Mandatory steam for civ V makes me very very sad. I've been a longtime civ fan, and i was very excited by everything I'd heard about it up till today. All the gameplay changes sound interesting. I'm especially excited about what they can do with a hex based system. Now I just don't know about the game. I may buy it anyway, but i may well not.
I'm not a steam user, and so i have negligible firsthand knowledge of the program or how it works. My impression is that of all the similar sorts of services they could have picked for civ 5, steam is the least problematic, and adds the most value to the game. But its not without its problems.
First of all, my understanding is the game will require 1) a steam account and 2) an internet connection at least once to install. Don't give me crap about how its 2010 and everyone should have internet access. Obviously I do in some form if I'm posting on this forum. But by requiring steam, a game company adds an additional point of failure to the game. One that civilization shouldn't require. As a single player game, there is no reason it shouldn't work out of the box. I guess for the first time that won't be true for civ 5.
As far as a steam account goes, I don't have one. Likely it takes minimal effort to get one, and they won't do anything malicious with the data they require to create an account. But that's only likely, I am paranoid about that sort of thing. Even if you disregard it, creating accounts becomes a major inconvenience if every new game i buy requires a new unique account with a third party to install.
As i said above i don't use steam, so I don't know how well offline mode works, or what kind of hoops you have to jump though. Some people report problems with updates + bad internet locking them out of games. I'm worried about that and similar problems steam may introduce.
The biggest problem, and please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but valve asserts it has the right to close your steam account at any time, for any reason, or no reason, without appeal. Almost every game i own came with comes with some <expletive> eula that purports i don't own it, but only a license to use it at $company1's pleasure. Its a paper tiger because $company1 generally has no way of knowing or doing anything much about how i use the product. (i don't buy games with forced updates/drm that would make that untrue) With steam integration this isn't true, and that is a MAJOR lost of rights for anyone who buys a steam product. Unless there is some easy way to make civ V run w/o a steam account, valve, and perhaps 2k as well, will be able to steal my copy of civ 5 (presuming i do buy the game) anytime they feel like it, or modify how it works in any arbitrary fashion. Valve may be an awesome company who farts bunnies and unicorns right now, i have no way of knowing. It doesn't matter, they shouldn't have the power to take products i own, especially those i haven't even bought from them. There's also the question of resale rights, which is only a question of principle to me, given i'm yet to resale anything i've bought.I can't imagine why i would want to get rid of civ 5. like ever
Still principles matter more than entertainment.
Its possible at least in theory that valve's eula and tos or the like give their customers some actual rights, but i would be shocked to learn that's true. If I'm mistaken as to their general bad faith dealing with customers, please post the relevant excerpts, and a link to the full text if such is available online somewhere.