Its the end of an era folks.
Quoting Yarlen, reply 41The Steam client will be required for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion for initial install, updates and Internet multiplayer, regardless of purchase location. You can choose to play in offline mode via the Steam client after initial install, though ICO features and achievements will no longer be available.
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8. Gamers have the right to use their games without being inconvenienced due to copy protection or digital rights management.
Now its debatable whether this news actually goes against the PC gamers bill of rights Stardock pushed forward 3-4 years ago, but it certainly seems an ominous change of pace for the company to me. Are the other Stardock gaming communities concerned? Will other Stardock titles follow suite? Does this symbolically show the finalization of the Steam monopoly, short of the self sufficient EA and Blizzard titles? What does the wider community think, and what can we do about it?
I understand why a lot of people have a problem with Steam. It is because Steam's a giant, and it's getting bigger all the time. Consumers in this day and age are for the most part, wary of giant money making machines because it makes them feel like they don't matter; that all this giant machine wants to do is eat their money, belch out a cost-effective product, and leave the consumer with no recourse should the product fail to perform. That's the state of modern PC gaming.
I think the biggest problem people have with Steam is that they want to get unlimited value out of their games, and Steam threatens that perceived value. When we buy a game we want to be able to play it forever. And we have every right to expect that. Whoever created the game and owns the rights to it doesn't matter, there are NO built in expiry dates to the software licenses you purchase.
When you sell a license to someone else enabling them to download a copy of some software and use it, then unless the User Agreement specifically states that the license will expire within a certain timeframe, that license is assumed to be permanent. The software might not be supported indefinately, but the licensee still has the right to retain and use the software indefinately within the bounds of the User Agreement.
If Valve should suddenly go belly-up and Steam is no longer functioning (providing updates, supporting multiplayer, tracking achievements, etc.), then a lot of people will be out a lot of money because they can no longer access games that require Steam to function fully, if at all.
That said, I think it's extremely unlikely that Valve will go bankrupt or disappear in the foreseeable future, but you see my point. Having all these games under one roof creates a huge dependancy on that ONE system, and if it should permanently fail, we're all screwed out of potentially hundreds of dollars (individually speaking).
The other side of the problem is that it is only in a company's best interest to maintain a license agreement as long as the property the license is linked to is profitable; but Valve doesn't actually own the rights to the majority of the games it supports, it's just a middleman that happens to control the method of distribution. If Valve decides Steam is no longer profitable and shuts it down, do you think they will compensate all the millions of gamers who bought games through Steam and rely on it to support and provide functionality to their games? Not a chance in hell.
I do have a small library of games on Steam, and it will remain as small as possible. I have bit the bullet and bought some games through Steam that I really wanted to play, and had no choice but to go through Steam to own, like Serious Sam 3 and Worms Reloaded. I'll definately buy Rebellion without question. My love for Sins transcends my distrust of Steam.
But heaven help Valve on that day when Steam shuts down and I can't play Rebellion anymore. There will be blood and fire.
HTML 5 matters. This is a case of most of the world not caring because it's not layman's stuff--not because it doesn't affect them. It does. It's kind of the like how most people don't care about Washington shutting down over all their antics with the budget shortfall. Why would we care? We're only talking about what happens to 35% of the money you make and shutting down a nation of 300 million people, that's all. We don't care because we don't know the ins-and-outs of the legal process or every line item in the budget. And because there's not one damm thing we can do about it. Similarly, if browsers can't agree on what XMLHTTPRequest does, that matters all right. It affects every human being on the planet who uses the web; and even those who don't, the businesses they interact with every single day do. Similarly, what happens in the gaming world matters. I just don't pay close attention because it's beyond my power.
There was a lawsuit some time ago about it.
Well, I like the old school method plenty well. I'm savvy enough to override .big files and do all the things to troubleshoot patches, mods, etc. Impulse was a little more convenient, but it was nice that it asked to update and that I could unload/reload it at will so that I can finish a current game before a patch screws up the compatibility.
I've said it before, but no one seems to catch on. I get why they went to Steam and expect them to make more money for it. I just don't like Steam. I never brought up the GBoR or said I hate Steamers.
I made this account just to post on this. In my experience with steam it has been a hassle and has slowly but surely pushed me away from PC gaming in general. In example i bought a physical copy of Fallout New Vegas as a pre-order. Upon putting the disk in my PC i come to realize it needed steam to play at all. "Ok fine" i said so i intalled the client and it started a download immediately. Baffled i realized even tho i had a phyisical copy of the game the disk was only a unlock key for the download of the full game ?!?!?! You mean i hold a disc that is useless after this and that i must download a game that is multiple gigibits ?? My net was fairly slow at the time and it took almost 20 hours to download and then i had to wait for it to update after that.
It is experiences like that one that turned me completely off steam. I will not buy another Fallout for PC cause of that and there are a few other series that i have dropped on PC cause of steam such as the Total War series, The Elder Scrolls, and one that really got me was Civilization. I know this is not what steam is trying to do or these gaming companies but it comes down to a principality to me and yes i do contradict it a little bit as i run steam in offline mode to still play Civ 5 but as a whole that was the last game for PC i have bought and it will be the last as long as they run on steam.
I do not hate these companies for this decision as i understand it and i must make that clear. I praise them for all the great games they make but as long as steam is the major client on the PC platform i guess i shall be playing only the older games and for new ones will stick to my PS3 and that is only as long as PSN is free. Cause if they begin to charge for it i guess ill just turn off the games and pick up my guitar.
