That is clearly the future and will come to pass for sure, whatever people feel about drm its here to stay. Although the main reason I don't use steam is because it is so expensive. Call me old fashioned but digital should be cheaper, by far, than physical. The fact steam is usually a lot more expensive than physical puts me off.

I'm rather convinced that gamesas went solely with steam because Valve gives them a better distribution deal if you go solely steamworks. And given how popular steam distribution is, they figure it is a safe risk.

No! Where I live I'm forced to use satellite internet-- 250 Mb/day download allowance & significantly slower than cable/dsl. While I have no problem using steam on it it would take me forever to DL a complete game file.

Well then they were obviously smoking something. Just because a game shows up on Steam, doesn't make it instantly immune to pirating. Like Woden said, Skyrim was cracked two days before release. That's totally what Bethesda was aiming for, amirite? If pirates want something bad enough, they'll crack it. There is just no excuse for Bethesda to force Steam on the RETAIL release. If they had a Steam release and an independent retail, then that's fine - more options is good, variety is the spice of life.

Don't get me wrong, I love Steam. I bought the Valve Complete Pack on there for just $99 (the price of one and a half games, except i got like 12 games, all of which I enjoy). However, Steam should not be a mandatory add-on for a singleplayer game. Multiplayer, I get, for the sake of servers. But never singleplayer.

Clearly you are the one confused.

Steam is awesome.

Exactly. That's as far as it goes, end of story. They did what makes the most sense for them financially and as a business. That's how businesses stay in business.

Who cares.

Seriously.

You bought the game. You're playing it (except for this poor chap who is unfortunately stuck during a HUGE download cycle for the servers). You knew it would be on Steam and if you cared THAT MUCH you should have done your homework before purchasing it. It's done. They're not going to change their mind, it's one of the most successful Steam releases of all time. You whining about it here will NOT stop them from using Steam again.

My question is this. Is Steam going bust and if they are what would the consequences be.

And why would the system that more or less controls the PC market for games bust? The money that they save doing digital downloads is massive. I know this is old and 3rd hand info but:

http://www.gamefocus.ca/news/12732.html

I personally think that any activation method is worthless, as the game crackers WILL crack popular games, and NOTHING can stop them from doing it. Lengthy and "secure" activation systems will only hurt the loyal and honest players who buy the game (and frankly, cracked Steam only games do not require Steam to run to play, which means pirated games behave the way the game should have worked)

I say, the best way to allure the players to buy the game is to reward them for paying: give them extra stuff that you WILL need to play the game (for example, in Professor Layton 2 for DS, the game ships with a physical object required to finish a storyline puzzle), and will greatly hinder their ability to play if it's not available.

Any attempt at "DRM" is nothing but a failure. If a protected game (or just about anything) is not pirated, it simply means it's not important enough, pure and simple.

Why does any company go bust, mostly because they try to go to big to soon.. Do you think games companies just give Steam their games for nothing

True, but it's been around for 8 years, their overhead is the cost of servers, the connection to the servers, the software to protect their servers, and the employees to manage the servers. Considering bringing in about 1 billion in 2010 alone they net huge profits. Also, companies may not give the game to them to host for free but it's basically next to nothing compared to how much it costs to make a disk and the packaging and shipping to stores and advertising.

Steam is the Walmart of PC Games. Some people love it, some people hate it, and the rest of us grudgingly accept it. Then you have things like Ubisoft's and EA's DRM which are like Kmart of PC Games. Yeah, they're there but the only reason people still bother to go there is they have some stuff you can't get elsewhere, at least not until the company bleeds itself dry.

Gee whiz, folks. Navigate to the folder and create a link on your desktop.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\skyrim\skyrimlauncher.exe

The game will load without Steam.

In my opinion, Steam exists for one reason only. It's not for DRM or ease of patching, but to try to sell you games at inflated (well, in the UK anyway) prices, nothing else.

It also happens to be the most annoyingly 'thick' piece of software I've ever seen.......

I can't turn off auto updates without it auto updating first?

I can't go offline without going online?

And then when I do finally get it to go into offline mode the first thing it asks is 'Do I want to go online'???

Just very poorly written, not in the least user friendly and if it wasn't forced on me for playing Skyrim would be uninstalled already.


Edit: just seen this


I assume you haven't patched the game as it's no longer possible to do this

DRM protection needs to be rethought. No current DRM works against those wanting to crack it.
I don't know of a single popular game or even any other type of software, that I could not get a "dodgy" copy of, that worked.
I only done this twice and it was I'd accidentally broken the cd/dvd and thus couldn't play it. I've never done it for a copy of something I hadn't already bought.
So I had bought a legit copy, but the lack of the cd/dvd left me in a situation of not being able to use it, unless I got a cracked copy.

Steam based DRM is laughable from what I read and thus, is not immune to being cracked., it's just like the rest of them
Also it seems more bothersome to legit users than it is to those with a cracked copy; In that it continues to stick around after activation.
So as others have stated, those with a cracked copy get to remove that annoyance that is steam ads.

The only benefit of steam so far was the ability for me to download the game at the point of sale, instead of having to wait to have it shipped or to visit a local store to pick up a copy.
The Steam program however is rather irrating with it's insistant pop-ups to advertise it self and other games etc, every single time I leave it online.
Add to the fact it patches the games without any input from myself, if I had told it not to.
Keeping it offline is not fool proof either it has a way of conviently forgetting it should be offline every so often.

Steam like distribution is probably the way forward, since the convience of it is popular. However if given the choice I would of chosen a non-steam version of the game, after now experiencing it.
Don't get me wrong I love Skyrim, it won't stop me playing the game and future games if it was on Steam. I just don't like Steam and prefer if my favourite single player RPG series wasn't using this as it's sole method of DRM.

If you want to discuss Steam, there is already an existing topic here: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1286613-unofficial-steamdrm-discussion/