15 years from now, for the 30th Elder Scrolls anniversary, you decided to play some ancient history, Skyrim. But wait, Steam doesn't exist anymore because Valve went out of the gaming business 5 years ago, or maybe they just don't support a title that old, etc. So you're forced to turn to piracy to play a game you've legally owned for 15 years.

It would already be a miracle if Skyrim still works without patches in 15 years in Macdows 27 256bit edition on NVidia CPUs in the first place.

Also, that. Not to be mister doom and gloom but imagine this scenario:

15 years from now, for the 30th Elder Scrolls anniversary, you decided to play some ancient history, Skyrim. But wait, Steam doesn't exist anymore because Valve went out of the gaming business 5 years ago, or maybe they just don't support a title that old, etc. So you're forced to turn to piracy to play a game you've legally owned for 15 years.

I've been under the assumption that Skyrim would require Steam. However, I noticed at the bottom of the http://www.elderscrolls.com/ there are logos for Playstation Network, Xbox Live, and for Games for Windows. There is no Steam logo. I''m not coming to any certain conclusions, but It's interesting and cause for Concern.

Considering what peripherals, graphics cards, antivirus software and all the other modern day stuff that gets downloaded into your PC and run as background processes, you are looking to have eaten up in the region of 1.2 to 1.5GB just by booting your OS and doing a few daily things like checking email. Considering there are still a lot of Vista 32bit gamers out there, they have a Ram ceiling of about 3.5GB. So a lot of gamers will be running near the edge of having 2GB of 'free' memory left for gaming. Thus a 100MB exe running in the background can be a significant overhead. Steam is also trying up processor resources (which is normally running at 100% when I'm playing Oblivion on highest settings) and can slow down parts of the game by needing to be swapped in and out of memory.

That is now.

In 9 months I guarantee that your repeatedly evolving graphics drivers, patched OS, updated antivirus software and all those other background processes will have grown significantly - most developers assuming that they can hog all the system resources they need (hey my program is more important than anyone else's) or that everyone has already upgraded to Win7 (still on Vista, are you a Luddite?). Steam will be foremost amongst them. Therefore in the not too distant future, 32bit Vista even with '4'GB and all the hardware to put a PS to shame, will start to suffer problems trying to find enough gaming RAM without having to constantly page/cache memory.

Now not everybody has the technical skill or knowledge to purge their system, running it clean. Some need a lot of that other 3rd party extraneous software for their jobs or hobbies. Others lack the patience to do clean sweep and reboot every time they run a game. Still more have currently powerful gaming rigs which they don't want to upgrade to 64bit. So for them it'll start to make a difference. At the moment it might be a mere handful of FPS, but those can become vital in preventing lagging depending on the on-screen action or numbers of characters in your cell. In the future it'll just get worse and Steam will be a significant portion of that responsibility.

So don't say 100MB isn't much. It does has an effect. If nothing else, unless Skyrim plugs all the memory leaks Oblivion had, it will shorten the play time before the game CTD.

Despite this, Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, said in a post on the Steam User Forums that "Unless there was some situation I don't understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available." He added, "We've tested disabling authentication and it works."[86]
In addition to Gabe Newell's comments, Steam's Support Staff have confirmed that "in the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will have access to their Steam games."[87][88]

I would hate Beth if they took GfWL over Steam. Steam easily owns it and is not nearly as bad as everyone is making it to be. I've had a much better experience with it over GfWL.

Sorry, but it just sounds to me like sweet nothings to keep users from freaking out over a real possibility.

Highly doubt they're using GFWL. It's been menetioned that they don't like it, and prefer Steam. And no one's saying it won't or shouldn't be available on Steam, we just don't want it to require Steam.

I remember reading somewhere in one of the magazine cover stories they were gonna use Steam for DRM though?

Sorry, but what's steam, and why does everyone hate it so much?

If you had actually read the thread, that question would have been answered for you already.

There's six pages, forgive me if I don't want to read all of it. I just thought it wouldn't bother anybody to give me a brief description, since some people are decent enough to do so.

Swarley:
Can't change install path
Frequent mandatory updates of the client that not only take upwards of 5 minutes to complete, but they never tell you what they do.
Auto-updating, which frankly pisses some players off.
Additional hard drive memory and CPU footprint.

There's six pages, forgive me if I don't want to read all of it. I just thought it wouldn't bother anybody to give me a brief description, since some people are decent enough to do so.

Brief Description of Steam:

It is an iTunes for games.


More Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)

Even with today's computers that can be upwards of 5-10 FPS gained, depending on how much stuff is running in the background.

Up to 5 - 10 FPS?

its not like you can see the difference if there is 80 - 90 difference...granted its noticeable to many guys if they really want to focus on it, but if you play noramlly you wont see the difference so 5 to 10 fps shoud not be a problem to us regular people who are no gods

Not sure the exact number, but the eye can only distinguish so many frames per second before it's no longer noticeable.