few more don't have it connected to their gaming machines. They're basically stiffed by this sort of thing, and unfortunately Steamworks isn't something that can really be handled in an optional sense or separately from the Steam authentication - if a game's going to use it, it's going to need to connect with Steam when it installs.

For someone like me this all works out pretty well - I always have an internet connection to my main machine, and Steamworks means Steam Cloud access, better Steam Community support, and automatic patching - but it's still a pretty bad deal for anyone who doesn't have a net connection. Not that that'll make much difference - it's a business decision for Bethesda, and unfortunately the group of people with no internet access or no broadband who are interested in their games is so small as to be insignificant to them.

This is actually the biggest source of my concern for "what happens when Steam goes down". Financially they are very stable, but the further they raise them selves over what little competition they have the more likley thier downfall will be due to legal reasons. There is also possibility of new regulations and legislation being passed that makes the Steam business model untenable. Something like that could happen much faster than financial ruin, and unless you are a video game and news junkie you may not notice it's happening until it's too late.

I don't even see those sorts of things as especially likely. It's still going to take Steam a while to defeat other digital distribution platforms on the PC entirely, with a few holdouts (like gog.com) differentiating themselves from Steam in such a way that it appears they'll be sticking around well after more general platforms go down and with several publishers unlikely to stop offering their own download platforms at any point. There's also the digital distribution platforms on the consoles and the Mac app store that Valve can point to should the need arise. Even with all of that aside, Steam isn't doing anything that so much as approaches being a target for any sort of anti-trust suit. Their games are popular but not nearly popular or fundamental enough to gaming functionality to attract something like the action Microsoft was hit with over the IE bundling, and their actual business strategies (while aggressive) are focused more around providing superior functionality and features than around bullying the competition - Valve doesn't care whether or not games that use Steamworks appear in other digital distribution stores, the other stores simply refuse to carry them because Steamworks relies on Steam itself. Not that any of this is all that important, because the PC-specific video game digital distribution market is too far off the radars of most legislators and litigators to really attract much of anything in terms of a legal response.

Steam is a service Valve provides to developers who choose to use it and to consumers who choose to buy through it, and one that it doesn't force on any developer or abuse in a way that would make it impossible for games that use the platform to be distributed on competing services. They're certainly trying to destroy any chances of competition, but they aren't doing it in a way that would really make them a target for any kind of legal action.

As for new legislation or regulations being passed, even that seems like a pretty unlikely possibility. New legislation that would have an impact on Steam would probably have an impact on digital commerce in general, and that includes companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. If a piece of legislation were damaging enough that it could spell out the outright destruction of a platform like Steam then I can guarantee that they'd lobby fiercely enough to more or less completely destroy it, and I don't see that any powerful industry would benefit from such legislation (generally, that kind of legislation would be focused more on taxation, which is something that would have to be applied to an unprecedented extreme to actually make Steam collapse). If it were to actually make it through, you could expect whatever state it's been enacted in (since something like that wouldn't really make sense on a broader national scale) to be sued if the new legislation were actually that severe, though it's doubtful that it would be to begin with - there are already several states that have laws that are harmful to e-commerce, and so far they haven't put so much as a mild dent on Steam's popularity. But even if we run on the outside chance that some major national laws were going to be passed making services like Steam impossible to handle, they wouldn't hit without warning - legislation like that tends to take quite some time to actually build enough moment to pass in the first place, and with constant delays by lobbying groups and extremely long and drawn out lawsuits intended to slow or stop the implementation of that kind of thing we'd be able to see it coming from a very, very long ways down the road.

Basically, even in terms of potential legal threats what I've already said still applies: if they happen in a way that could take Steam down (which is pretty exceptionally doubtful), it'll be far enough into the future that games relying on Steam now will be trivially easy to acquire by other means.

EDIT: And as a bit of an aside, if Steam ever actually reaches a size large or pervasive enough that it could attract serious anti-trust allegations, it'll have reached a size large enough to more or less make those allegations a paper tiger. Note that Microsoft's troubles with Windows haven't exactly crushed their domination in the OS market - anti-trust investigations and suits, even when they do result in action being taking, take an obscenely long time to actually go through and rarely have a solid impact before the damage is done (and done to such a severe extent that no action that's likely to be taken would be of any real help).

If anything, I'd be less concerned with Steam going down and more concerned with what would happen if it doesn't. Monopolies in industries like that are rarely good for consumers.

I might pre order on steam, or I might get the Collector's if there is some decent swag. Either way, I really like Steam and actually buy a fair bit of games on it.

