Exclusive to Steam? - A Faint Hope

Steam is pretty handy and convenient. I figure my library is safe w/ Steam than owning physical copies at home.
Besides, if you have any interest at all in modding, steam workshop makes managing mods (downloading/enabling) much easier.

I've been using it extensively in Cities Skylines and can't imagine having to phyisically manage the hundreds of buildings I have enabled that I may want to go back and disable/manage over time when new expansions come out and some buildings start to look dated or don't support whatever new feature was added.
 
dexters said:
Steam is pretty handy and convenient. I figure my library is safe w/ Steam than owning physical copies at home.
Click to expand...
That's true until the moment Valve goes bankrupt. :D
Then you sit there, and all your games are gone.

dexters said:
Besides, if you have any interest at all in modding, steam workshop makes managing mods (downloading/enabling) much easier.
Click to expand...
Unless of course you have games like Skyrim, that update your mods automatically which more often than not causes problems with your savegames. :mischief:

dexters said:
I've been using it extensively in Cities Skylines and can't imagine having to phyisically manage the hundreds of buildings I have enabled that I may want to go back and disable/manage over time when new expansions come out and some buildings start to look dated or don't support whatever new feature was added.
Click to expand...
Third Party Clients like the Nexus Mod Manager handle that just fine. Steam is convenient, but certainly not required.
 
Ryika said:
That's true until the moment Valve goes bankrupt. :D
Then you sit there, and all your games are gone.


Unless of course you have games like Skyrim, that update your mods automatically which more often than not causes problems with your savegames. :mischief:


Third Party Clients like the Nexus Mod Manager handle that just fine. Steam is convenient, but certainly not required.
Click to expand...

True enough. Although so are my CDs in many cases.

I figure I'll likely be dead by the time it goes under.
 
Verrucosus said:
I don't like that one bit. It's bad enough that Windows Updates can interfere with my games. I accept that for security reasons, but a gaming platform? Speaking of Windows Updates, there's no guarantee that 15 years from now when the industry has moved on to another platform and looks at Steam in the same way it looks now at game CDs, some genius at Microsoft won't decide that the Steam client poses some security risk and disable it. That's pretty much what happened last year with the CD copy protection of games like Civ3 or even the vanilla version of Civ4. The publisher's reaction: "Sorry, we cannot help you with a game that has passed its life cycle. Get a Steam version!" For someone who keeps going back to older games (I still play Civ1!) that is not good enough. These days I have most of my games on an offline machine, safe from Microsoft interference. With Steam games, that won't work.
Click to expand...

I have some games on disks (like Disciples 2) which don't work on anything post XP. It's DRM system don't recognize the newer OS and thinks you're trying to cheat. No compatibility mode helps - it tries to access deep windows core.

Offline DRMs have much more problems than online ones.

Ryika said:
That's true until the moment Valve goes bankrupt. :D
Then you sit there, and all your games are gone.
Click to expand...

Just imagine if Google or Microsoft go bankrupt. :lol:

We depend on those big guys, that's modern world reality, unfortunately.
 
stealth_nsk said:
I have some games on disks (like Disciples 2) which don't work on anything post XP. It's DRM system don't recognize the newer OS and thinks you're trying to cheat. No compatibility mode helps - it tries to access deep windows core.

Offline DRMs have much more problems than online ones.
Click to expand...
there are virtual machines for this

stealth_nsk said:
Just imagine if Google or Microsoft go bankrupt. :lol:

We depend on those big guys, that's modern world reality, unfortunately.
Click to expand...
you can always switch to linux and play freeciv ;)
 
If any of the big guys go away, the massive infrastructure they leave behind will be picked up by someone. I assume even the government might step in.

Steam would be like this on a smaller scale. Their massive user list would be a gold-mine for a 3rd party looking to gain entry into their market, and quite possibly the one that put them out of business would pick it up.

There would also be huge vested interest in game publishing to not annoy customers and find a solution for them to maintain their back catalogs.

The only viable scenario where my Steam library is gone is a very narrow path of Steam collapsing along with general anarchy, economic and political collapse. Not impossible but improbable and I figure at that time, I would have bigger fish to fry.
 
dexters said:
If any of the big guys go away, the massive infrastructure they leave behind will be picked up by someone. I assume even the government might step in.

Steam would be like this on a smaller scale. Their massive user list would be a gold-mine for a 3rd party looking to gain entry into their market, and quite possibly the one that put them out of business would pick it up.

There would also be huge vested interest in game publishing to not annoy customers and find a solution for them to maintain their back catalogs.

The only viable scenario where my Steam library is gone is a very narrow path of Steam collapsing along with general anarchy, economic and political collapse. Not impossible but improbable and I figure at that time, I would have bigger fish to fry.
Click to expand...

Yep, I totally agree with you.
 
As long as Steam is the big thing it is now, the bankruptcy scenario is as unlikely as it is likely that someone would step in if it did happen. The problem really starts when, years from now, most gamers have jumped to a new platform, their Steam accounts forgotten by anyone but a couple of hundred people who keep playing the old stuff instead of being good consumers buying so much that they don't have time to play anything older than two years. I'm not optimistic about anyone stepping in to help these dinosaurs.

The disabling of that copy protection service through a Windows Update last year affected the disk versions of Civilization III and its expansions, Civilization IV, Warlords, all the Total War games up to the base version of Medieval Total War II, Sim City IV, The Sims 1 and Tropico II and a long list of other games. Some of these were pretty popular just a few years ago, but now they are hardly played any more. Sure, there were a couple of forum threads, but there was no outcry loud enough to make any sane publisher consider spending resources on patching these games. Many people probably never noticed that half their game collection was disabled. If it had happened a few years earlier, the public response would have been different, and I suspect that's why it did not happen a few years earlier. For the same reason, the fact that Steam is now "too big to fail" has little meaning when it comes to problems that might arise once that is no longer the case.

Please remember that I am merely trying to explain my own aversion to Steam, not to convince anyone that Steam is bad for them.
 
stealth_nsk said:
Just imagine if Google or Microsoft go bankrupt. :lol:

We depend on those big guys, that's modern world reality, unfortunately.
Click to expand...
Valve is a tiny player compared to either of those two companies; as large as it is in the video games space.

It can happen, and people are allowed to be worried.

Thoughts on my post?
 
Gorbles said:
Valve is a tiny player compared to either of those two companies; as large as it is in the video games space.

It can happen, and people are allowed to be worried.

Thoughts on my post?
Click to expand...

Yes, your post makes sense. Still Steam looks a way better than any offline DRM.
 
Gorbles said:
Valve is a tiny player compared to either of those two companies; as large as it is in the video games space.

It can happen, and people are allowed to be worried.

Thoughts on my post?
Click to expand...

If steam fails, for whatever reason, the drm part of it goes away and you still have your steam library of games. Still accessible, etc etc.

People act like it's an end of world scenario, but it's not.
 
anandus said:
As the game also comes out on Playstation, it'll not be Steam-exclusive (unless Steam also runs on Playstation, I don't know?)
Click to expand...

Civ VI will come out on PlayStation? :confused:

Edit: I saw the thread. Consolization 6?
 
stealth_nsk said:
Original Civ was released on consoles. I have no problems with this as long as PC version UI is not designed for consoles (Bethesda, this one is for you :) )
Click to expand...

Consoles are limited in a lot of ways. As long as the PC game isn't adversely affected, then I can probably live with it.
 
Not a fan too since Steam support gave me the login and password of another user who had used used a cd-key (of the original Half-Life) that belonged to me. Rather than transferring the game to my account, they gave me access to the account of someone else.
 
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