Last person who patted me on the head pulled back a stump. Don't try to be condescending to me buddy, I was online back in the days when flame wars had bite, not these trite little pissy fits. I only hold myself in check here because i have a lot of respect for both Bethesda and the moderators, nor do i wish to be banned.

EDIT: As for being forced to use steam, well, PC gamers better get used to it. It is a lot better than being forced to have the DVD in the drive or being forced to install some sort of garbage DRM that causes more issues than it solves. Don't tell me you don't remember the starforce fiasco. It's either steam, intrusive DRM, or the always connected to the internet garbage that some games require. Put the blame where it belongs, software pirates even though they manage to crack it all the time.

Nobody claims to own "game", you however need some files present on your hardware in order to use it. You can print your licence and put it in to good use at the toilet otherwise. Developer or publisher owns rights to "code" and "art" but he do not owns binary digits stored on your hardisc. Same as producer of some drink who owns its recipe/chemical composition would not claim drink in your belly be still his property.

Also nobody challenges right of Bethesda to sell their product way they want. You should however stop challenging right of its customers to complain. If you have problem with that, stop posting in thread like this ...in your own words.

re: back in the day.
Yeah, so was I.I remember the first BBS's, the old newsgroups, even installing the first early modem in my pc when i was a kid. Even then it was mostly ninnies giving hissy fits. Now the spelling and intelligence has gotten a lot worse.. and your comment of 'well genius' was just as condescending. Don't do it to me, I won't do it to you.

Actually, never played Starforce, so no, I don't remember it.
As for DRM and the like. Yes, much of it is crap, but I've never had a problem with keeping a disc in a computer. Makes it harder to lose. Then there's crap like EA's Sims 3 (wife plays) which not only needs the disk AND the whole online connection/launcher s***.
But as for semi-recent. Hell, Civ IV complete edition (or whatever it's called with all the expansions & colonization)... I loaded it once. put the game back in the case. and I can play as much as I want. I've got it on 4 machines.

Thing is, the blame is shared, IMO, between the pirates and the software companies themselves. Much like with the pirates and the music/video industries. GIVE people something worth the money they're going to pay. And people will pay it. Give people overpriced crap, people will steal it because it's not worth the money. Now companies are giving out barely beta-tested software, and spend useless money on DRM that might keep people from cracking it for a week, tops, instead of making sure they have a solid game for which people would be happy to pay for.

So Steam is in fact just another garbage on my disc which does not work? Right?

YEP!

So your computer has issues with steam? Well, the solution is to figure out what the problem is with your system.

To Alex: Starforce was a DRM which caused actual damage to people's systems. People claim that a program or code cannot damage the hardware of a system need to read up on the Starforce DRM.

I could have sworn it said Free Steam account required, but I don't have the box. Anyway I haven't had any problems with Steam causing crashes or problems. All my problems with Steam games have bene from dodgy DX10 problems in Crysis, or the horrible optimization of this game causing me to use a hacked .dll file to get it running somewhat decently. Steam is cool, great sales on games all the time, the community, etc. Reminds me of Xbox Live but for the PC.

I prefer a DVD just so it installs faster, but other than that no problems at all. I like it when a game like this melds with Steam so fully.

Yeah, I've heard of those. Was probably Starforce, I just didn't remember the name of the DRM. I've been fortunate to never have had that problem. But yes, it's very possible.

No, but if whole point of Steam would be piracy than why bother? It did not prevent single game from been pirated as much as I know. I am sure internet is flowing with "free" New Vegas right as I type it. So why Steam and not DVD in disk? DVD check is certainly less intrusive than whole program running on your computer.

But really: you like it, keep it. But why would you deny other people different possibilities to obtain this game? What is wrong on having more than one distributor/method? How on Earth would it hurt you if I had option to buy it somewhere else than Steam?

The community is hardly affected. A very small minority with a [censored] internet connection hardly constitutes as an affect.

I honestly think what most people don’t realize, especially those who would rather have a ‘simple disk check’ than Steam, is that a ‘simple disk check’ isn’t so simple, and that even the DRM that’s on a disk check can be 100x worse than anything Steam does. StarForce is a prime example of this. It was a type of disk checking DRM but it caused so many problems UbiSoft eventually decided to stop using it. Everything from SafeDisc to SecuROM is a form of disk checking DRM, and even SecuROM causes problems, as well as needing to activate the game online and limiting the number of times games can be activated. They often require drivers of some sort to be installed on your PC without your knowledge or permission. And these are all types of DRM that are included on nearly every retail disk copy of games these days.

