Puzzles me why anyone defends steam. Steam is a great place to buy games, but it is a horrible feature for playing them. It adds nothing to a single player game, there is no beneficial side to it, there is only the downside.

@http://www.gamesas.com/user/783896-phauxxee/

You could try this answer I found on the web: go to your steam program folder, right-click on steam.exe, go to properties, click on the compatibility tab, and the compatibility mode box should be turned on to Windows XP SP2). Turn it off, and steam should run.

And here is a link to Steam Support, you might be able to find the error your having.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_cat.php?id=59

Hope it helps.

P.S I found another solution that might work, here is a steam user with a similar problem and he managed to fix it.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1257146

'Convenience'

The same reason people defend iTunes.

You know there is a thread for Steam discussion already here on these forums:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1331715-unofficial-steamdrm-discussion-26/

Why not use that instead of opening yet another one?

Convenience?
Like conveniently making you a beta tester for a patch?
Conveniently telling you how you should try to play your game in a few min because it has trouble connecting now?
Conveniently telling you that you can’t play the game when you have an internet outage and didn’t go through all the bells and whistles since you didn’t know about it ahead of time?

Edit: I’ve lived with steam for a while now so I have it on offline mode and had to reinstall it several times to stop it from doing the stupid reconnect bug. Lately steam has been doing nothing bad to me. Yet it has NEVER done anything good when it comes to playing games and I have had a troubled history with it in the past.

Steam blows end of story.

ITT: melodrama

This is exactly why I declined the Steam agreement and took it back

I find it a very stable platform, myself. I've had fewer problems with Steam than dealing with EA for authentication, especially once I have DLC on my saves and if it can't authenticate it won't let me load old saves.

Here's some irony- when we got Fallout, we decided to hold out for GOTY before buying any DLC because we didn't want to mess around with GFWL. Then it turned out that the GOTY required you to log in to GFWL anyway. It was such a mess that we ended up abandoning our Fallout 3 GOTY disk. A year or two later, the price was low enough on Steam that I decided to get Fallout 3 GOTY on Steam. Runs very smoothly, no issues with it at all, and I finally got to play all the Fallout 3 DLCs.

None of us likes DRM, but both Bethesda and Steam are companies who make money because they listen to and respond to fans and both have done a lot to keep PC gaming viable when other companies are saying it's dead. Contrast this to EA/ Origin who is playing shenanigans with exclusivity, which is marketing by manipulation. It makes sense for Beth and Valve to work together. I was skeptical of Steam at first, too, but they won me over and as long as they continue to be cheap, reliable and customer-oriented, I'm happy that Bethesda sticks with them.

lol

I don't think it is convenient at all.

Its software for people that need an aggregator.

I'm versatile enough to know how to organize my own stuff, and even moreso when it comes to being able to play these games on my PC.

Just because something stinks more than Steam doesn’t make Steam great.
I buy all of my games on steam, I just don’t want to play them with steam. I like it as it option I hate it as a requirement.
Can you tell me one good reason to having Steam active while I play a single player game?
You brought up Fallout 3, and here is an awesome example from it. There was a patch for Fallout 3 that broke at least every third good community mod out there. Steam would patch automatically and provide little recourse for those wanting to roll back. I really don’t understand the logic behind it, make things optional not mandatory.
And Plz PLZZZZZ don’t tell me how Steam stops the infamous PWord that will get this topic locked should I openly say it.

BUT you can just play in the glorious Offline mode!

/sarcasm

Probably for the same reason people would wonder the reverse.

I have no issues with steam. I know no one personally who has had real issues with steam. Ever. Period. Not saying that it svcks to be other people, just that I have No reason to complain. Steam is a service and nothing more IMO, Big Deal. I think people's energy would be of better use if it was directed at complaining about bad design decisions IN SKYRIM... and not as much the 3rd party service it comes with.

There are people who are having legitimate problems and that is one thing. If it dies on you occasionally, or your upset because when it resets you have to set yourself back to offline mode... well okay: Complain away. You are having an issue that needs to be addressed. I'd go to the steam forums and raise some hell, put a block under it, don't leave there until you get banned.

That said: The vast majority of complaints I keep reading aren't about what is wrong with the service, it's what COULD go wrong with the service. At that point, it's all just paranoia. Steam could one day reverse much of it's policy, sell all your information to Ethiopian con artists, crash it's servers intentionally, lock all play into required internet access, put spyware on your computer so that you can ONLY play steam games, put spyware on to search for Pirated softwares it then reports to publishers, Gabe Newell could drive to your house and eat everything, Or the whole mess could become sentient... You've got me there. Also, tomorrow the sun could explode, the singularity could happen, bubonic plague could kill 1/4 of the population, the US could arbitrarily decide to invade Poland, and I could be crowned King of Sardinia.

