It`s not a huge market, no, but it`s nice to recoup something back on your purchase and put it towards your next game. I`ve actually made a good amount from selling my old games on Play, which is nice, as i`ll get new ones from that

Reselling games is nice for 20 hour with gameplay games. Also nice if you did not like the game. For games like elder scroll it's not very important

I can feel the collective sigh of relief haha

Don't see the need to change the path.
Client updates never take that long unless there is a problem on your end, also they tell you what the update is fixing/doing.
Guess what you are a minority, also you can disable it.
Seriously....



Fine, I just hope they add the [censored] AC DRM for you then.

The only customization I want for Steam is self-deletion. I have no use for its services, and I don't want to have to ask it if I can play each time I start up Skyrim. If I'm going to be buying a game like Skyrim, I'm likely going to be playing it for years to come, and I don't want to be at the constant mercy of a third party (Valve) for permission to play a game I legally bought and have on my machine that was made by Bethesda.


The Video Game industry is bigger than it ever has been. Games are being made now with budgets that rival movies. They have star-studded casts, famous authors, exquisite promotional art, live orchestrated music, and take several years to make. People have been saying piracy is hurting the game industry for quite a long time, but in all that time, I've only ever seen the industry grow.

Man, I remember when Zelda 64 even got a theatrical trailer. That was unprecedented for a video game. Now I feel old.

Blame money, read the ToS, and you don't "have" to use steam.

1. Why does that matter? It keeps all your games organised for you.
2. You can turn these off in the client setitngs.
3. Again, you can turn this off in the client settings.
4. Which uses up less memory than explorer, firefox, IE, etc.

Steam is an amazing platform and for the people who find it hard to embrace it, I feel sorry for you.





You must have a terrible computer considering steam uses about 4% the processing power firefox does, and with firefox open my computer takes almost no fps hit.

Steam is great,i hope Skyrim will be a steamworks title

You don't want DRM but Bethesda wants them in. You don't want achievements but Bethesda wants to put them in I bet. Also you can use the steam client to browse any website you want really which is neat for fullscreen games that don't like Alt+Tab.

And about that steam client that always updates and takes long minutes to patch without ever telling you what it does, wtf are you people smoking? My steam is nagging me to update right now and that's what I see :


Less than one update per month. And clicking on those little [+] shows me exactly all that was changed. One change in particular shows why the Steamworks model is great : they increased microphone quality in Steam and via it I bet, from all the games that use Steam to handle voice chat ingame. From that Steam patch, potentially many old games that aren't updated anymore just received an update to their capabilities.

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.

Counter-Points:
1. I'm a big boy I can organise my games myself
2. It should be off by default
3. It should be off by default
4. Who leaves a browser window open when they're not using it?

A number of us don't use Steam, or don't want it for Skyrim, and that's why we're asking for a non-Steam version.

I will forever fail to understand the complete and utter hatred experienced by some towards steam :ermm: I understand disliking it, but really people here demonise it to no end, stating that they simply won't buy it for pc if it's Steam based. Now, I'm biased because I love steam, but for those who don't, really it can't be that damn bad?! That fallacy of internet logins being a necessity at all times has been busted countless times on many forums, and people still bring it up :shrug:

That said, I completely respect your opinion regarding Steam and hope you will respect mine as well. Let's not devolve this into a flame war

(And at OP: interesting observation, but really, thanks for bringing THIS thread up again. As if we needed more of this :shakehead: )

1. And you can still do it, just use the tools you've been provided with here by different posters.
2. No it shouldn't, it just causes headaches for developers with users still connecting to your servers with seriously outdated client versions still with long fixed bugs.
3. No it shouldn't. The default behavior people want is to keep their games updated and it's in the interest of everybody.
4. I do. Multiple windows even.

I used to hate Steam when I had a slow internet connection, now I love it. It keeps everything organized and updated, and also has a number of useful features such as the overlay browser, an easy-to-use invite system for multiplayer, Steam Cloud, achievements and the recently introduced screenshot utility. Plus, Steam games have very low prices in my country. If I could, I'd move all the games I own to my Steam account.

I don't have anything against the concept of Steam, it's the implementation Valve did that I dislike. Greatly.

This is how Steam should have been done:
Implemented as a mostly-invisible daemon in the background which installs games on your file system like normal, with customisable paths rather than an ugly, slow GUI, and it only showed an interface when it really had to, like say you opened the Store or wanted to check your Steam library, etc etc. That way, everybody wins! You guys still have your Steam, I still control over the install paths and Steam's memory footprint is lower.

How can an invisible daemon in the background ask you for a path to install a game in the first place? Besides, here's a hint : launch Steam, close windows, launch Steam installed games from Windows Start Menu and you'll never really see Steam again

I so hope you're right about this. I prefer having a disk that stands alone and doesn't have to rely on something outside. I mean, what if there is no Steam in a few years (not to wish them ill)? I'd rather not have to worry about the playability of my game.

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.

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.

...touche.

NO

FRIGGIN

STEAM

PLZ

how I hate all forms of 3rd party software. its like your in bed with some one and some one is watching and giving notes :banghead:

u mean the quantum processors and cybernetic cores, who needs skyrim in 15 years when you can have a Holographic room (startrek), or your on a colony ship heading for the Gliese 581 solar system.

Holograms have been 15 years away for 40 years. That's not about to change now.

Didn't Obsidian Entertainment release New Vegas? If so, there is no guarantee Bethesda would use Steam. I'd rather they didn't use steam, but if they need to pick one, Steam isn't too invasive, but a lot of people have problems with it. or Games For Windows Live (possible to disable) wouldn't be so bad I guess.. it worked in Fallout 3 rather nicely.