Ahh I understand.

I would prefer it if Skyrim was available to play without it going through Steam. If I'd had have wanted to play the game through Steam then I would have bought it from Steam, however it was not enough for me to want to return the game.

I will have to get out the games I want to play and see if I can get them to work.

When I bought Skyrim, I installed Steam and let it activate my game. Afterward, I didn't launch Steam, but just ran Skyrim by running the EXE. Then one day I launched Steam so I could check out current game promotions. The next day, I double-clicked Skyrim's EXE to play Skyrim, and the Steam login popped up. If I cancelled the Steam login, Skyrim didn't launch. Apparently, Steam pushed some patches onto my system without me asking it to, and left it so I had to be running Steam if I wished to play Skyrim.

I still start Skyrim with TESV.exe, and TESV.exe still makes me run Steam.

I'm not buying the PC version, NO. I have the XBox Version. I would have had BOTH the PC version and the XBox version if not for Steam.

Why you ask do I hate Steam? Simple. It's a single player game and Steam does nothing but take up memory and is used only for security checks. It's not needed and it treats me, the paying customer, as a thief. Steam does not do anything to stop piracy and is extremely invasive.

I refuse to install Steam on any computer I own. If the future of PC Gaming is Steam, than I'll just sick with my XBox.

I can completely relate to people's issue with a lack of choice in the matter, but practically all of the arguments I've seen used against Steam hold little to no ground and come over to me as "Rarara, I hate Steam! Rarara!". The only issue I can genuinely understand is the fact that sometimes games update even though "Automatically update this game" is switched off. A solid annoyance with Steam and you're completely justified to point that out as a fallacy on Steam's part. All the rest of the repeated arguments are either non-issues or have very elaborate help entries on Steam's site. People who say Steam implements spyware and other ridiculous claims like that obviously are not familiar with Valve and their stance on such matters. They're arguably the only major game company left that has very liberal views regarding the gaming industry, as opposed to Sony and Microsoft who's consoles a few lost souls in this thread apparently resort to to avoid Steam (rofl).

The thing is, what alternatives are there? It svcks, but retail discs for the PC are rapidly dying. Digital distribution giants like Steam and D2D are taking over the market and have absolutely huge advantages such as the ridiculously great sales and a bigger profit margin for developers, not to mention all the free advertising and exposure (of indie games too!) to millions of players. So many retail games these days come with Games for Windows Live or other actually invasive DRM software like Ubisoft's.

Steam is the ultimate combatant of pirating. Sure, there's a tiny minority that resort to pirating of games that use Steamworks because they have a bias against the platform, but they are nothing compared to the masses of people who went with Steam over pirating because of the even easier and better services it offers.

The thing is that Steam DOES NOT STOP PIRACY. Skyrim was out there for anyone to get a week before the game hit the shelfs. Steam doesn't work, NOTHING WORKS, to stop Piracy. So instead of just using another type of security check and realizing that you will never stop Piracy companys decide to force 3rd party software on people that DO NOT WANT IT.

As I said, I'll stick with my console before I buy a PC game that uses Steam.

Whoever claimed that Steam stops piracy? It combats it, and much more effectively than raw RDM implementations. By offering a better service because a major reason for pirating is because of the sheer simplicity in doing it. And that's exactly what Steam is: a service before "another security check" (which you would have in a retail box release without Steamworks too, probably Games for Windows Live).

I detest steam, not because of anything Steam has done per say, though it's auto patching and occasionally telling me my game "isn't available right now" are irritating, the main reason is because i had no choice but to install it to play a game i purchased. Its a program i had no interest in having but have no choice to have if i want to play my game, I had to sign up to it and for its services despite not wanting to, and because of that, and because it's makes itself obvious with its "special offers" and auto patching, and because it keeps track of some info on my PC, and because i can't get rid till i lose interest in the game, i hate it with a passion.

Just like a few above me have said, i would have happily paid more expensive to buy a non steam version of this game.

The ulitmate combatant of piracy you say, but I'm not a pirate but I'm treated as a potential pirate and found guilty before i've committed any crime and must jump through xyz hoops to play one game that i've never had to do before. I can't run this game without steam, i can't get patches without steam, and now I won't be able to get the creation kit without steam. Thats bullsh!t. I don't want pop up advertisemants on my computer, i don't want steam running in my background, they'll never get my credit card number. If you think steam is safe you're fooling yourself.

Guess I've been fooling myself for 8 years now then

You know kind of odd then, but because this game came with steam it actually for the first time in how ever many years that i have been playing PC games made me concider whole heartedly getting a pirated version for a while, not to avoid paying for the game, i'm more than happy paying Beth for this product, but solely to avoid that "service" as you call it. I didn't in the end, but thought of it real hard, and most likely will again with any future games i purchase attached to steam.

And regarding your other post, You don't mind steam, good for you, maybe you like the services it provides, great. But i and many others have no interests in their promos or other services and have no interest in having it on our PCs. It isn't bias then to dislike or hate steam, its only normal to nor like something you have forced to "wear" or use or have that you do not want.

