Ah, I've never experienced that. Probably because my Steam is set to 'Iceland and Greenland' as a download location and the demand on those servers isn't nearly as high as the demand on the Swedish servers.

Discs break, dics check = SecuRom (or even worse, StarForce) rootkit in your machine that you pretty much can't ever remove, and if you think those don't have these kind of launch issues, you've just been very lucky.

Installers don't work, or you install and then the game refuses to recognize your disc as valid, because of OS/driver/some app you installed/itunes changed the registry values of your optical drive/your motherboard's sata controller is weird/your optical drive wasnt tested/monkeys. The copy protection crashes the game. The de-registration tool for DLCs crashes, and when you reinstall your OS you can't play the game anymore. Its alllll the same all over, piracy protection has never worked on _any_ game, even ubisoft's, all it does is give legitimate owners grief, but with steam at least you're not bound to a disc that will eventually simply fall apart on you.

Also, some of us don't actually have optical drives anymore, whether by choice or because our laptops have them external.

Been using Steam since 2005 and never had any trouble. I buy all my games from retail shops and i'm always happy when they are linked with steam.

Those people obviously rely heavily on digital downloads and need a service like Steam. I have no problem with those people, or Steam in that respect. I with my physical copy of the game do not require anything it offers, though. I get by nicely without it. I'm asking for a choice here. I stand by my statement that there are less intrusive and more hassle free DRM variants, and I've said before I don't have a problem with online activation. I'd go register my game with any online service to get it going, I just don't need or want anything else that comes with it, if that thing is like Steam. Don't need it, the game doesn't need it. I won't use it. lol

People here are citing things like how many users Steam has, "30 million users!" So it must be proof of its popularity. I'd say a couple of hundred thousand gamers recently purchased a game and were forced to install it. I should know, I'm one of them. <_< :laugh:

I love steam :

1) For automatic updates;
2) I have all my games simple to selecting (install/uninstall/download etc...)
3) Save backup copy of all games.

and other....

Steam is evil. But only because I'm super lazy and now I don't even have physical games anymore. I like having physical collections. But if it weren't for me being super lazy, I'd have no problems with Steam. Kinda svcks it needs to be running to play games, unlike Impulse, but what the hell, it only takes a couple seconds to start and doesn't use much resources.

I'm in the UK so haven't actually played New Vegas yet (sob!) but I have been using Steam for a while now so it doesn't alarm me that I need it to play this game - in fact I already bought the digital copy and downloaded it so when it is released I'll be ready to go, hours before the shops open.

This is the first new release I've bought digitally rather than wanting a physical copy, I have always had a bit of a collector tendency and wanted to have the box and the disk and the gubbins that comes with it (yes I miss the days of games with manuals thicker than the phone directory and fold out maps etc) - but in the last few weeks I've misplaced one game disk and I can't find the product key for another game - which has sweetened my opinions on Steam somewhat!

see it's for the above reasons I do like steam, I don't need to worry about loosing stuff lol wow 83 people are objective! that's bloody incredible!