This is completely wrong, steam is a platform on the PC used to give the average consumer a sense of safety and familiarity, it is also a convenient digital store, and minor marketing platform. You need to look at things from more perspectives than your own. Skyrim and Steam were not solely made by or for you.



Steam does not issue updates when you are in a steam game, unless you set it to active in the background (which was your own decision).



I have a Degree in Computer Science, and a Masters in Games Development, if you have a computer capable of running Skyrim, the resource footprint of steam is insignificant. (if your retort involves this case where steam starts to download updates refer to my previous statement indicating that this is an option you can enable or disable)



Because then they do not get any usage stats from you, and it allows you to bypass steamworks DRM features.


This too

The only issues I concerned with are potential modding issues. There are absolutely no issues otherwise.

Not sure what potential modding issues there would be? I have Oblivion from Steam and I used 175 mods at once in that game with no issues beyond compatibility issues with mods working with each other.

Because Steam is awesome. How else would you curb piracy other than requiring Steam to operate? I mean, sure, you can still pirate it, but it's a lot more difficult. Also: as someone else has said, it allows screenshots, chatting with bros, etc in game.

Game producers use live statistics of games to gather information about how players use games, what quests they do, how long they spend playing, whether they play in short bursts or for extended periods. Information like this is used by game designers to sculpt and craft future games, in live games, like F2P online games, such as league of legends they track the metrics of game results to do things like approximate the balance of different champions.

So lets please stop with the knee-jerk reactions.

since when did hackers become magicians able to make your computer disappear? but more seriously the kind of data they track is in no way going to allow hackers to do anything to you, how would a hacker use your achievement information, number of in-game items crafted, or number of all your deaths to do something malicious.

Rest assured there are no mod issues, unless you want to modify the exe (shouldnt be necessary anymore).

Just spitballing here but I'd guess what he was implying was that if Steam were hacked the hacker would know that he has a Falcon Northwest Mach V water cooled system with all the bells and whistles at 6 Valleyview Drive in Westminster, MA. I don't think hackers need to be magicians, just criminals, a box they've already checked on the degenerate sheet.

Though equating Steam getting hacked with people breaking into homes is just a teensy bit paranoid.

Meanwhile, the guy who actually has that address just wet himself.

yeah, he just wet himself thinking "Holy crap, I have that computer in my house? Where?" =D

And I suppose the Hackers that recently hacked the Forums and gained access to the Steam database with all the users personal info including credit card info (they say it was encrypted but who knows if they also hacked into the system far enough to get the decryption keys as well !) that was stored on Steam can not potentially be a problem either

Or did you not get the E-mail :

I like Steam, let me just say that first.

Regardless, with Steam off, my Skyrim runs better. I'm sure it's not Steam's fault, but there seems to be an instability between the two so right now I'm not using it. If Bethesda can fix it, then I'll go back to using it again. I still bring it up daily to see if there were any updates or anything.

There is absolutely no point to use steam on a game like this what so ever. Does it bother no one that you have to run this program to play your game? Buying skyrim I am forced to patronize steam, which I have zero interest in doing. So they force me too! Blackmail, use steam or don’t play your game! It advertises even if you turn them off it will advertise something somewhere using the starting updating window or when you exit. They can remove the ability at anytime with any patch to start the game without steam like some people are with the texv.exe. Zero redeeming qualities for a single player game.

This system is a form of control that benefits the game makers, the distributors, and advertisers with little benefit to the customers. The few trinkets steam has are joke, only real benefit is for multiplayer games. Everything I said goes for any single player game you buy in a box.

No evidence whatsoever that any credit cards were hacked. Also, you don't have to have any credit cards AT ALL associated with your steam account. You could easily have a steam account associated with an anonymous google account that you only use for steam. You could use a fake name and no one would know the difference. The amount of personal information that you associate with Steam is your own choice 100%.