As I said, a small minority (such as those who speak out so vocally against steam on this very forum) likely have converted to pirating because of the forced Steam. And honestly? I don't really blame those people, I agree that there needs to be a choice. I'm just arguing against all the non-sensical claims about Steam that have been produced just so people can hate and rant more on the platform.

or just lucky

Really? Alright, please link me an example where someone was victimized by Valve and have had their identity stolen, or creditcard info abused, or something along those lines. Prove to me that Steam isn't safe. Shouldn't be hard if I'm one of the lucky few in a database of 20 million+ accounts.

1) "Your friend" is is either savvy or lucky - almost every time any friend of mine gets a virus it's the result of downloading something illegally.
2) You ask for it by buying a game that utilizes Steam. The only monitoring it does that I know is VAC on mulitplayer games such as CounterStrike. They do from time to time ask you to take part in optional hardware and software surveys.
3) Which only goes to show that it's not about bypassing Steam, it's about getting something for nothing.


QFT.

Re: the mention of indie games - for this alone I love Steam, I found great games that I'd have never found via conventional retail.

This is already common, mostly because the copy protection for old games does not let them run Vista, Win 7, or longer back win 2000 and xp.
This is because copy protection usually uses tricks like creating bad sectors in dvd to verify that the dvd is authentic, this often does not work on new operation systems who have stronger control over hardware.
http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/ needs an no cd crack to be run today, however this is included.

Some companies has actually taken cracks from pirates and used as patches to get old games running on new OS.

google works chum.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38517/Steam_Accounts_Hacked_Credit_Card_Info_Obtained.php

Why not go the GOG.com way? Digital distribution. Good prices. DRM free. No background applications, no need to constantly ask permission to play the games already installed on your system, no fear of being locked out of what you paid for because of spotty internet connectivity, no risk of losing your games if you lose your account...

If new games like The Witcher 2 can be sold through it, why not Skyrim?

The thing is, no one wants to prevent people from using Steam if that's their choice. People who want to use Steam over pirating can do so. It's the people who don't want to be tied to an unwanted service that are being turned to piracy. It is not impossible to have them both by offering Steam and non-Steam versions.

Yep, pretty old news and different versions of that article is all we saw from that. The data that was stolen was encrypted, and apparently never successfully deciphered because there hasn't been any word about that incident since then such as people's credit cards actually being misused or accounts being actively stolen and sold. Hell I don't even know of anyone who suddenly started receiving spam or phishing mails after that (since they did get an amount of email addresses apparently). And the "competition" people are referencing ("I'll play on PS3 instead of ever downloading Steam!") are lot worse in that regard I'd dare say, let's not mention PSN shall we...

Except for "losing" your email address, if it didn't receive spam already, this "issue" is purely a problem of the online store, not the Steam service itself. If you got an issue with online stores, don't use them. Buy Skyrim in a physical store and your Steam account wouldn't hold any CC info and the like.


Heck, Verisign was hacked not long ago, if you find the time to be angry at Valve not protecting themselves enough against hackers, the Verisign hack would warrant doing in the streets and protesting against their incompetence because the stakes are THAT much higher there.

yet it still got hacked.

I do actually use gog.com from time to time and it's great, but I personally prefer Steam for the community integration. I also don't know what you mean by constantly asking permission to play the games you installed? I've also played my Steam games for a full 2 weeks without internet connection once.


I agree with this. The choice should exist. All I'm saying is that Steam isn't remotely as bad as people try to make it out to be.

That's a strawman. They got hacked but so far, you couldn't produce examples of someone that lost something because of that hack. Security isn't a single step process. It seems someone got some data from the Steam store servers. Doesn't mean people lost money or other from that meaning that the secondary security features Valve put in seemed to be holding up so far. Meaning they did their job well enough.


AND, in all cases this has NOTHING to do with Skyrim requiring Steam to work. It has to do with the online Steam store getting hacked while a huge number of Skyrim sales weren't made on that store in the first place and so weren't affected in the hack in anyway.

Steam is inherently evil.
It comes from an assumption that customers are criminals and it ensures that you never own content you payed for.

When you typically start a Steam game, it goes online with your account and makes sure you're supposed to have the game before it'll let you play. Even though the game is fully installed and available on your hard drive, if the Steam servers don't report back that it's okay for you to play (for whatever reason, like a connection problem with the servers or the lack of an internet connection), it won't run.

Yes, I know you can put Steam into Offline Mode, but A) it requires being online first, and B) is unreliable. There's a lot of complaints from all over that Steam will go back online even after being told to stay offline, and there's a lot of cases where after a while Steam will refuse to let you run anything without going online to verify that you're allowed to play.

Been using it since 2005, no trouble apart from RAGE(wrong serial key on the box) as much as some people hate it, i love it and hope Bethesda continue to use steam for future games.