Pangaea said:
Ah, so now I'm spineless for having a different opinion than many others here. Most would say that having an opinion opposed to the vast majority is showing some spine, but whatever floats your boat.
Voice your opinion and don't care much for what the response is. A forum is a place for people to share their thoughts and experiences and have a civil discussion about it. If some people feel threatened by your post and retort with ad hominems rather than discuss the topic at hand, then ignoring the post in question would be the better option. For your sanity that is.
That said! I think Steam justifies its DRM for a couple of reasons.
One, Valve actually gives a shit about its customers and have created a pretty solid platform from which you can play games. I haven't had any problems with it. My brother got his account hacked. He merely took a screenshot of a cdkey from a physical box of a game with his phone, sent it to Valve, and got his account back. I doubt Uplay or Origin would give two shits about its customers. In fact, my friend bought Splinter Cell: Conviction. We were going to coop. The game doesn't work. If it was Steam, we'd be able to fix it the same night. Since Conviction runs through Uplay, we were screwed. So yeah.
Two, Steam offers fantastic and reasonable prices for games and have even started to sell non-gaming software. Affordable and downright a bargain at times, what's not to love?
Three, you can play in offline mode for significant periods of time (if not unlimited, not sure. Haven't had to play offline myself). Unlike games for windows live or any other disgusting DRM client...
And four, Steam itself is easy to use, convenient and works bloody good. I really have to emphasise this because I have to use GFWL everytime I want to play Dark Souls and let me tell, I cry a bit every time. GFWL is the analwaste of human achievement. It's utter and complete garbage. I hate that client with a fiery passion. So I guess you could say that I have perspective. And I appreciate Steam for doing the whole "DRM games platform client" thing
right.
Though in the end it's all about compromise and balance. Valve has a really good business model and their ethos is commendable. In this vile and frankly depressing industry, it's interesting that Valve has remained so lovable in the eyes of the gamers. And understandably so. They understand that it's all about compromise and balance. They're gonna have DRM on their client but in return we get: a community, a forum, a bunch of games, incredible sales, a friend system which is easy to use and you can swiftly join a friends game if you want to, your entire library is on one account, you can play offline, you can download mods from Steam Workshop and etc etc etc. You see what I'm saying right? This is why Uplay, Origin, GFWL etc suck monkey dick. They don't give anything back to the customer other than their greasy ass sweat in a bottle. The respective publishers only care about profit, while Valve cares about profit
AND their customers.
Which is obviously just common sense, customers is where your profit comes from, it makes only sense to take care of them. I guess that's why people hate EA, Ubisoft, etc. Because not only do they continuously insult gamers intelligence, but they're also dumb themselves. Rather than fostering good will and creating a solid bond of trust with gamers, they just don't give a shit. No wonder Valve is so praised and loved. They're just doing the common sense thing. Taking care of their customers.