If you've bought it directly from Steam I would say: pretty fast shipping!
Just curious if any of the non-STEAMers ever check out this page:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
I mean it's easy to see that the bulk of the playerbase is there for the MP, stat-tracking, social interaction (if you check out the huge MP-based groups etc.). STEAMWORKS is what people want. Just looking at the graph even at it's lowest population there are over 2 million users online.
Sid Meier's Civilization V is seventh, nice. 4x gaming FTW
Bear in mind that's a count of accounts logged in for an app which auto-starts and sits resident by default, not players in games. It basically boils down to a count of machines currently turned on whose owners have ever bought a Steam game. The number of actual in-game users is generally going to be maybe a quarter of that at the very most.
There's also the matter of self-selection bias; they only tell you about active Steam users, so it's a matter of course that they'll make it look like its features are in higher demand than they actually are (that isn't helped by Steams' fans being extremely vocal).
Personally (philosophical reasons aside), Steam offers no added value to me. So if I'm not playing a game that requires it, it's shut down and as such I'm excluded from the stats.
Sure, but that can go both ways. For instance back when Far Cry 2 was popular I played (I won't tell you exactly how many hours ) many hours of Far Cry 2 but because it didn't actually need STEAMWORKS to be logged in my stats weren't being tracked at all. So I guess the argument could be made that those stats may even be low.
EDIT:
Also, I was specifically pointing out the individual game usage data. While that could be 'massaged' for effect (if we're going down that road then I guess we have to be cynical and believe nothing anymore...hehe) I actually own quite a few of the games on that usage-list and can attest to the fact that the playerbase data on STEAM seems accurate at any rate.
I don't expect that's much of a factor, since many people probably don't even realize they don't have to use the Steam library to launch their games (or conversely that they can put non-Steam games in there). And the most popular games listed there can't be run without Steam.
Summing up everything they list (which granted is only those that have more than a couple hundred people playing), it comes to a bit more than an eighth of the current total online.
Well, these individual game data don't say you that people are playing in single player mode or multi player mode... as i post now, skyrim is number 3 in the list but skyrim is a single player game only...
When, steam is running, it know when you start/stop playing a game... but cannot always see if you are playing online game or not...
As say before, i am not a online player... but i have somehow love some feature like in total war Shogun II... for shogun II, i am a single player but since the drop in feature is enable for battle in single player, it happen that some of my battle become 2 player battle... don't know if it is a steamwork feature or something build in the game itself by the dev but it is a cool feature... i really compensate for the bad AI during battle...
By the way, if i don't play multiplayer online thing, it is not because i don't like it... what i don't like is the rudeness of people that you find there... have try sins online a few year ago but i have give up fast for other reason... almost nobody for play at european time... maybe these problem will be solved with the release of Rebellion on Steam... but if the newcomer are a majority of teen driver by their hormone, who have respect for nothing and can only insult other people, i will be out very fast...
Stardock has gone from a company that released the "Gamer's Bill of Rights" to one that uses Steam. I'm disappointed.
It's very sad to know that I'm a "sliver of a sliver of a sliver" and no longer count....
Who am I demographically?
Graduated HS:1985
Male, 44, married, one kid, one grandchild on the way
Mechanical Engineer/Project Manager
USMC veteran
Maybe what I really need to do is go dig out one of the many old PC's I have with '95 on it and see if I can get Jane's F15 up and running again....
: (
I'm a sliver of a sliver of a sliver too... Oh well. I'll just stick to TeamSpeak when I get switched back to working days.
You'll notice the COD is listed 2x once as the SP and once as the MP (Multiplayer).
I've got 3 children myself. Aged 23, 20 and 17. Thankfully no grandchildren yet.....hehe
Jane's F15 was ok.......but nothing in my opinion holds a candle to Falcon 3.0.......not even Falcon 4.0 and its addons.........
IIRC the last COD game had separate executables for SP/MP, that's why.
IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 for the win!
Thanks. I do know that much...........
I'm also a sliver of a sliver and no longer count.
There it is again. Guess I must not have a life because I stay in touch with things......
I believe it was you who stated earlier in this thread that you don't know and in fact don't care........hard to have a discussion with that eh?
Cheers. That's excellent. It wasn't there last I looked, great to see!
Monk, you can read my edits if you so desire and respond accordingly, but i have no want or need to continue to spar with you. Just know that i won't reply, not out of disrespect, but simply because i don't want to write posts like the one i just edited.Be well.
In a similar vein, most retail computer printers have a 600 dpi printing resolution. If you ever see a printer that boasts 2400 dpi, it's a bit of a marketing ploy. They're simply adding up the 600 dpi each for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key. Also, on topic counterpoint/support for kyro's point: https://steamcommunity.com/ -- "763,365 In-Game | 4,984,801 Online" at the time of copy/paste.
Same for me on the values and stats. I've mentioned it before, but if you so choose, you might be able to actively exclude yourself from the parts of the gameplay stats by ending the Steam process tree instead of closing your games normally. Once I knew I was stuck with it, I went into playing Supreme Commander 2 with the mentality that I was going to get the most out of it while I was interested, then never touch it or Steam again. As I said, I got tired of the ads when I closed Supreme Commander 2. After I started closing the process tree to avoid them, my friends started to notice that our multiplayer time was being added to their profiles but not mine.
The sad thing seems to be that even all of the silvers of silvers added up still only make a silver...
And apparently even silvers don't count either...
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