So excuse me if I prefer not having to swap disks every time I want to play a different game.

Well, it's not exactly a Surgeon General warning against lung cancer, is it?

On the Coll.Ed box, it's in a large white and red cartouche centered between company logos and the GFW "optimized for" box. The cartouche is bigger than all the studio names, the epilepsy warning and the UPC barcode. Actually, only the ESRB rating takes more real estate.

Upload a pic of your backside for compare . . . urr, I mean, your box's backside . . . aahh, I mean, your packaging backside. Thanks.

thanks for the laugh..

And this was for Civ V (regular edition), not Fallout NV. I got the Xbox version for FNV... However, my feelings on Steam remain the same despite it being a different game-forum than the one that forced me to get steam in the first place

I guess that's about 40% of the US population and about 30% in Canada.

Yes you can. You can gift games on steam.

All the steam haters seem to think that steam is the same beast it was when it debuted before HL2 even released. I used to hate it, I called it bloatware, malware and rationalized tons of reasons why it was evil. Then i grew up. It takes less than 0.1% of my system ram while idle in the taskbar. It has NEVER, and i mean that literally caused any problems with my system(XP, 7x64) anyone having problems with vista and steam.. Ill give you 3 guesses what the problem is, and its not steam. The only people with legitimate gripes with steam are bandwidth related.

I've been using steam since forever and have not had a single problem with it. The only issues I've had were the occasional offline moments for patches, but in that case guess what you can do? Go into offline mode and still play games just fine.

Steam is better than pretty much everything out there in more ways than one. Just being able to not have to use a physical disk is a good thing in itself. Besides, the games are bound to your ACCOUNT, not the computer, so wherever you go, as long as you have steam and your account, you have access to all your games.

Let's also not forget that steam is constantly having sales on their games.

You need to as well it seems, Starforce, while being horribly coded, and basically malware, was never once proven to physically damage hardware. Nothing done by Starforce was ever not reversible by an OS reinstall. That being said, im still glad that company is so far off the radar now and i wish them nothing but bankruptcy.

So, Boing Boing and CNET are clueless idiots who don't know what they are talking about eh?

No.. I never said that Starforce wasn't utter garbage that degrades a system, I said, it was never PROVEN to damage hardware. Period. Starforce is everything your quote outlined, which doesn't mention hardware damage once.

You need to take a Valium.

You obviously don't know how starforce works. It works by creating ring0 privileges. Which means that it can modify anything and everything outside of the normal protected rings. Once that happens, because it has system level access, it can by fault, or none, or by poor programing make modifications to the firmware of devices like video cards, disk drives, CD/DVD/etc drives, and so on.

Anything that works at ring0 must be for lack of a better word "perfect". Bad code = you're screwed, and so is your hardware.

I know exactly how it works, it caused down-stepping in read/write speeds which could, theoretically, cause damage to very specific hardware(1st gen CD/DVD Combo burners) after being slowed to a certain threshold. Which was never proven. I honestly wish someone would have proved it and sued the company into oblivion, sadly it was never proven, and hardware damage via SF3 is theoretical.

Speed stepdowns via unprotected mode also exist in 2nd and 3rd generation drives, they're used in test mode, and by using a particular line interrupt to the device. So no, it wasn't just 1st generation.

Huh. I don't have a credit card yet I buy games off steam all the time.

I simply use my debit card. However, I've also looked into alternative payment. Steam takes paypal, and there's also those visa gift cards, which function just like prepaid debit cards and can be used by steam AFAIK. Mind, anyone who has a checking account can have a debit card, so this isn't exactly a valid complaint even if paypal and gift cards didn't exist. I mean, if someone's so poor that they don't have a checking account at any bank, they're really too poor to be buying PC games.

Considering that paypal refuses to follow the standards of banking, and banking practices I wouldn't use it if I valued my money at all.

I myself have had issues with StarForce in the past where burners were mysteriously burning very slow (and I’m talking 0.2x instead of 8.0x) and it turns out it’s because StarForce can force your optical burner drives to run in legacy PIO mode which modern drives are not meant to run in. This is how it’s entirely possible for StarForce to ruin your hardware.