Alright, I'd really like to know why Bethesda is tolerating this, and expecting us to tolerate it. By "this" I mean STEAM, and the recent release of "Honest Hearts". I understand the advantages of a digital distribution platform, concerns over piracy, and all of that stuff, but the bottom line is not getting the job done, and it seems like the industry, including big companies like Bethesda, are unwilling to crack the whip.

Right now it's the release date for "Honest Hearts", we didn't get the game up for immediate release when midnight ticked past, despite FAST and EASY distribution being one of the strengths of this platform. Like with other games STEAM apparently decided we needed to wait. "Star Wolves 3: Civil War" and most recently "Darkspore" being cases where we've been made to wait until 1PM EST for the game to finally unlock even if you prepaid. Now we're looking at a situation with "Honest Hearts" where not only did the game not get mentioned under new releases, but despite being availible for purchuse by it's heading if you search, we also can't complete the transaction.

I'm getting tired of big developers saying "oh well, STEAM is just dong it's own thing" (to quote EA's forum rep with Darkspore), this isn't "doing it's thing" we the customers by definition are always right, and should be getting far better service.

It would be one thing if we were CHOOSING to use STEAM for a platform, which with Darkspore was admittedly my mistake, but with "New Vegas" even buying a physical
copy means that we have to go through STEAM, and also means that the DLC also has to come from STEAM.

My overall point here is that if Bethesda is going to make us use a service, then they should demand certain standards from that service. Immediate release of products using it, fast and easy payment, and all the other things that are supposed to be advantages to digital distribution services like STEAM. If these things aren't happening Bethesda should be going after the service (and making it obvious), perhaps up to and including legal action, or threatening to pull their products from that distribution network.

For all the problems with "Games For Windows Live" I don't remember having this much trouble getting DLC for my game.

Right now the DLC is roughly 4 hours late even by STEAM's standards, and 17 hours late from when it should have been released at midnight.

What's even more maddening is that for all the annoyance that this is putting us customers through, I very much doubt we're going to be receiving any compensation or apologies.... and really even if Bethesda did make such a gesture (since they pretty much hired STEAM to be their platform), it's really not Bethesda that I see as the problem. Someone should be getting Gabe out here to apologize in person and get his company on track. I shouldn't have to deal with this frustration to get someone to take my money. All lectures that might be given about patience are irrelevent, because as a customer I'm always right, it's not my job to be patient, it's the job of the businesses to cater to me. That's how it is IRL at a store, and that's what I expect from an online store.

I'll also say that STEAM has a lot of potential, there is a lot to like about it, however should another similar service launch at the same level but treats it's customers better I think it's going to kill it, since STEAM is definatly not a customer friendly service from where I'm sitting.

Apologies for the rant, but I needed to get this off my chest. I wanted to play the DLC today, and apparently that isn't going to happen, or if it does it's going to be ridiculously late (when I was up really late yesterday). This is also not the first time that I've been sitting here twiddling my thumbs waiting for STEAM to "do it's own thing" and I'm becoming increasingly irritated that big companies whose business STEAM relies on are just letting this go. EA is a juggernaut and I expected them to really lay into STEAM over Darkspore... but it never happened. Bethesda is another pretty big company and has a lot of it's library of games on STEAM, I'd expect them to be upset as well... and by "upset" I mean "getting Gabe on the phone and putting the resulting chewing out on Youtube" upset.

Of course then again if someone from Valve reads this I could be in trouble, according to "The Escapist" (a website I wholly recommend) one of Valve's big ideas is that they want to turn their service into a popularity contest and charge people they find annoying more money for products, while lowering the prices for those that they think are positive influances.... so you know, complaining about them doing something like this means that they'd like to charge me more for a product when it's released as I understand things.... I'm not kidding, check the site and the article. It's a point to consider when we're doing buisness with these guys, their arrogance seems to be heading for astronomical levels.

true

I too would love to see other options. expecting really devoted fan steam defenders at any moment

Not true at all, some people did success on downloading HH on Steam, I think it just a problem in some regions



Maybe you dont, but others, like me, we have,

Im not defending Steam,but this system IMO is way better then others

I'm all for options, actually.

I love Steam myself especially because I don't have a lot of money for gaming and their 75%-off sales let me get far more for my gaming buck.

But that said, no one should be FORCED into using something like that, it's just bad business sense.