Since it seems that DRM is with us to stay, a lot of the arguments for owning a physical disk are moot. You don't actually own the game until you can activate it online, so it is just as likely or more likely that you'll lose the activation code or never be able to activate it in the first place (as happened to me when I bought a copy of Assassin's Creed II off the shelf only to find the key had been hacked). In those cases your disk is worthless, even if you managed to keep it in pristine conditions for years. These days you could go back and buy those games from the various digital services for 5 bucks anyway, so it's not the end of the world if you have to re-buy a game.

I don't like having to be wired and dealing with an online entity to play a game I buy off the shelf, but if I have to do it, Steam seems to be fairly reliable. I cannot put into words how much I loathed GFWL, so it's at least a step up. I wish that they made it easier to make them unobtrusive, though. Having to disable pop-up ads, online mode, automatic and/or mandatory updates etc. is a pain. They should have two modes: "I like you and want to talk" and "shut up and leave me alone."

I'm most likely going to buy it for the Xbox 360 because of the controller. The controller feels more natural to me because you can play as more of an extension of oneself while the computer has more of a second nature feel to it. I will eventually buy it for the PC, probably the GOTY edition but if Bethesda allows for straight conversion of the xbox controls to the PC I will buy it for the PC only and use the 360 controller on my computer and plug my m17x into my 52" HDTV. It will look better than the 360 while running at highest quality and not lagging on my tv.

A lot of people overlooking one major pro of steam - less pirating.

I know, a lot of people who pirate feel they're entitled to pretty much any game they bother to DL if they decide "the price is too high" or "I wouldn't buy it so it doesn't matter if I pirate it" etc. etc. And I'm no angel when it comes to this TBH, but greedy gamers are as much a problem as greedy game companies - that's why so many use annoying programs like DRM, Game for Windows Live, etc. Steam is hands down, no contest, the lesser evil of anti-pirating software and I prefer to support it over the others. I actually find Steam pretty convenient and occasionally buy old games I own the disc for when they go on sale for ridiculously low prices just so I don't have to bother with patching and discs and so on.

Shouldn't the trouble that "Emergent Game Technologies" (makers of the Gamebryo engine) has had show that putting all one's eggs in one basket can be a bad idea? & that is what Beth did with New Vegas PC's distribution.

Steam doesn't really do this. Less first-day/first-week piracy if a developer is lucky, but not less piracy period. Fewer resales, though.

How is mac support an advantage of steam?

@Odd Hermit: Everything gets pirated anyways. I will agree that steam is the lesser of the evils as far as DRM is concerned, but that still doesn't beat having no DRM as the best of the best.
Note: I bought all my Bethesda games. Don't let my argument make you think otherwise. I'm the kind of person who uses 5 hard drives and an SSD because he doesn't feel malfunction-proof. I couldn't handle not having a physical copy as well as a backed up one.

Sell the game on Steam. Do not force Steam unto the game. It's that simple. Sell the game at retail without the necessity to use Steam. Give customers the option. There are benefits to using Steam, but there are also problems. Let the customer decided if the benefits outweigh the costs for themselves. I spent two and a half hours logging in to Steam yesterday. That's downright unreasonable. Steam is NOT suitable for slow internet connections. It spend TWO HOURS downloading an update (which It had done two days ago) and HALF AND HOUR signing in after that. Furthermore, Steam forces you to update your games to the newest update. Anyone familiar with Bethesda's previous work can tell you that sometimes new patches cause more problems than old ones, and having the freedom to choose which patch you want to use is a godsend.

You want Steam achievements? You want your Steam friends list? Then buy the game on Steam, but don't try to force it on the rest of us if we don't want it.

:yes: Thank you Mr. Smiley Bear. You will see I will learn the 'how to' and navigation.

First day/week piracy counts for a lot though, and also you have to consider that a lot of people pirate simply because they don't want to deal with having to go to a store to buy it - that alone prevents a lot of piracy IMO, I've bought a lot of games on Steam that I wouldn't have gone to a store for.

Also, having it on Steam probably increases sales later on when Steam has their sales, and those who wouldn't spend 50-60$ on the game when it came out, but won't/don't pirate, will often buy it later for 20-30 on sale. This is another reason people pirate too - availability of older games later on. I recently got some older games for as low as 2-5$ that cost 50+$ to buy the actual disc for anymore due to their availability.

that just shows that it's a good option to have the the game available via Steam, which not many are actually against

One thing I think hurts is the localized release dates, when I buy a single-player game legally & install it, I shouldn't have to wait for some server somewhere to say "You may play........... NOW!"

I want a hard copy of the collectors edition but I also want it on steam so I don't have to worry about losing the disc.

So I voted Steamworks only.