You can then say: "Well, because all those horrible things could happen, we shouldn't use steam at all!" Which is all well and good, but not entirely realistic. I don't know for sure, but I would bet anything the majority of PC copies were sold over Steam. If that is the case, almost all titles sold on steam require steam to install. It doesn't make a lot of sense for Beth to exclude steam from their product, if that would limit the number of units it sold. Beth makes games, they seem to enjoy making games, but they are also a business. You can do both, but to do so successfully you can't stunt one end or the other of that equation.

GoG was mentioned above, but one thing to that: GOG did mostly out of date games until just recently I believe. I was surprised when they put Witcher 2 out on that service. Of course a lot of things surprise me about Witcher 2... Further, GoG is a great service, but you can't say that if they sold exclusively on that service, they would have had as much success with PC sales.

I play in offline mode, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Of course it doesn't stop the "p" word, any more than Sony or Microsoft can completely stop console hacking, but companies are going to use DRM. As long as they do, yes it does matter- a lot- that they choose a good system.

I never had to mess with the GFWL of Fallout3 & I bought the collector's & the Goty edition both being retail disc PC versions

NOTE: the GFWL wasn't the the DRM, Securom was

I agree with this sentiment for the most part.

I just think Steam is the lesser of two evils, an existential choice that is unnecessary. Its a completely fabricated war with piracy that infuriates me, and only punishes legitimate users of software.

The problem for me isn't so much with Steam itself, or DRM's, but rather the staunch requirement to play a game that depends upon this service in absolutely no damned way.

Its a company monitoring the way you operate a game, and if you're fine with that. Okay.

I'm not.

We had to go online and register for a GFWL account in order to load disc 2, which was the DLC disc. Up to that time we had been playing Disc 1- the vanilla game- with no problems. As soon as we hooked our game into GFWL, it became so crashy that it was unplayable. I came onto the forums looking for a fix and the recommendation was to "boot your computer into Safe Mode and start the game from there." Yeah.


Well that's a philosophical argument. You're never going to talk companies out of DRM, so might as well reward the ones who aren't being draconian about it. That's why I bought Witcher 2 from GOG instead of another outlet, even though I didn't want to. That's why I'll never buy an Ubisoft title. But so far Steam has not done anything to earn that kind of boycott.

I never had that issue, granted I do use "fallout mod manager" to play the game

besides, the safe mode "fix" is really for the long time it can take for the dlc installer (a 2.03GB EXE) to come up

Why is “I never had an Issue” the ultimate Steam justification for people? Ok, good for YOU!!! Others have issues, I had a numerous issues until I reinstalled it a couple of times. I still don’t see the benefit it just stopped tormenting me, at least not nearly as much as it did in the past. I still fail to see the upside to it can anyone provide one? Steam is not as bad as other potential things is NOT an upside!

A fair point.

I think this will be an ongoing dynamic in the next decade.

Consumers buying into convenience or those buying into a more liberal stance on gaming.

I guess we'll see how time treats these DRM's.

steam is an anti-piracy f-u all, to make sure the ones who pirate get the finger too...period.

and it'll still get cracked so annoyance maybe...

Much as I hate to admit it, I'm influenced by my herd, which is my husband and his gamer friends, and the people I talk to online via Twitter, tumblr, etc. who are gamers. I can't think of any of them who've said they hate Steam or wouldn't buy a game if it was tied to Steam. On the contrary, we give each other a heads up when Steam has sales. If Steam were really as bad as these complaint threads say, my gamerverse would have echoes of it. It doesn't, so I have to read threads like this as isolated issues rather than a trend. YMMV.

That's the thing about Steam.

IT DOES NOT EVEN SLOW DOWN PIRACY. Skyrim was cracked and running two weeks before the game was even launched, thanks in large part to Steam.

It actually makes piracy easier by providing a digital copy.

Steam is more about creating a digital hub for PC gaming akin to PSN or LIVE.

It has about as much to do with piracy as SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/COICA.

The minority dismissal argument is pretty funny I must admit.

Visit any thread, perhaps not the Valve forums, on any forum and you may want to re-evaluate the snide minority sentiment.