The real question though is this: would you prefer they use Steam for their DRM or would you prefer they have a system like EA that frequently prevents legitimate owners from playing a game at all because they can't run the EA authentication client? (I have two friends that can't play their copy of sims because for whatever reason the EA client won't run). I suspect relying on Steam is far superior to anything they could cook up in-house for DRM and face it in this day and age without any sort of authentication controls you get screwed.

To be fair, you'd never catch me waiting for Darkspore.

The regular Spore had so much potential, but EA/Maxis decided to not support it anymore.
"Hey guys! We've got the most overhyped game in the world! Instead of making it live up to its hype, let's abandon it and release a DARK AND GRITTY version!"

Yeah... no thanks.

ahm the right choice is: achievments in game (like minecraft O.o), and sell in all digital game distribution

I don't know what happened in this case, but my experience with Steam over the years (ever since HL2 launched) have been pretty good.

As for today, well that is probably in some way related to the decision by Bethesda to release HH on the same day as two other major PC titles. In the end Steam probably made the decision to prioritize those over a relatively small profit DLC.

Well basicaly your choices are

Xbox 360
PSN
and Steam

Cant you just SMELL the fail-cade this month?

Well the issue there is that STEAM is still a professional service, and is accepting payment to provide that service for the DLC just the same as the other products. If it can't deliver the service, then it shouldn't have been taking the money to begin with.


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As far as other responses I've received here, I'll say that it gets into a bigger meta-arguement but I don't think DRM is in any way nessicary. It's not a matter of needing STEAM or another form of possibly more intrusive DRM, it's a situation where I don't think we need DRM at all. The game industry became a multi-billion dollar entity before there was this kind of DRM. Digital Rights Management is something concocted due to various bean counters talking to executives during meetings atop their giant castles made of money saying that "well according to these figures we think you could be making this much more money if you could stop piracy". This is of course based on faulty logic that those who steal something for free would have been buying the same product for full price if it wasn't free. In reality a lot of piracy is similar to taking a free pen off a business counter, the fact that you take it for free when it's availible, does not mean that if instead they were selling pens for $1 apiece you would have bought one. Do not misunderstand my point here though, piracy is wrong, it's just that DRM is a greater wrong. Basically, it's all a scheme by the rich in hopes that they can get richer, and implemented without any cares for how many people get slammed as a result. We, the legitimate users, should not have to suffer this kind of thing... ever. I might be more sympathetic if the games industry was actually in trouble, but it's not, it's makin crazy amounts of dough overall. Sure, some businesses go under, but that's the way things are in any industry and says nothing about the industry as a whole. It's like trying to say the industry is in trouble based on Japanese developers taking a bath, when the actual cause of that is natural disasters totally messing up their market for all products.... it can happen to anyone. I support anti-piracy DRM as a concept if it can be implemented without interfering with legitimate users, perhaps in the future that can be done, right now the technology does not exist, and as such DRM should not be being used since even without it the industry is still making massivre amounts of moolah. Victimizing the companies is not right, but neither is victimizing the users, and honestly I think the victimization of the users is the greater of the wrongs by far under this set of circumstances.

If that sounds like a rant from some pirate who hates DRM and wants piracy to run rampant, remember this is coming from a guy who is currently REALLY upset while he waits for STEAM to finally stop kicking him in the head and sell him the game he wants. To be honest it definatly makes me understand the whole "I didn't turn to piracy until DRM forced me to" arguement, even if I hardly plan to go that route. Honestly, how long is this DLC? By the time it's out will I have spent more time twiddling my thumbs waiting for it than playing it? What about the guy who has been waiting since midnight when the DLC should have been out, does this DLC have 17+ hours of content? Heck it's approaching 6PM and even by "Steam time" we're talking 5 hours, and to be honest I think that's right on the edge of the amount of play time DLC tends to offer. How much is our time worth here?

The point here is that DRM isn't a nessicary evil, it's just evil. There is no justification or purpose to it, it doesn't stop pirates, and does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers as illustrated by me sitting here typing this. I *could* be doing something else, but at the same time I have time to play the DLC right now, I might not have that kind of time tomorrow. So if I want to get the DLC the minute it becomes availible to use what time I know I'm going to have, what else is there for me to do except rant on message boards?