Wow, it must be fun to write your opinions as absolute facts. There are several advantages to using Steam as people have mentioned:

- Easy way to connect and chat with friends.
- Convenient game updates. You know the very second the game is updated, you don't have to go to the publishers website frequently and you don't have to manually download a file.
- Built in ability to take pictures, share them with friends, and share them online.
- You can play the game anytime, anywhere, and on any machine.
- Achievements are available.
- The game is conveniently situated with all of your other games. You don't have to download 3rd party publisher programs. You can launch everything from steam and hit sh-ift-tab at any time in any game to be able to check messages and chat with friends.

These are just a few of the things Steam does for single player games. Steam Cloud is also a nice bonus for many single player games. You may not personally care about these things, but to suggest that they aren't an advantage for anyone is ridiculous.

All these things you can do on facebook or countless other places on the web.


All these things you praise steam for are to me incredibly intrusive to my gaming experience with an immersive game like Skyrim.

Now what if this steam trend catches on and others like origin or what not become common place? Are you going to bend over and take it if your fav game is forcing you to use origin or something even worse or will you accept it by tell your self how great it is to convince yourself that it is?

No, I can't hit shi-ft-tab in game and bring up facebook. In fact, I can't do ANY of those things on facebook. I hate Origin personally. One of the things I like about Steam is that I DONT have to download a separate game launching program for every single publisher. I didn't buy BF3 because it was on Origin and Origin annoyed the hell out of me.

And some of us feel the same way about STEAM !!

That is fine. I 100% understand if people personally don't like Steam. However, lots of people are making statements like "There is absolutely no advantage for this game to have Steam." That is just false. Many people in this thread have listed numerous advantages to having the game on Steam. It is fine if those aren't particular advantages to you, but they are advantages to people like me who buy almost all my games on Steam and use it as my PC gaming platform.

This hypothesis is not based upon the comment I am citing but rather your response to another posters reasoning for not minding Steam. Seriously? You've never heard of DRM? You think that only console players like to engage in conversation with their friends while playing? Just because concepts do not appeal to you does not make them bad.

Edit: Honestly Steam or no Steam it will not affect my decision to play the game. I will end up launching it from the inevitable Wrye Bash or SKSE launcher and that will be that. I agree, forcing consumers to use a service they do not care for ,in order to play your game is unnecessary but I do not see any harmful effects. Do not make an argument for hack attempts either, anytime you purchase something with plastic you run that risk.

Skyrim is using Steam for DRM not support.......get your facts straight people.

Steam provides both DRM and support and features. Those are the facts.

No, just every single publisher seems to want to use steam to launch their games.

Also yes there are harmful effects with steam, some people are still on dial up not by choice, now a steam game just says internet connection thats it so technically dial up should work, but some times it dont or its a horribly slow process. Not being able to play a game you paid for and all the stress you just went threw forget a refund if the box is opened, people can feel like they got ripped off or their money stolen.

All this could have been avoided had they just not used steam, thats the thing it so easly avoided and unneccesary for a single player game.

Oh I see, you are just misinformed. I can see that you are new to Steam. Just play always in offline mode. You never have to worry about your bad connection again. Problem solved.

Edit: and if you are referring to downloading an initially large patch to play the first time, that does svck, but is unfortunately a part of gaming nowadays. If you bought the game and played it without that initial patch, it would likely be very very broken. Also, you may be able to avoid this problem by setting your Steam settings to "Manually update," although I've never done this as I have fast internet.

Thats if you can even get to that point and if you do its not guaranteed it will stay in offline mode according many others. I wont use my own experience because it happened a few years back im sure you will say its been fixed and it may, still i hear that off line mode inst 100% working as intended.

Oh for [censored]s sake! You can play Skyrim WITHOUT steam. Just launch the application from the folder directly! You don't need it running to play skyrim so why are you so concerned?

The game and Steam just need to be patched to play nicely with each other, Steam as a platform isn't the problem.