Hmmm, well it appears they fixed it while I wrote the above message. Still, this was a ridiculous situation overall, and I imagine it's going to happen again.

Well, you could start your own major online distributing service or you can always take up knitting.

I did some digging

right now based on my pings of the Seatle city hall, I would say something is causing a MASSIVE trafic conjestion in washington state,

since thats where the main server for VALVE is located I suspect thats part of the problem.

so basicaly your screaming in frustration at Valve for not being able to deliver when theres some kind of trafic jam fubaring everything.

Because it's tolerable.

since we're [censored]ing about steam (and by extension is valve) I feel the need to ask WHERE THE [censored] IS HALF-LIFE EPISODE 3???
seriously though, why hasn't steam gotten the DLC? What the hell could possibly have gone wrong? Between this and PSN being down, it might as well have been 360 exclusive...

So...what's the problem? A slight delay? Wow, I'm making protest signs right now! Down with Delays!

*Unless they are wrong.

In which case management tells them to basically go screw themselves and we laugh about it later.

DLC is up, Restart Steam

DRM has been the best thing for Piracy since we all went from BBS's to the Interwebs. Games i'd normally happily pay $90aud for that include insipid Games for Windows Live _crap_ that makes me [censored] about trying to register completely useless accounts with microsoft and retrieve passwords for 30 minutes I can simply avoid and simply queue up the torrent. Thankfully Bethesda are not tools so i've never been crabbed out by their interfaces and therefore have purchased all their goodness. Go Beth!

I think a simple equation in this fast paced modernity in which we live is this - if it aint required, it will die in the fire.

So, with open arms i shall embrace that soon coming day when current DRM standards get the hell off this planet. And i completely agree with the $1 Pen issue, piracy is definately not mutually exclusive with paying custom, in fact i'd go so far as to say it may actually enhance probability to purchase. A pirate today may have a salary in 5 years and also has the exposure to products that he/she can now afford to purchase, it's sort of similar to the Radio->Cassette->MP3 debate. It's up to distribution platforms to "wage war" on piracy by making it easier and more comfortable to purchase media, not with negative reinforcement by forcing me into performing a completely off-task set of activities (registration on whatever site, EA, Windows Live etc) after i've just paid for content - that's slapping the customer in the face. Even back in the day if a game wanted to protect itself in a really hard core way it would come with a "dongle", a hardware device you can plug into your computer to provide some encryption cipher to unlock the disk based data, whilst this was rare and considered "full on" it was virtually zero impact on the customer for the day and age (1990's), as it only took 10 seconds to plug it in, and there's no privacy issues involved with me plugging that dongle in nor is there any problem with playing a game if my "connectivity" drops.

As for traffic Jam, i can't see how that would have caused the interface errors. Bandwidth for a payment gateway should be quite low, since it's only transacting key data, auth and id's / amounts etc, any real traffic real hit would have been on the steam interface itself, which was quite happily providing us with errors nice and swiftly. Generally you make payment servers out of titanium and kryptonite, and web servers, well you can make em out of fishcakes if you want, just don't put anything you want to hide or keep on them, thusly web servers should die in a traffic storm faster than pmt gateway servers (unless you designed the network out of fruit loops and empty whiskey bottles).

8 minutes til HH! WOO!

Bro I'm not trying to be a donkey hole...
But steam is the best thing that has happend to pc.

In game web browser, and its a full flash compliant browser not a "light" browser.
In game mp3's
Sales, free weekend, ect its better than anything XBL or (the lack of) PSN has.

Steam has 2 problems right now.

1) You MIGHT get your game up to 16 hours later than you want depending on where you live. As an alaskan I got New Vegas at 9PM; I wa happy. Others who got it at 3 AM the next day were pissed.
2) No refunds. I've gotten 2 refunds out of steam that didn't work: you call the publisher, dev, or whatever. Silent hill and call of ctulluuu (spelling error)

I called up the devs, emailed steam telling them I was seeking a refund through the devs, and did a bunch of trouble shooting and was compliant as I could with all their requests.

one was "redownload the game" after having all files verify sucessfully
Whatever and I did it anyway.
Gave them screenshots, a video, made a youtube vid of it not working.

I got a refund and they were removed from my steam list ~ 2 days later.



Steam is good.
Its the best thing for pc right now.
Its not perfict, but its the only thing keeping pc alive atm.